Samurai Armies 1550–1615 by Stephen Turnbull

Author:Stephen Turnbull
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Samurai Armies 1550–1615
ISBN: 9781780963655
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

Warrior wearing kamishimo, and carrying the two swords.

An important aspect of any samurai’s appearance was the dressing of the hair, upon which much care and attention was lavished. Even a ronin would take some pride in this aspect of his toilet, and to an ordinary samurai, having a single hair out of place was a disgrace. It had become customary during the early 16th century to shave off the hair from the front part of the head. This had originally been for the sake of comfort when wearing a helmet, but by Momoyama times it had become a mere whim of fashion. The tonsured portion of the head was called the sakayaki, and what hair remained was drawn back into a queue on the back of the head. There were two methods of making this queue. One was called chasen-gami, because of a fanciful resemblance to the bamboo tea-whisk used in the Japanese tea ceremony. It involved coiling a piece of string round and round the lower half of the tuft so as to make it stick out like a shaving brush. The other style, far more common, was to gather the oiled hair into a long narrow cylindrical queue at the back, bend it forward and then back again, and tie it in place. This style, called mitsu-ori, or threefold, was popular in the Momoyama Period.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.