Traditional clogs

When it comes to traditional Japanese shoes, clogs may come to mind. Clogs can almost represent Japanese culture. Speaking of Japanese women, we will see beautiful women walking slowly along the wooden corridor with oiled paper umbrellas, kimonos and clogs.

Nowadays, clogs have not completely disappeared from Japanese life. When we travel to Japan, we often see a woman wearing a kimono standing on a pair of tall clogs, which looks elegant and charming.

Under the cultural export of Japan, many people in China think that clogs are Japanese inventions. But in fact, clogs first came from China and are still one of the traditional costumes of ethnic minorities.

Clogs were originally invented for aristocratic women in the court, but in the eyes of ancient people in China, clogs not only looked very heavy and inconvenient to walk, so they were soon abandoned by mainstream aesthetics.

However, Japanese people like this kind of shoes very much, and carry them forward to the extent that people in the world think of Japanese when they mention clogs, and even become an important symbol of Yamato national costume culture.

It is puzzling why Japanese people like clogs and shoes that seem inconvenient to walk.

Clogs, the word "clogs" from China, mean shoes that people wear on their feet, and clogs, as the name suggests, are shoes made of wood. We can see that Japanese clogs are actually very similar to the popular "flip-flops", except that the bottom of clogs is made of wood, while the earliest records of clogs in China can be traced back thousands of years.

Clogs have long appeared in Chinese records. As early as in Urgent Articles, there was a saying that "Clogs are made of wood, but they use two teeth, so they practice mud", which was translated into modern Chinese. In other words, if you nail two teeth under a shoe with a wooden foundation, you can walk in the mud. This is to describe our clogs now.

There are more than one ancient book that mentions similar things. The Book of Jin Xuan Di also tells the story of a soldier wearing clogs: there are many thorns on the battlefield in Guanzhong area, and people can't pass directly. So the emperor at that time came up with a way to make 2000 soldiers put on "soft clogs" and successfully won the battle.

The mysterious novel Sou Ji Shen, which has been circulating since the Eastern Jin Dynasty, also describes clogs:

This sentence tells the difference between male and female clogs. Women generally wear clogs with round heads, while men generally wear clogs with square heads. Coincidentally, in Japanese culture, most people also think that it is orthodox for women to wear round-headed clogs. If it is not a coincidence, it is another hard evidence that Japanese clogs come from China.

Although there are many records about clogs in the history of our country, the most widely known is a sentence in the middle school text "Tianmu Mountain Dreams Ascend to Heaven":

The "Xie" in Li Bai's poem is a wooden shoe worn by Xie Lingyun, a writer in the Eastern Jin Dynasty. According to historical records, this kind of shoes are also made of wood, with two wooden teeth at the bottom, which is very convenient when walking on mountain roads.

It has been more than 2,000 years since the Eastern Jin Dynasty, which shows that clogs were born in China for more than 2,000 years, completely denying the claim that clogs were invented by the Japanese.

After all, as we all know, Japan was still in the age of rope patterns two thousand years ago, that is, in the late Stone Age, and it was impossible to invent such shoes.

Clogs were still very common shoes in the court of the Han Dynasty, but in the Song Dynasty, clogs gradually disappeared from our history, and it was difficult to find traces of clogs in both poetry and ancient prose.

Before the earliest clogs were unearthed in China, even though there were many documents, most Japanese people did not recognize them. In their view, clogs are their traditional costumes, so they naturally invented them.

However, in June of 1984, the real proof appeared. The earliest existing clogs in the world were unearthed in the tomb of Zhu Ran, a famous soldier of the State of Wu during the Three Kingdoms period in China, but those scholars who claimed that clogs were invented by Japan actually punched themselves in the face.

The lacquer clogs unearthed from Zhu Ran's tomb have a hole in the front and two holes in the back, which are very similar to those worn in Japan today, and caused a great sensation when they were exhibited in Japan. The discovery of this lacquer clogs also brought the time of economic and cultural exchanges between China and Japan to the Three Kingdoms period more than 1700 years ago, which is undoubtedly a breakthrough discovery.

Japanese clogs, also known as "clogs", are wooden shoes with four nails fixed at the bottom. The nails under them have the function of wear resistance and anti-slip when walking, and there will be a creaking sound when walking through clogs, which sounds very interesting.

This kind of shoes is more suitable for traveling in rainy days, or walking on wet and muddy roads, which will save labor. However, if we carefully observe its structure, it is no different from China's "Xie". We also have reason to believe that Japanese clogs are thanks from China.

Of course, the Japanese have made great progress on the basis of China's "thanks", and there are many products made around clogs, and split-toe socks are one of them.

Japanese split-toe socks are born with sandals or clogs. Different from ordinary socks, they have a fork between the thumb and other toes, and some have anti-slip devices for the fork.

I believe everyone who has watched Japanese dramas knows that in Japanese culture, guests often take off their shoes at the door before entering the host's house. If the guest wears a pair of dirty socks, it is very impolite to enter the host's house like this. Sometimes, the host family may judge their first impression of the guests by the socks they wear, so the Japanese attach great importance to socks, which is also a new custom promoted by clogs.

Then the question is, why do Japanese people like China's inventions and China's traditions so much? In fact, this is still related to the climate in Japan.

Japan is an island country. Because this country is surrounded by the sea and frequented by typhoons and earthquakes, the climate is humid, there is much rain, there are many mountain roads and swamps, so most of the local plants are relatively low, and most of them can hurt people.

Walking on the slippery road with clogs can not only raise the foot surface without being injured by the plants on the ground, but also prevent the muddy water on the ground from sticking to the instep, ensure that moisture does not enter the body, make the feet drier and fresher, and prevent the birth of beriberi.

The most important thing is that the productivity of ancient Japan was relatively low. Before the Meiji Restoration, Japan's economy changed little. People's living standards are low, and agriculture and animal husbandry are not as good as those in China, so there are not too good materials to waste on shoes. Clogs were easier to obtain and simple to make, so they were very popular with civilians at that time.

In addition, it is convenient for Japanese women to wear clogs because they don't bind their feet like ancient Chinese women when they are young, so they can walk well even if they wear clogs. But in our country, if a woman with little feet wears clogs again, it is really difficult to walk. So some people think that women's foot-binding is the main reason for the rapid decline of clogs in China.

In fact, we might as well explore the similarities between Japanese clogs and China Xie Gong clogs from another angle: looking at the costumes of most ethnic minorities in China, they actually have a little taste of Han costumes, whether it is the long-sleeved robes with coats off, the gorgeous colors, or the oblique buttons or belts, which are one of the main features of Hanfu.

This illustrates a problem. The prosperity of the Han nationality in China has made the Han culture have a great influence on the surrounding culture, and made it subconsciously change to "orthodoxy".

However, most of the ethnic minorities in China are isolated from the world and their information is relatively blocked, so their clothing evolution speed has not kept up with the Central Plains, and with the gradual improvement of living environment, it has become such a quasi-similar state.

The situation in Japan is actually similar to that of ethnic minorities. I used to study China culture, but because Japan and our country face each other across the sea, information dissemination is slow.

After they brought back the costumes of the Han nationality from the Central Plains, they changed them according to their own production and labor needs, changed Hanfu into kimono, and kept the traditional clogs.

In Japan, there is another saying that they are actually from Yunnan, China, and now Yunnan, China also has the habit of wearing "flip-flops" similar to clogs. Perhaps this is a proof, but it may also be a coincidence.

I have seen the change history of clogs from China to Japan, and I believe everyone has a deep feeling. Many people have a little knowledge of foreign things, but they take it seriously when they hear others say so. When we explore the unique customs of other countries, we should get to the bottom of it and really find its origin.

In fact, many foreign things are brought from China, but in recent years, we have been too superstitious about foreign cultures and neglected the history of our own country.

References:

Urgent article

Looking for gods