Shinto wedding, samurai bride: Inventing tradition and fashioning identity in the rituals of bridal dress in Japan

Since the end of World War II, most weddings in Japan have moved from private homes into Shinto shrines and/or western-style hotels or "wedding palaces" made exclusively for wedding use. Despite the modern setting and array of wedding styles available to them, many brides inevitably rent a kimono ensemble that includes a white kimono (shiromuku) that is worn with a white or colored over-kimono (uchikake) and a heavy headdress that restrict body movements, cosmetics that are time-consuming to apply, and a small dagger (kaiken) that seems to have no obvious purpose. Brides who choose this style, which derived from Tokugawa Period (1603-1867) etiquettes for women of the former samurai class, usually wear it in Shinto shrine settings and perform a ritual of exchanging cups of sake (san-san-ku do). Although the Shinto-style ceremony and kimono appear to be centuries old, they are modern constructions that reflect 20th century searches for identity in Japan. Scholars attribute the initial movement of wedding ceremonies from the home into Shinto shrines to the Taisho Emperor who invented the tradition in 1900 in reaction to a half-century of foreign influx. Interviews with Japanese women who married before and after World War II and photographs of their weddings found in storehouses called kura in Kochi, Japan, demonstrate that bridal clothing changed from personal, family-oriented attire to an invented, publicly-marketed samurai "tradition" that swept Japan in the prosperous years following World War II. Further, the process of marketing "samuraization," the configuration of identity to a perception of a past samurai lifestyle, as it occurred among non-elite brides in Kochi, presents a case study in the creation of "ethnic" dress at the grassroots level in the face of global encroachment where no such "ethnic identity" previously had been required.