NO MORE KIMONAS IN JAPAN.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 February 1928, Page 21

NO MORE KIMONAS IN JAPAN.

The kimono, the conventional garb of Japanese womanhood for centuries, is doomed, despite tradition and aesthetic standards, declares one. of Japan’s best known feminists, Miss Fusae Ishikawa. Miss Ishikawa bases this somewhat startling statement on economic causes. She points out that the Japanese woman can dress much more economically in foreign style than in Japanese kimono, and that foreign farments allow much more freedom of movement, making them far superior to a kimono from the utilitarian standpoint. She has no patience with the foreigner who insists that Japanese women should stick to their own dress because it is more ■becoming. Those who take this stand, she says, regard Japanese women only from the aesthetic viewpoint, and do not take into account the changing features of life in Japan as the apply to the everyday existence of Japanese women. Miss Ishikawa argues that if foreign dress were only a matter of style it would have died out long ago, for it has encountered much opposition among the conservative clases. She admits that a few Japanese women are garbed in foreign attire merely because of the novelty of wearing something different, but she insists that the greit majority of women in Japan who don foreign clothes do so because of economic reason!