Gido Sanshi no Haha

We go back exactly a thousand years for this month's poetess; 'd.996' my Hyaku-nin Isshu textbook says. Buried among the references to all the 'important' people around her - her Imperial relations, her Fujiwara husband, and her son who held important ministerial positions - is one, and only one, comment about the lady herself - 'Her name was Takako.' Her poem is not one of my favourites in the collection:

What interests me more than the poem this month, is the picture. To be honest, I don't think it's a particularly good design; it's not very elegant, and the clothing is just too tangled up to be attractive to the eye, but the way she is sitting is interesting ...

While living here in Japan, I have become used to two ways of sitting: the cross-legged agura position in which I work every day, and the formal kneeling seiza position, which like most of us (at least like most men) I avoid wherever possible. But more than a quarter of the poets in this set have been posed by Shunsho in yet a third sitting position, the one we see here, with one knee raised. It's a bit hard to tell, but I think most of the men are sitting flat on the floor, with one knee off to the side and the other raised (a kind of modified agura), but the women seem to be sitting on one ankle, with the other leg raised (a modified seiza).

As I always do whenever I see something in these pictures that I don't understand, I asked the people around me about this, and as always, I got lots of different answers! It seems that the way of doing something even as basic and simple as sitting down, has evolved through many different forms during the centuries. The history of Japanese methods of sitting is quite complicated, and depended on many factors: the person's status and rank, the type of clothing worn, and the floor surface, whether dirt, wood or tatami. The women in Shunsho's prints are all depicted wearing a 'hakama', common in their era, rather than the kimono/obi combination which had become universal by his Edo time. A woman in kimono has no alternative to seiza when sitting, as the clothing is quite restricting, but the hakama was loose enough to permit the legs to move independently, and I am told that people of the Heian era commonly sat this way. Apparently this 'one leg up' sitting style is common in Korea even today, and perhaps this is another one of those many aspects of Japanese culture which were imported from that country.

But this way of sitting, as common as it may have been a thousand years ago, hasn't quite disappeared yet. In fact I think that every woman in Japan probably sits this way for at least a few minutes every day ... When? When taking a bath, of course! Can't you picture the woman in this print (without all the clothes!) lifting the basin of hot water to pour it over herself?

Perhaps after all, this is simply one of the most natural ways for people to sit down. When not impeded by various types of clothing, the body naturally moves into this position. I'm curious now to learn about how people in other cultures sit down when they don't have a chair handy. Can anybody pass along any insights into this ...?

November 1996

Translation: Heihachiro Honda, 1956