美人 Bijin /Beauty

Abstract

美人 / Bijin / Beauty Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit Bijin wa iwanedo kakure nashi, miyako no jōge katsu shitte It is no secret: everyone knows what a bijin is. (Japanese proverb) 1 The term bijin is defined by the Dictionary of the Japanese Language (Nihon kokugo daijiten) as: “A beautiful person. A beautiful person, superior in appearance to others. […] A woman, beautiful in appearance. Bijo (a female beauty). Kajin (a beauty). […] A man, beautiful in appearance. Bidanshi (a beautiful man).” 2 Although the term bijin existed well before the Meiji period (1868-1912) and would have been understood to refer to both women and men during the Edo period (1600-1868), in the modern era it came to refer exclusively to women. What accounts for the popularization of the term bijin and why did bijin become a gender-specific term in the Meiji period? Why was bijin with the character “bi” (美)—rather than, for instance, “kajin” (佳人・a beauty) or reijin (麗人・a beauty) 3 —the term that popularly came to be used to specify beautiful Japanese Koji Zokushin Kotowaza Daijiten, ed. Shōgaku Tosho, Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1982. Nihon kokkugo daijiten dainiban, vol. 11, Tokyo; Shogakukan, 2001, 279. The Nihon kokugo daijiten specifies that the kajin is someone with a beautiful face (627). Chō Kyō explains that in China the attribution of beauty was often a veiled way of making a distinction between the upper and lower classes. Chō says, “The term „kajin‟ [in Chinese] does not simply mean a beautiful woman. The woman must be from a literati family” (26). (Chō Kyō, Bijo to wa nanika: Nitchū bijin no bunkashi [Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 2001]). In Meiji Japan the word “kajin” was applied to women writers such as Higuchi Ichiyō and maintained this inflection of designating a beautiful, educated woman. Because of this