Hello, as a kimono scholar, i was wondering if you could share your opinion on the 2015 Boston Muesum scandal, wherein the museum allowed people to wear an uchikake and recreate Monet's painting La Japonaise. What can be improved in order to avoid causing offense? Should people even be offended? Thank you
Hello and thank you for your question!
I actually wrote something related to the scandal in this post from July 2015, but seeing as this was a response from over 6 years ago, I would add that the scandal is a matter of perspective. I still think that my assessment of the kimono itself is accurate and that Japanese people in Japan (then and now) would likely see no offense in the exhibit, but it seems I also missed the point that the protestors were trying to make.
It's become clearer over the years that the question of cultural appropriation is a matter of historical context. There have been many videos on Youtube of foreigners asking young native Japanese people if they mind non-natives wearing their national/ traditional clothing, to which they all seem to either have no opinion or think it's fine. Ask anyone who works in a kimono-related business what they think and they'll tell you that foreigners wearing kimono is how they're staying in the black. The video creators imply that if the country of origin has no issue, then the diaspora should also have no issue.
However, these videos miss the point ENTIRELY. A Japanese person in Japan has never been looked down upon for wearing a kimono. Historically, Japanese people began adopting Western clothing in the Meiji Period (1868-1912) of their own initiative, and by the Taisho period (1912-1926) western clothes & kimono had found a happy balance between tradition and modernity. Japanese people were never forced out of wearing kimono or made to seem backward, or uncultured, for wearing it, not by their fellow Japanese or even the Americans who occupied the island after WW2. The post-war decline in kimono use was due to a lack of material resources, a decimated economy, and a desire to leave behind anything associated with a way of thinking that lead to their then-current suffering.
However, if you were a Japanese person outside of Japan, that's a whole other story. Japanese immigrants, and other East Asian immigrants, famously suffered intense legalized discrimination since the 1850s in the United States. Numerous federal, state, and local laws banned the various ethnicities from wearing their traditional clothes/ hairstyles as well as practicing their religions or celebrating important holidays.
The struggle for many immigrant communities to this day is the struggle between honoring their roots and assimilating into the culture of their host country. And when the dominant population group in that country goes out of their way to:
Stereotype your people based on their physical appearances
Tell you your homecooked foods smell disgusting or look weird
Tell you the language of your parents sounds like gibberish
Tell you your accented English is reason enough to diminish your intelligence
And make endless assumptions about you as a person based on their infinitesimally-small, misinformed "knowledge" of your culture
you get to be as sensitive as you want about how non-native people choose to use items from your culture that YOU get ridiculed for wearing/ doing/ having, while they are celebrated as worldly/ fashionable/ cultured for doing the same.
Sadly, I don't think there's any way to prevent offense completely. If the exhibit had happened in Japan, where it's highly likely that public opinion would've been overwhelmingly positive for reasons described earlier, it'd be unsurprising to find that some portion of Japanese people would find it exploitative, or feel that foreigners have no business wearing kimono in any context. For example, I've only ever worn kimono in a respectable, traditional manner to events connected to Japanese culture here in America. Yet, despite my attempts to be respectful, I've still had several older Japanese women glaring at me while wearing my kimono. You just can't make everyone happy all the time because how someone feels about a non-native person wearing their national/ traditional clothing depends on the historical relationship between those two cultures as well as their own personal history/ traumas regarding that relationship.
Also, something I seem to take for granted in my July 2015 response is that Japanese people/ members of the Japanese diaspora would have as much historical kimono knowledge as I do. There are plenty of Japanese and Japanese-Americans who readily admit to not knowing anything about kimono, neither it’s practical wearing nor historical origins. Why was I so certain that any present-day Japanese person would immediately see that the replica kimono is a "costume”? Did I really think that the average Japanese person today would just casually possess intimate historical knowledge of a piece of clothing they might see exactly once in their lifetime? How arrogant I was!
On that note, any museum interested in dealing with cultures not their own would do well to hire a few people from the culture in question to help create a well-rounded, culturally sensitive and relevant exhibit. Not just subject matter experts from that culture, but individuals from that culture who live in the local community. A subject matter expert would serve to make sure that everything is factually accurate, while the local representative would bring valuable lived experiences to the forefront which could help to address community concerns. If they had, for example, reached out to leaders in the local Asian or Japanese-American communities, I Imagine the question of whether this exhibit was promoting cultural appropriation would’ve been addressed much earlier in the design of the exhibit. What would’ve made for a better solution? I don’t know, but I’m certain some sort of compromise could’ve been reached.
