#as always one of my favourite topics…the politics of haircuts and the alienating force of westernisation

[stirringwinds]

Man, just thinking of the dynamic between Kiku and Yao, the politics of men’s haircuts from the Opium Wars onwards, and how two nations who have known each other for so long see things. When Kiku first cuts his hair short in the western style upon the dawn of the Meiji-era, it’s naturally a tad strange and unnerving. But it’s a transition he’s able to make, especially because the western world is simultaneously unfamiliar but also familiar through his longtime relationship with the Netherlands and rangaku (Dutch studies). Short hair marks him as severing his ties with the old Sinocentric order, and what feels incredibly alienating eventually symbolises power, adaptability and recognition, in the aftermath of his victory in the first Sino-Japanese war.

But of course, it is the opposite for Yao. It symbolises defeat, it is the admission of failure, that he is well and truly no longer the standard bearer of civilisational prestige. I think one moment where it really sinks in for Kiku that the old order is truly upside down isn’t just the moment he wins—but seeing Yao himself later at the peace conference, tense and weary, but now with his own hair neatly cropped short, in drab western clothes so different from the more colourful silk garb of a Qing official—as the ink dries on the Treaty of Shimonoseki. A mourner at his own funeral, a pale shadow of the forceful, proud and towering empire whose presence used to fill the room effortlessly, in whose shadow Kiku used to walk.