Talk:Meisen (textile)

Meisen definition

This site [1] sems to have a rather differnt definition of meisen. HLHJ (talk) 01:50, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

@HLHJ: ? Doesn't seem that different to me; seems like the definition for a specific type of meisen, namely ashikaga meisen. It also lists a combination fibre type of meisen known as bunka meisen that combines silk and cotton. Seems like that counts as meisen to me, as it still has silk in it.

I've got a source somewhere from John Marshall on the difference between meisen and kasuri I'll have to dig out.--Ineffablebookkeeper (talk) ({{ping}} me!) 10:33, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, Ineffablebookkeeper! I'm puzzled by the fact that the meisen described seems to pre-date machine-weaving. If it's not defined by the weaving of noil... This fact is also needed in Tsumugi (cloth), and probably kasuri..oh wait, I see you've done some of that. Sorry. HLHJ (talk) 02:41, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

@HLHJ: I think it probably is woven using noil, but I have a hunch that the difference might be in the processing of the fibre, particularly the removal (or not) of sericin in the production of the yarn.

I'll need to dig up more sources, but off the cuff, meisen is a very hard-faced, slub-woven fabric that doesn't get softer with wear; it's stiff, and though you can get different weights and qualities of it, there's a certain body to the fabric. Tsumugi, in contrast, is a slub-woven silk, also ostensibly woven from noil, that only gets softer with wear.

In Kimono: Fashioning Culture, Dalby describes meisen as "a flat hard-finish silk" (p. 333), and also mentions that "Whereas in the 1870s striped meisen[...] or, in summer, thin ikat kasuri had been acceptable for a geisha to wear to an informal afternoon gathering, by 1900 such fabrics had become déclassé."

Tsumugi, in the same book, is described as "the cloth that peasants wove for themselves from the broken filaments of wild cocoons after the moths had emerged, or from the leftovers of the cultivated crop that had been spoiled or broken by hatching the seed moths that would lay the eggs for the next season's crop of silkworms." (p. 156)

There's a definite difference of texture and probably one of production. I know I have some sources that go into better detail than this, so I'll have to dig them out.--Ineffablebookkeeper (talk) ({{ping}} me!) 12:28, 5 April 2022 (UTC

@Ineffablebookkeeper: It seems that meisen is degummed, but a soy-milk size is also involved, see new ref & content. This fits the 1880s meisen, and might also explain the change in drape. I also get the impression that tsumugi was hand-plied, with the filaments manually joined end-to-end, while meisen fibers were drawn and spun (machine spinning is credible, but making a machine that could join threads by plying them end-to-end would be insanely difficult). Is this correct? If so, I'd expect the meisen to be stiffer and have coarser threads and thicker cloth. The twist and the larger number of fibers would stiffen the threads. HLHJ (talk) 18:37, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

@HLHJ: If it *is* a soy milk sizing, that tends to imply it could be washed out – for instance, plain calico comes with sizing, and when washed, the drape changes entirely. I don't think I have any meisen to hand that I could wash to check, though.

Reading through that source, the difference being machine spinning and weaving does make sense, and lines up with the introduction of weaving machinery to Japan. Meisen does have a robustness to it that would match its thicker yarns. I don't think the yarns would be joined end-to-end; rather, I'd hazard a guess that they would be spun like a staple fibre would be – shorter fibre lengths carded into one direction and then spun into a single yarn.

The split between tsumugi being a folk-produced fabric and meisen being mass-produced also makes sense, as tsumugi experienced a kind of swing revival in popularity in the early 2000s for its craftsmanship qualities, but meisen, I think, did not. Tsumugi has a slubbiness that does suggest end-to-end joining of yarn, which would also be prized for craftsmanship.--Ineffablebookkeeper (talk) ({{ping}} me!) 11:30, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

I may have oversimplified, Ineffablebookkeeper; it seems it might be only partialy degummed[2]. Desizing before sale now seems likely to me. Weighted silk seems unlikely for meisen as it lasts too well. Too many online sources are marketing materials... HLHJ (talk) 01:14, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

@HLHJ: Ah, that makes more sense. Historically, kimono would have been unpicked to be washed, so there would have to be some effect that would last past continual rewashings. I'd also agree that weighted silk seems unlikely—I'm not actually sure weighted silk was common in Japan, based on just how many vintage and antique silk kimono we have that don't display the kind of degradation you'd find in weighted silk.

I'll have a look through the written sources I have to hand. Julie Valk's thesis turns up nothing for meisen, and neither does Dalby's. Valk does mention tsumugi more than once, so we could use it as a source elsewhere, but she doesn't bring it up in definition contrasting with meisen. My own personal kimono glossary lists no sources for the meisen entry; Dalby's Geisha pulls up nothing.

Ruth M. Shaver's Kabuki Costume (1966, Tuttle Publishing) may pull up a few more answers. In the Glossary section, meisen is defined as a "type of medium-quality silk used by merchants" (page 377). In contrast, tsumugi is defined as "rough-textured pongee" (page 381).

The index doesn't list any entries for meisen, but does list "textiles and textile designs", of which it lists numerous entries.

On page 77, Shaver describes clothing edicts of 1789: "All that was permitted was the use of hemp cloth and two types of rough plain silk: tsumugi, closely woven from heavy yarn of the cocoon of double silkworms (normally the cocoon is filled with only one worm), or mawata, spun from the heavy thread of imperfect filament or silk waste taken from the contents of a cocoon broken through by a butterfly before the cocoon has been heated." This definition is new to me; mawata isn't definsd in the Glossary at all. It may be that this distinction merged slightly over time?

I'm up to page 160 – I'll have to go through the rest of the book later. For the time being, I'll look in Sheila Cliffe's The Social Life of Kimono and Taishō Kimono: Speaking of Past and Present.

Social Life promises a section on meisen in the index, pages 51–54:

"...the biggest fashion movement in the 1920s and 1930s, at least in the Kanto area where it was produced, was the meisen boom [...] This cloth was originally used for making plain or striped homespun and soft furnishings such as cushions or futons. Japan's biggest export was silk, and meisen was made from the poor-quality silk which was rejected for export. It was originally marketed for its strength, rather than beauty, but according to Koizumi Kazuko in Meisen no Kaisoka (2004:102–103), this varied greatly with the price." (page 51)

A quick look online brings up this essay, with citations, for the title of Kazuko's work. It seems good; not just a rehash of Cliffe's work. The paper is titled Kimono Fashion: The Consumer and the Growth of the Textile Industry in Pre-War Japan by Penelope Francks. It makes the distinction that meisen was the result of silk deemed unsuitable for export end-use, which demarcates the difference between meisen and tsumugi as being the use of waste product as part of the production of silk for mass export versus the use of waste product removed from this process of global trade and production. Where meisen formed part of the fashion cycle as a fashion product, not a staple garment. It even mentions the area most known for its production of dyed meisen—Isesaki, in Gunma Prefecture. (I disagree with the paper's conclusion that it "could of course be argued that the path followed by Japanese-style clothing and its production in the pre-war period represented a dead-end, cut off by the almost complete switch to Western style after World War II, which froze the kimono in a particular 'traditional' form suited only to the most formal of occasions (Dalby 2001: 125—36)", and this is something Cliffe disagrees with too—it's an argument lifted from Dalby's work that doesn't hold up on closer inspection.)

On page 52, Cliffe chronicles how meisen specifically took advantage of the problems caused by the Great Depression, also supported in Francks' paper. "...almost universally markets were falling due to the depression in the late 1920s. Of all types of kimono, only meisen experienced a domwstic boom, because it answered the need for a colorful cheap kimono in hard economic times. It is estimated that at least 70 percent of all Japanese women owned at least one meisen kimono."

Cliffe goes on to detail that another contributor to the boom was marketing, but I feel I'm getting off-target here. On page 53, Cliffe does note other fabrics and their movements around this same time: "Meisen had only one rival...This was wool muslin, an imported fabric...Along with luxury taxes on foreign goods, the rising price of wool, negative feelings about America and foreigners, and an award for being a good domestic product, meisen fended off the threat from imported wool."

In Taishō Kimono, we get a few more tidbits: a plain-weave meisen with a stencil-printed weft is called yokoso-gasuri meisen (pp. 98, 119); a plain-weave meisen with a stencil-printed warp is called hogushi-gasuri meisen (page 97); one example of a meisen women's kimono on page 89, dating to 1920–1940, has thicker weft threads spaced at 4mm intervals, providing a ribbed texture; a stencil-printed warp and weft is called heiyō-gasuri meisen, which requires a screen for each colour printed (page 85).

Page 79 gives us some more info:

"Meisen kimono were made of a thickly woven glossy fabric produced from raw or waste silk. This could be achieved thanks to the introduction of high frequency spinning machines, which were able to reduce the excess of floss lint. Due to several treatments during the production process, this kind of silk not only brought out the colours in a more brilliant way it was more durable too.¹"

The citation here is Van Assche 199: 30–39. Looking in the Bibliography, this is "Van Assche, Annie. 'Meisen – Early 20th Century Fashion Kimono'. In Daruma, no.22 (1999): 30–39."

This gives us something more to go off. this seems to be the magazine this citation is pulled from. I'll have a look later to see if I can find a copy online.--Ineffablebookkeeper (talk) ({{ping}} me!) 11:57, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Hold on; I'm being dim. The necessity of using a spinning machine - like a spinning jenny or a spinning mule - dates this fabric to existing solely in post-Meiji Restoration Japan, as those machines wouldn't have been introduced before then. So this is a relatively modern material, introduced at a time when Japan's main export was still silk (1860s-1870s, as Dalby notes that geisha wore meisen in the 1870s), and popularised later (during the Great Depression) for its price, cheaper mechanised production (both Cliffe and other sources detail how mechanised dyeing that imitated kasuri were used) and hard-wearing nature; its cost especially capitalised upon economic conditions of the time.

If we look in Dalby's Fashioning Culture, we can see how the production of hand-woven materials, specifically rural kasuri and other materials, pretty much fell off the wagon not long after the mechanisation of fabric production was introduced, producing cheaper clothing that could be bought off-the-rack; this meant people no longer needed to weave their own clothing. I'd imagine tsumugi was part of this. Though the traditions of tsumugi have survived, this really paints a clearer picture of what drove the production of both, and to be honest, looking at this, they don't even seem related. Machine-spun cheap silk, mass produced for colourful, Taishō-Roman kimono for wider sale is a world apart from homespun silk materials created using what was available.--Ineffablebookkeeper (talk) ({{ping}} me!) 17:13, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

I think you're right, Ineffablebookkeeper: mechanization seems to be the defining factor. The ~1870 date for meisen introduction (needed if geishas were wearing meisen in the 1870s, so the '80s date in article lede is a bit late) matches the date for the introduction of mechanization in the tanmono article. Mawata is defined on Wiktionary, as silk batting/wadding/floss (I'm guessing this is also what is meant by "floss lint", and noil). Kiwata is cotton wool. Shaver's definition is closer to wild silk. I'm guessing meisen is a durable machine-spun noil, and tsumugi a hand-joined noil.

Not sure if whether the silk is from dupioni (double cocoons) or broken cocoons or noil (combings) is relevant; all would be shorter-staple silk, which presumably would produced in larger volumes as a byproduct of a boom in the export of other grades of silk (tsumugi can apparently be made of "deformed" or broken cocoons[3]). Thicker thread tightly spun from short fibers would explain the physical properties of the meisen cloth. For tsumugi, "A yarn should be spun by hand out of silk floss. A hard twist yarn cannot be used"[4] (not in native-expert English, some of the technical terms are clearly inexpertly translated; as they aren't translated into the standard English technical terms, it makes the source less useful). See twist per inch and sources in tsumugi.

The sociological information you've cited looks solid and useful for the article. The essaydoc article gives a 1890s-start but detailed history, and mentions cotton and synthetic blends called "meisen". HLHJ (talk) 19:53, 15 April 2022 (UTC)