The Search for the Beautiful Woman: A Cultural History of Japanese and Chinese Beauty

by Cho Kyo, Kyoko Iriye Selden (Translator)

While a slender body is a prerequisite for beauty today, plump women were considered ideal in Tang Dynasty China and Heian-period Japan. Starting around the Southern Song period in China, bound feet symbolized the attractiveness of women. But in Japan, shaved eyebrows and blackened teeth long were markers of loveliness.

For centuries, Japanese culture was profoundly shaped by China, but in complex ways that are only now becoming apparent. In this first full comparative history of the subject, Cho Kyo explores changing standards of feminine beauty in China and Japan over the past two millennia. Drawing on a rich array of literary and artistic sources gathered over a decade of research, he considers which Chinese representations were rejected or accepted and transformed in Japan. He then traces the introduction of Western aesthetics into Japan starting in the Meiji era, leading to slowly developing but radical changes in representations of beauty. Through fiction, poetry, art, advertisements, and photographs, the author vividly demonstrates how criteria of beauty differ greatly by era and culture and how aesthetic sense changed in the course of extended cultural transformations that were influenced by both China and the West.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Japan, China

302 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Eustacia Tan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I stumbled across this book while browsing through Overdrive and knew that I was going to read it someday because it’s related to the World of Genji project I’m doing. I kind of put it off for a few weeks because it looked a bit intimidating, but I told Pan Pan about it and basically guilted myself into reading this.

And it is such an informative book! I read through it twice – once to get a feel of a thing and once for notes – and I still think that there’s a lot I’m missing. To sum the book briefly, it looks at the history of beauty in China and Japan through the centuries by examining artistic and literary portrayals of beautiful women.

I ended up with twelve pages of notes, so this is obviously full of content. I really appreciated that the author referred to so many pictures and writings because it made it a bit easier to understand what was going on. Some interesting points I picked up include:

“Whether or not people of a different race appear beautiful is less a matter of judgement based on looks and styles than a product of one’s evaluation of that race’s culture.” – I agree! We think that beauty is universal, but that’s a pretty recent development (probably due to the Internet spreading one dominant form of culture)
The purpose of makeup is, “while anticipating society’s aesthetic eye, to show oneself according to its taste or expectation. Thus, makeup becomes meaningful only within a community.” – This also made sense. A lot of makeup trends are popular within a subculture, or perhaps to deliberately show non-affiliation of a particular group.
Japanese standards of beauty are a bit more complicated to discern because they had two types of writing – Chinese writing which was heavily influenced by Chinese turns of phrase regarding beauty, and Japanese narrative (e.g. The Tale of Genji) which had less of such constraints. That said, Chinese culture was huge during the Heian era, with scenes depicting Chinese culture drawn on screens so everyone would have some level of familiarity, and thus be influenced, by Chinese standards of beauty.
Bo Juyi has a poem where he mentions a type of crying makeup, which reminds me a bit of igari makeup, where you emphasis puffy red eyes, although in this case, to suggest a hangover. But it does draw on traditions where being sick was associated with being beautiful, which just goes to show that there is nothing new under the sun.
In terms of credentials, the author Cho Kyo (張競) was born in China and moved to Japan. He’s currently teaching comparative culture and the history East Asian cultural exchange at Meiji University (according to his specialist topic, 専攻分野, in his page), so I think that he has solid credentials to talk about the history of beauty in both countries.

All that said, this book is definitely very academic in tone. Not only is there a lot of information, the writing style also leans towards the academic. That makes it a little hard to read at times, but it is definitely rewarding if you’re interested in this topic.

Overall, I found this to be a fascinating book. While I don’t think it’s a general introduction to the history of beauty standards in China and Japan (I’ve heard a few lectures on the topic which really helped when reading), it’s something you should definitely check out if you have a general idea of how beauty has been viewed in China and Japan and want to find out more.

This review was first posted at Eustea Reads

[kia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is very informative with regard to the development of beauty standards for women in China and Japan. However repetitive, it was well researched and presented in a very interesting manner. I was surprised that it was not as simple as it seemed but the whole point was to make comparisons with the two different cultures that were once in the same race.

[Quicksilver Quill · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Search for the Beautiful Woman is an erudite and enjoyable survey of the depiction of female beauty in China and Japan. Using historical examples from literature and art, author Cho Kyo expertly traces the changing of aesthetics and the shifting view of female beauty through time.

[m · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's more of a literature review than a well-developed book. Very repetitive and I didn't glean much new knowledge from it.