The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 10 | Issue 49 | Number 1 | Article ID 3859 | Dec 01, 2012

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The Search for Beautiful Women in China and Japan:Aesthetics and Power　　美女とは何か−−日中美人の文化史

Cho Kyo

Translated by Kyoko Selden

An oblique tooth is viewed in the States asrequiring straightening, but in Japan it may bethought of as emblematic of a young woman’scharm. While a slim body is a prerequisite forbeauty today, plump women were consideredbeautiful in Tang Dynasty China and Heianperiod Japan. Starting from around the twelfthcentury in China, bound feet symbolized theattractiveness of women. But Japan, whichreceived sundry influences from China, neveradopted foot-binding. Instead, shavingeyebrows and blackening teeth becamemarkers of feminine beauty. Before moderntimes, neither Japanese nor Chinese paid muchattention to double eyelids, but in the course ofthe long twentieth century they became astandard for distinguishing beautiful from plainwomen. Thus, criteria of beauty greatly differby era and culture, and therein lie manyriddles.

Focusing on changing representations ofbeauty in Chinese and Japanese cultures, ChoKyo, in The Search for the Beautiful Woman,attempts to clarify such riddles from the angleof comparative cultural history. Before moderntimes, Japanese culture was profoundly shapedby Chinese culture, and representations offeminine beauty too received continentalinf luences. In considering Japaneserepresentations of feminine beauty, the authorexamines literary and artistic sources scatteredacross historical materials and classical literaryworks.

Are There Universal Criteria for Beauty?

What constitutes a beautiful woman?Intrinsically, criteria vary greatly dependingupon peoples and cultures. A woman thought ofas a beauty in one culture may be consideredplain in another. This is not normally in ourconsciousness. Rather, images of beauty arethought to be universal across all cultures.Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn gainworldwide fame as beauties, not simply inAmerican eyes but in Asian and African eyes.But on what criteria?

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Princess Shokushi from One HundredPoets by Katsukawa Shunshō, Tokugawa,private collection.

Niimura Nobu, consort of TokugawaYoshinobu, the last Shogun.

In the possession of Ibaraki Prefecural Museumof History. Pola Research institute of Beautyand Culture (ed.), Bakumatsu-Meiji bijinchō(Shin Jinbutsu Ōraisha, 2002). p. 18.

Have universal standards for determiningbeauty emerged with the global reach ofconsumer culture and of the media? Asproducts of multinational enterprises transcendnational boundaries to spread worldwide,people of different races and nations have cometo use the same cosmetics, and people ofdifferent skin colors and facial and bodilyfeatures have come to don similar fashions. Asa result, the fact that different cultures havedifferent standards of beauty was forgottenbefore we realized it.

In earlier epochs, different cultures shared nocommon conception of beauty. In ancient times,each culture held a different image of beautifulwomen. This was naturally so when cultureswere widely different, say, between WesternEurope and East Asia, but images were not

identical even between closely connectedcultures.

Both Chinese and Japanese are Mongoloid.Moreover, in pre-modern times China andJapan shared Confucian culture. Despite thefact that cultural ties between the twocountries were extremely close, however,images of beauty in Edo Japan (1600-1868) andQing China (1644-1911) were strikinglydifferent. For example, while bound feet were acondition for female beauty in China, in Japanblackened teeth were considered beautiful.

At present, with the advance of globalization,the same commodities are not only distributedthroughout the world but information easilytranscends cultural walls. Boundary crossingsrepresented by satellite television, film and theinternet have greatly changed values andaesthetics of the non-Western world, but also ofthe Western world . . . such that the verycategories of East and West, and perhapsNorth and South, are problematized. AsAmerican visual culture is being consumed atthe global level, the Western sense of beautyinevitably penetrates today’s developingcountries. But Chinese and Japaneseconceptions of beauty have also, at varioustimes, made their way across the globe throughart, l iterature, fi lm, commodities andcommunications.

Despite the rapidly advancing standardizationof aesthetic sensibility, however, criteria ofbeauty have not necessarily become uniform. InSichuan province, a young medical studentfrom the Republic of Mali became acquaintedwith a Chinese woman. They fell in love andeventually married, the bridegroom staying onin China and becoming a doctor. A People’sDaily reporter who interviewed him asked:“Would you let us know the secret for winninga beauty like your wife?” “We Mali people havea completely different sense of beauty fromyours. A person you regard as a beauty isn’tnecessarily always beautiful in our eyes,” he

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said by way of preface before answering thereporter’s question.

The absence of universal standards for physicalbeauty was recognized early on along with thediscovery of “the intercultural.” Ever sinceDarwin stated that “It is certainly not true thatthere is in the mind of man any universalstandard of beauty with respect to the humanbody,”1many researchers have made the samepoint. Claude Lévi-Strauss, who observed thebody drawings of the Caduveo tribe in Braziland described them in Tristes Tropiques,conjectured as to why many men belonging toother tribes came to settle and marry Caduveowomen at Nalike: “Perhaps the facial and bodypaintings explain the attraction; at all events,they strengthen and symbolize it. The delicateand subtle markings, which are as sensitive asthe lines of the face, and sometimes accentuatethem, sometimes run counter to them, makethe women delightfully alluring.”(2) When hewrote this, the aesthetics that greatly differedfrom Western sense of beauty did not shock hisreaders. In their daily lives, however, mostpeople still believe that essential physicalbeauty exists universally. Utagawa Kunimasa, “Young Woman and a

Cat at a Kotatsu”

Tokyo National Museum. Ukiyo-e, Nihon bijutsuzenshū, Tokugawa, (Comprehensive Collectionof Japanese Art) vol. 20 (Kōdansha, 1991), p.34.

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Kitagawa Utamaro, “Array of SupremeBeauties of the Present Day: Takikawa”,Tokugawa, Tokyo National Museum. Ukiyo-e,p. 23.

Figure 0-1 Portrait of Empress XiaoXianchun in Formal Court Attire. Qing.National Palace Museum (Beijing). Source:Qi Gongzhu, ed. Select Chinese Paintings ofSuccessive Dynasties, vol. 6 (Zhongguo lidaihuihua jingpin). Shangdong Meishu PublishingHouse, 2003, figure 248.

How Foreign Races Were Regarded

It was in the twentieth century that images ofbeauty became homogenized from the West toAsia and Africa. Before then, aesthetics offacial features not only differed, but, with someexceptions, different peoples thought oneanother ugly. The Portuguese Dominican friarGaspar da Cruz (1520-1570), who visited Chinain the mid-sixteenth century, portrayed Chinesepeople, in his South China in the SixteenthCentury, as having “small eyes, low noses,large faces.”(3) Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), theItalian Jesuit priest who stayed in China from

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1552 to 1616, wrote, “Men’s beards are thinand meager and at times they have none at all.Their hair is rough and straight. . . . Thenarrow, elliptical eyes are noticeably black. Thenose is small and flat. . . .”(4) While neithermissionary directly says Chinese are ugly,discomfort lurks between the lines.

Japanese faces looked the same way toWesterners’ eyes. The German doctor PhilippFranz Balthasar von Siebold (1796-1866), whoresided in Japan in 1823-29 and 1858-62, statesof people of inland Kyūshū, “their faces are flatand wide, with small and wide noses, largemouths, and thick lips,” “wings of the nosepressed deep, eyes wide apart, cheek bonesprotruding.”(5) Swedish botanist Carl PeterThunberg (1743-1828), who visited Japan in1775, says: “[Japanese people’s eyes] areoblong, small, and are sunk deeper in the head,in the consequence of which these people havealmost the appearance of being pink-eyed. Inother respects their eyes are dark-brown, orrather black. . . . The eyebrows are also placedsomewhat higher. Their heads are in generallarge and their necks short; their hair black,thick, and shining from the use they make ofoils. Their noses although not flat, are yetrather thick and short.”(6) As time passed,exaggerated portrayals of ugliness becamefewer, but eyes directed toward Mongoloids didnot change much from the cases of Gaspar daCruz and Matteo Ricci.

Westerners similarly appeared ugly orgrotesque in Asian eyes. Yan Shigu (581-645) ofthe Tang period writes in an annotation in“Traditions of the Western Regions,” fascicle96 of The Book of the Former Han, “The Wusun[tribe] have the strangest features among thevarious peoples of the Western Regions.(7) Thereason that today’s Hu people [ethnic groups innorthern and western regions], with their blueeyes and red beards, resemble monkeys incountenance is that they derive from the sameancestors as the Wusun.” When Tang peoplesaw blue (or jasper-green) eyes and red beards,

they reflexively thought of animals. Of course,peoples of the Western Regions are notWesterners. But to Tang Chinese, deepsculpted faces of the Caucasoid type appearedugly.

Likewise when they directly describedEuropeans. “Biographies” 213 in fascicle 325 ofThe History of the Ming (1368-1644)characterizes the Dutch as having “deep seteyes and a long nose, with the hair, eyebrows,and beard equally red.” Seemingly an objectivedepiction of physical characteristics, thepassage employs the words “deep set eyes andlong noses” with a clearly derogatory nuance.The term “red ha i r” (hongmao) as adisparaging alias for Westerners began to beused around then. Likewise, “red hair, jaspereyes” (hongmao biyan) was a negativeexpression. As in Tang China (618-684,705-907), red hair (or gold hair) and blue eyeswere directly connected to the image of wildanimals. Such a view finally reversed itself inmodern times.

Following the Opium War (1840-1842), Chinaand the West experienced a reversal of power,and Chinese views of Westerners graduallychanged. In 1866, the Qing official Bin Chun(1827-1910) was sent as the first formalrepresentative to observe Europe. Europeanwomen had come to look beautiful in his eyes.(8)

Interestingly, his memoir called OccasionalJottings Aboard a Raft (Chengcha biji) makesno reference at all to the color of hair and eyes.

When looking at people of a different race orethnicity, whether the observation is of thesame gender can affect aesthetic judgments.There are many examples in which, in the eyesof male observers, foreigners of the samegender look ugly yet women look beautiful.Siebold and Thunberg mentioned above, as wellas the German physician and naturalistEngelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716), write in theirtravelogues that Japanese women are quitelovely. Likewise, even if Western women looked

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attractive to a Qing government official, he maynot necessarily have similarly assessed Westernmen.

Ascribed to Gu Kaizhi, “Instructress Writesa Letter of Advice” Eastern Jin. BritishMuseum. Liu Changluo et al. (ed.), Zhonghuaguwenmin datuji (Collection of ancient Chineseculture), People’s Daily et al., 1992, part 7(Customs and Manners), p. 7.

Leng Mei, “Out in the Garden on a MoonlitNight” Qing. National Palace Museum(Taipei). Glimpses, p. 45.

In China, too, once it was recognized that theWest had overwhelming power, “red hair” and“jasper eyes” became gradually less ugly.Indeed, in the twentieth century they weretransformed into a symbol of beauty. Westernfiction in translation exerted great influence onthe reversal of the image. Along with that,approaches to the portrayal of Westerners alsochanged. In Chinese fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, “red hair” changed to “golden hair”(jinfa) and “jasper eyes” to “indigo pupils” (lanyanjing).

A similar trend was common in Japan as well.There seem to be two stereotypical depictionsof Westerners in modern Japanese fiction:extremely ugly or exceedingly beautiful. Whenportrayed as ugly, physical characteristicssuggestive of non-humans such as a bear-likehuge body, intense body odor, and uncannyblue eyes are heavily emphasized.(9)

Whether or not people of a different raceappear beautiful is less a matter of judgmentbased on looks and styles than a product ofone’s evaluation of that race’s culture. Fromthe start, it is meaningless to try to determinewhether Caucasians or Mongoloids are morebeautiful. To compare the appearances of racesthat differ in eye color, hair, and skullstructure, is like comparing chow and bulldog,as it were, and judging which animal is moreaesthetically appealing. In this sense, the MissWorld competition can hardly be expected tohave any “fair criteria of judgment.” Theinterracial comparison is predicated on a myththat humans are all the same.

Aesthetics and Power Relations AmongCultures

Judging comparative beauty of two humangroups invariably involves a perception ofhierarchy, or power relations, between them.Aesthetic judgment about racial and ethnicgroups involves power relations betweencultures. Stated simply, a people whosecivilization is regarded as highly developed is

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likely to be viewed as physically appealing,whereas an ethnic group deemed “backward” isconsidered ugly. So long as the “backward”culture remains unaware of its backwardness,members do not think of themselves as ugly.But once hierarchical consciousness isestablished, the aesthetic of physical featuresrapidly changes.

This is the reason that, today, Westerners areconsidered beautiful. It is not just Westernersthemselves who think this, people in developingcountries also do. Such aesthetic senseperfectly corresponds with ideologiespertaining to “the West” and “the East,” and“advanced” and “backward” countries.

The point also can be illustrated by reverseexamples. Those who consider Westernersmore beauti ful than Japanese do notnecessarily think that Russians, belonging tothe same Caucasoid race, are better lookingthan Japanese. Some Iranians have looks thatcan hardly be distinguished from those ofWesterners. But when it is known in advancethat they are Iranians, few Japanese would feelphysically inferior to them.

Take for example the minority Uyghur inXinjiang, China. Their features divide into twotypes, one that is close to Mongoloids andanother to Caucasoids. The latter, with deepsculpted faces, resemble Westerners. Uyghurmen who used to come to large cities likeShanghai before economic opening were shyabout their tall noses. They tried to hide themas much as possible by pulling down their hats.

Other factors can of course shape judgmentsabout beauty. In recent years, young Japanesemen and women with darkly tanned faces,pierced ears, and Afro hair can be spotted inJapanese cities. They identify with African-American culture, which grew out of slaveryand oppression, for a variety of reasons: theseinclude the attraction of rebellion or differencefrom the American or Japanese mainstream, oridentification with the music and art associated

with American blacks. On the other hand,African blacks have not become a target ofimitation or emulation by Japanese.

The Foundation for Acceptance of a Viewof Female Beauty

In present-day Japan, an oval face with a tallnose is favored. This is not entirely due toWestern influence. The forensic anthropologistSuzuki Hisashi once conducted detailedresearch on the skeletons of the Tokugawafamily and their women. In the early years ofthe Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868), politicalconsiderations often dominated the choice offormal wives, but from the third generation on,that was no longer necessary, making itpossible to factor appearance into selection. Inchoosing consorts, moreover, there were nopolitical constraints from the beginning. Manyof them came of commoner families and mostwere chosen for their beauty. The physicalcharacteristics of Tokugawa women shouldprovide insight into Tokugawa conceptions offemale beauty.

According to the bone anthropologist SuzukiHisashi’s investigation, many Tokugawa womenhad narrower faces and relatively tall noses.For example, Tenshin-In (1823-48), the formalwife of Tokugawa Iesada, the thirteenthShōgun, is described as having “an oval facewith large eyes and a straight nose that wasnot too tall. . . and is assumed to have been arepresentative beauty of the Edo period.”(10) Along, narrow face and a tall nose werestandards for beauty in the Edo period as theyare in modern times. Suzuki suggests that thefeatures of Shogun consorts were similar tothose of women portrayed in Edo period ukiyo-e, a genre of woodblock prints and paintingsdepicting landscapes, tales, the theatre, andthe pleasure quarters.

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From Li Gonglin, “Beautiful Women’sOuting”

Song. National Palace Museum (Taibei,Taiwan). Glimpses into the Hidden Quarters:Paintings of Women from the Middle Kingdom,p. 14.

Takehisa Yumeji, “Nostalgia for Hirado”Sansai, Special Issues, no. 242 (Sansaisha,

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1969), Meiji, p. 9.

Z h o u F a n g , “ C o u r t i e r s P l a y i n gBackgammon” Tang. National Palace Museum(Taipei, Taiwan). Glimpses, p. 10.

“Gold and Jewels Fill the House” Qing.Tianjin Art Museum. Tianjin Art Museum, fig.258.

Needless to say, the skull bones alone do notdetermine facial appearances. Weight, skin

color and so forth greatly influence looks.Nevertheless, judgments about beauty drawheavily on the face. Delicate differences in thesize of the mouth and the shape of lips and eyesaffect the balance of the face. Whether theeyelids are double or single also greatly affectsthe appearance, aside from the fundamentalquestion of which was favored in the given age.What can be conjectured from skeletal bones isnaturally limited. It is nevertheless possible toestimate Edo taste in facial features.

No similar research on the Chinese imperialhousehold has been conducted, but paintingsand photographs portraying court women ofthe Qing dynasty remain. Those portraits showthat women chosen to be Empresses and high-ranking consorts are far from unattractive evenby today’s standards. Empress Xiao Xianchun(1712-1748), empress of Emperor Qianlong(1711-1799), has such a well-balanced face thatshe can still be called a beauty today (figure0-1). Why such aesthetics formed.has not yetbeen clarified. What is certain is that therewere at least some points of contact betweenWestern and Chinese or Japanese aesthetics.That laid a foundation in its own way for theWestern image of beauty to be accepted andrapidly established in modern times.

Beauty and Charm

What are the requirements for a beautifulwoman? Different people envision differentimages such as a slender build, bright eyes, atall nose, smooth skin. People tend to speakimpressionistically about a lovely mouth, cleareyes, and so forth. Cosmetologists and cosmeticsurgeons try to understand beauty objectively.Yet, even among professionals, opinion dividesover standards of beauty.

What sort of bodily shape appeals as beautifulis a relatively simple question. As a Japaneseexpression hattōshin bijin, a beautiful shapewith the head occupying one-eighth of theentire height, suggests, balance can beexpressed in terms of height, weight, head-to-

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body proportion and so forth. We should notforget, however, that there is no scientificground for such criteria and that they are justconventions. The three sizes of bust, waist andhips , in part icu lar , i s a s tandard o fmeasurement that is formed in relation to eros,and its essence is an illusion even as itpretends to be objective.

Compared with bodily types, facial criteria arefar more difficult to assess. Specialists haveoffered various hypotheses, all of whichemphasize balance above all. One theoryproposes that, dividing the length between thehairline and chin into three equal parts, thedistance between the hairline and theeyebrows, that between the eyebrows and thenose, and that between the nose and the tip ofthe chin should each occupy one-third. Anotherfinds beauty in a profile view in which theheight of the nose is one-third of its length andthe mouth is contained within the linesconnecting the sides of the nose and the jaw.(11)

Reducing a beautiful countenance to numericalvalues may give an impression that there areabsolute, objective criteria to beauty, but it ishighly doubtful that this is really the case. Inthe West, the attempt to try to explain beautyof the highest standard by expressing bodyproportions numerically goes back to the sixthcentury BCE.(12) Yet no scientific analysis hasdemonstrated grounds for defining beauty.

In recent years, a survey employing computertechnology concluded that female beauty infact corresponds to an average face.(13) Theclaim is that a montage photograph based onthe mean from a number of computer-processed facial photographs produces abeautiful countenance.(14) But then, the theorythat beauty means average was suggested byDarwin early on, and it is hardly new.(15) Onemay, however, venture to say that there issomething new about staging artificial“selection” with the use of the computer.

But a number of counterarguments havealready surfaced against the beauty=averagetheory. For faces that deviate from averagevalues seem more attractive.(16) At any rate,there are limits to scientific analyses ofbeautiful countenances and charms, which arein fact matters related to the heart and spirit.Humans are social animals. Whether or not aperson looks beautiful profoundly relates toeach observer’s human and social orientation.

To begin with, whether someone looks pretty isa matter of consciousness involving individualsentiments. A person who looks exceptionallybeautiful to one viewer may not necessarilyappear so to others. Evaluation of “charm” isgreatly influenced by subjectivity. Theexpression kawaii in Japanese means charming,winning, or cute. It can be considered a typicalaesthetic judgment that transcends objectivemeasurement. Someone does not look prettybecause of how many centimeters her eyesmeasure, or how many degrees wide her jaw is.The evaluation is based upon how “her looksspeak to me.”

“A beautiful woman” is an image as a whole; itis an impression. As long as this is the case,relativity is what matters above all else. Thereare any number of cases in which a handsomeman falls for a plain woman, or a beautifulwoman loves an ugly man. Plain or ugly merelyrepresents the judgment of viewers; the partiesinvolved do not necessarily share the view. Thedistinction between “beauty” and “non-beauty”is a product of the relationship between the twoindividuals. The Japanese saying, “Pockmarksare dimples in the eyes of one in love” (abatamo ekubo), demonstrates the mystery of thegaze on a person. Starting with “Love is blind”in English and “In a lover’s eyes emerges a XiShi” in Chinese, the latter referring to anunsurpassed beauty of the sixth-century BCE,we find similar proverbs in almost everylanguage. What is common to those sayings isthat judgment of beauty, regardless of culture,is arbitrary and hard to be understood by

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anyone other than the person concerned.

Particularly with a man and a woman, whensomething speaks to the heart the moment theone looks at the other, the other person looksmost beautiful. Looks are one element, but theyare never everything. Rather, the person’s airas a whole sometimes gives a strongerimpression.

As terms for estimating looks, expressions like“graceful” and “charming” carry an importantmeaning. They complement evaluation of aperson’s beauty. When one finds another“charming,” behind that feeling is already ajudgment that equates likeable to beautiful.One’s understanding of beauty is also easilyaffected by psychological elements. Ratherthan saying that the beautiful woman reallyexists, we should say that she only exists withinthe imagination of individuals.

Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana eachbecame a beauty representing an era, because,through film and media representations ofthem, an image of beauty as separate fromthem as individuals was created in people’sminds—one that contains fragments of viewers’personal sentiment. The media-formed imageevokes personal memories, experiences, andsentiments, and simultaneously functions as thetarget for emotional self-projection. Preciselyfor this reason, the status of a universal beautywas attained in these two examples.

Beauty as a Metaphor

Detailed inspection of changes in aestheticsfrom age to age clarifies that criteria for“beauty” are affected by elements other thanbeautiful looks. “Insiders” are beautiful,“outsiders” are ugly. “The noble” are beautiful,“the humble” are ugly. “The upper” arebeautiful, “the lower” are ugly. “The affluent”are beautiful, “the poor” are ugly. “The holy”are beautiful, “the secular” are ugly. “Thegood” are beautiful, “the evil” are ugly. Themore we go back to ancient times, the more

striking this tendency becomes.

Chinese dynastic histories invariably depictforeign peoples negatively. That is also the casewith portrayals of diplomatic emissaries inpaintings. This is not limited to foreigners. Inwritings portraying conflicts, be they historicalaccounts or fiction, friends tend to havebeautiful countenances while foes, both leadersand soldiers, look ferocious. The aesthetics thatholds “insiders” as beautiful and “outsiders” asugly also applies to women. Commoner womenrarely appear in literature of ancient times.Nearly without exception, those depicted inpoetry and fiction are court women or noblewomen. As in literary works like “The Goddessof the Luo” (Luoshui-shen fu) by the poet andstatesman Cao Zhi (192-232), descriptions ofglamorous clothing convey feminine beauty(see figure 3-19 in chapter 3 for a pictorialrepresentation of the poem). Because sartorialsplendor was among the requirements for abeauty, women who could not hope for suchgarb were eliminated as objects of depiction.

That beauty and ugliness are metaphors ofvertical relationships is readily apparent inrepresentations of rank among states andraces. As mentioned above, in pre-modernChina foreigners, including those such asMongols, Tibetans and Uyghurs living onChina’s borders, and Europeans, were deemedugly not only because they were regarded as“outsiders” but because they were “people oflower standing” than the Chinese.

Among the Han themselves, descriptions ofbeauty and ugliness formed metaphors ofvertical relations. The Chinese expression“talented men and fair women” (cairen jiaren)by definition implies their class origin. Thephrase “fair women” does not simply refer towomen of lovely appearance but of literaryfamilies. In China, where Confucianism was theofficial learning and the Imperial ExaminationSystem processed entrance into thebureaucracy, literary ability was a crucial

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measure defining social standing. In fiction ofMing and Qing China (1368-1644, 1644-1911),although women were not eligible to take theimperial examination or become officials, theyare never described or depicted as “fair” unlessthey possess literary talent.

The metaphor most frequently employedpresumes “holy” to be beautiful and “secular”to be ugly. In every culture, goddesses arewithout exception depicted as beautiful.Alongside this, the entrance of a beautifulwoman into a scene is often portrayed in thesame way as the descent of a goddess to theearth. An unparalleled beauty frequently shinesdazzlingly as if clad in a halo. Such metaphor,or interchangeable relationship between abeautiful human and a god or goddess, can beobserved in Buddhist images as well.

That “good” is beautiful and “evil” is ugly is ametaphor that has recurred since the oldestdays. In literature of all ages and regions, agood woman is almost always beautiful, and abad woman ugly. We cannot laugh this away asa paradigm in old fiction. In fact, the samepattern is repeated today in Hollywood movies.Y e t , t h e a u d i e n c e d o e s n o t f i n d i tuncomfortable. The metaphor assuming“justice” to be beautiful and “vice” ugly isgenerally accepted across history.

Narrating Stories of Beauties

“A beauty” is not merely “a beautiful-lookingwoman” but an indicator of culture thatcontains multiple meanings. From standardsfor beauty, we can not only observe thecharacter of each culture but can also studyintercultural relationships. Moreover, withinthe same culture, we note different images ofthe beautiful woman at different historicalmoments. From them we can gl impsetransitions of customs and aesthetics from ageto age. It is also possible to start out withchanges in images of feminine beauty toexplore intercultural crossings.

Suzuki Harunobu, “An Insect Cage and aLittle Child”

Harunobu—botsugo 200-nen kinen, fig. 218.Tokugawa.

From Zhou Fang, "Court Ladies with FloralHair Ornaments," Tang. Museume of

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Liaoning Province.

Discourse on beautiful women also serves as anindicator, so to speak, of a culture’s level ofmaturity. In general, praise of feminine beautyor descriptions of beautiful women go back toancient times, but theories of feminine beautycome later. In China, something like a theory ofbeauty appeared only in late Ming to earlyQing. The “Voice and Appearance” chapter ofOccasional Contemplations (Jianqing ouji) bythe seventeenth century playwright andnovelist Li Yu (1610-1680) of the Qing periodcan be called the first Chinese theory offeminine beauty. As you will see in chapter 1,the author discussed in detail the requirementsfor a beauty from the aspects of appearance,gesture, makeup, and so forth.

Beautiful women were not always glorified inhistory. While they were praised as objects ofmale monopoly in historical and literary works,beautiful looks were also portrayed as masksworn by evil women with destructive power.Beauties were not always associated withstatus, wealth, and good fortune, but came tobe feared as the source of death, downfall,national ruin, loss, and collapse. How suchcontradictory image were formed, what theymeant, and how they functioned are questionsto be explored below.

This book reflects on issues of beautiful womenand beautiful countenances from the angle ofcomparative cultural history with the aboveissues in mind. For pre-modern times, I willfocus on cultural intersections within East Asia.I explore the criteria for feminine beauty, andconsider when and how changes occurredacross history. Changes in aesthetics are ofteninfluenced by contact with foreign culture.Examination of the image of a beautiful womaninevitably faces the question of interculturalencounters.

Even within East Asia, things differ greatlybetween the Han people and diverse ethnic

groups, and between the continent and Japan.How do Chinese images of beauty differ fromthose in Japan, and what are the reasons?These will also be considered.

When exploring ancient images of femininebeauty, written documents are powerful cluesas are works of art. But art and literature donot serve as simple historical evidence.Representations, whether in art or literature,may or may not gibe with images in life. Thus,while examining female images in paintings, wewill also observe how beautiful women wereportrayed in history books, poetry, fiction, andessays.

In modern times, Western images of beautifulwomen came to exert overwhelming influencein the East. In particular, I will explore howbeautiful women came to be portrayed in Chinaand Japan, and how literary style, vocabulary,and rhetoric changed.

Cho Kyo (Chinese name Zhang Jing) isProfessor in the School of Global JapaneseStudies at Meiji University and a guestprofessor at the International Research Centerfor Japanese Stud ies (Nich ibunken(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Research_Center_for_Japanese_Studies)). Hisspecial field is comparative literature, withcultural history as a secondary field ofresearch. This is excerpted from his new bookThe Search for the Beautiful Woman: Historicaland Contemporary Perspectives and Aesthetics(http://www.amazon.com/The-Search-Beautiful-W o m a n -Perspectives/dp/1442218932/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20),Rowman & Littlefield, translated byKyoko Selden (https://apjjf.org/-Kyoko-Selden).

Kyoko Selden is the translator of KayanoS h i g e r u ’ s O u r L a n d W a s a F o r e s t(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0813318807/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20), and Honda Katsuichi’sH a r u k o r : A n A i n u W o m a n ’ s T a l e(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520210204/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20). With Noriko Mizuta she

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edited and translated Japanese Women Writers(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0873328604/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) and More Stories byJ a p a n e s e W o m e n W r i t e r s(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0765627345/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20). She is the coeditor andtranslator of The Atomic Bomb: Voices FromH i r o s h i m a a n d N a g a s a k i(http://www.amazon.com/dp/product/087332773X/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) and an Asia-PacificJournal associate.

Recommended citation: Cho Kyo, "The Searchfor Beautiful Women in China and Japan:Aesthetics and Power," The Asia-PacificJournal, Vol 10, Issue 49, No. 1, December 3,2012.

Notes

1 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (JohnMurray, 1871), vol. 2, p. 383.

2 John and Doreen Weightman (trs.), TristesTropiques (first published by AtheneumPublishers, 1974; Penguin Books, 1992), p. 188.

3 Gaspar da Cruz, South China in the SixteenthCentury. Translated into Japanese by HinoHiroshi as Jūrokuseiki kanan jibutsushi (AkashiShoten, 1987), p. 293.

4 Louis J. Gallagher, S. J. (tr.), The Journals ofMatthew Ricci: 1583-1671 (Random House,1953), p. 77.

5 Philipp Franz von Siebold, Reise nach demHofe des Sjogun im Jahre 1826. Translated bySaitō Makoto as Edo sanpu kikō (Heibonsha,1967), p. 77.

6 Timon Screech (editor and annotator), JapanExtolled and Decried: Carl Peter Thunberg andthe Shogun’s Realm, 1775-1796 (Routledge,2005), p. 88. Cf.: Takahashi Fumi (tr.), Edosanpu zuikōki (Heibonsha, 1994), pp. 218-219.

7 Also called Book of Former Han, it wascomposed by Ban Biao, Ban Gu, and Ban Zhaoand completed in 111 CE. It covers the historyof China under the Western Han from 206 BCEto 25 CE.

8 Bin Chun, Occasional Jottings Aboard a Raft.In Zhong Shuhe (editor in chief), Toward theWorld Library (Zouxiang Shijie Congshu)(Yuelu Publications, 1985), p. 101.

9 Tsuruta Kin’ya, Modern Japanese Literaturethat Boundary-Crossers Read (Ekkyōsha gayonda Nihon bungaku) (Shin’yōsha, 1999), pp.10-22.

10 Suzuki Hisashi, The Bones Tell Their Stories:People of the Tokugawa Shogunate and DaimyōFamilies (Hone wa kataru: Tokugawa Shōgun,daimyōke no hitobito) (The University of TokyoPress, 1985), p. 113.

11 Da Capo, vol. 19, issue 12, no. 423 (MagazineHouse, 1999), p. 6.

12 Francette Pacteau. The Symptom of Beauty(Essays in Art and Culture). Translated intoJapanese by Hamana Emi as Bijin (Kenkyūsha,1996), p. 99.

13 Karl Grammer, Signale der Liebe: Diebiologischen Gesetze der Partnerschaft.Translated into Japanese by Koizumi Minekounder the supervision of Hidaka Toshitaka as Aino Kaibōgaku (Kinokuniya Shoten, 1997),pp.168-169.

14 Shioya Nobuyuki, The Truth of CosmeticSurgery: Can the Surgical Knife Heal theHeart? (Biyō geka no shinjitsu: mesu de kokorowa naoseru ka) (Kōdansha, 2000), pp. 50-51.

15 Karl Grammer, op. cit., p. 159.

16 Ibid., p. 51.