an entry from the Toukoku journals of Imperial Princess Rika
14th of Ascent, Toutei 719
At Cherry Fall I see a lot of white, red, and pink. In Toukoku most people acknowledge white is a male color and red as a female color & pink the color of commingling, love. Of course it is also frequently the case that men dress in bright red or that a male doll is distinguished from a female doll by his red dress and makeup as opposed to her blue, which I'm not quite sure about -- the male is tamed by female color, the male has mirror qualities in which his presence makes one's own femininity salient due to his presence as an object of desire, the male always has sexual presence, ...?
In the Cherry Fall party, esp. in the Palace gardens which have been seemingly constructed to provide as many opportunities for coy peeking and languid posing and so forth as possible, young men go strolling or tossing their hair in front of marriageable women who came in pairs or trios to drink tea and leer at much younger boys.
What I see are the young men dressed in pink outer robes with purple and scarlet shiny embroidery of cherry blossoms, lilies, roses, etc., dark blood red belts and shoes, and underrobes of creamy peach, shiny white or sheer white, and so forth. This sort of color scheme is called the "cherry blossom" type, with he most fashionable currently a variation called "cherry blossom reflected in water" which is supposed to evoke the hazy and dreamy effect of trembling cloud-like cherry boughs reflected in the shimmery, clean pool or lake below. There is a poem about this fashion by 'Pheasant' which was circulated around the court during the Cherry Blossom-Cherry Fall period last year:
............ White clouds arrive this year
............ Tumbling on the north wind
............ With the subtle breath of Spring
.................. Blood/berry crimson sleeves
.................. Cascading around lily-wrists
.................. As the boys fix their hair
.................. With three mother-of-pearl sticks,
.................. They go walking
.................. Covered with the Cherry Fall,
.................. Toeing the silver pond's edge
.................. Moon-white faces blushing
.................. Tenderly blotted with pink
.................. Competing with the blossoms
.................. In pale blooming loveliness,
.................. Shimmering across the water.
.................. My chest full of sweet fragrance,
.................. My head full of fragrant sadness,
.................. The petals are consumed,
............ Cherry blossoms evanesce,
............ Lovely maidens disappear,
............ Perishing in whiteness.
This poem integrates the many associations of white -- maleness and male sexuality, which in turn evokes water, desirability and physical loveliness (impossible beauty standards of Toukoku which are often unachievable even for those of southern ancestry,) mute-status, and failure and death.
Children, considered intellectually equal during immaturity, are divided at puberty, at which time the redness of women enables them to become social, fertile, nurturing, leading, to effect positive change, etc., all signifying mature adulthood, whereas the whiteness of men is emblematic of his failure to reach intellectual maturity. The "white lily rite" is celebrated, because the boy's physical maturation, his "becoming white," is the moment of becoming desirable, an eligible husband, but it is also the moment at which he is marked off from girls who will become leaders and dismissed as just a male, who will never have room in his head for great things because he is so distracted by desire.
At the same time whiteness signifies the maturity of the boys it also signifies their immaturity, as men never become matriarchs; always sons, they are dominated and coddled like children -- for their own good, they say, to protect them against their own stupidity. So at the same time 'Pheasant' is fetishizing the nubile quality of the white maidens she is matronizing them, dismissing them as "boys," who are lovely to look at but are not worth talking to. (Consider also that the idealized pale complexion appears naturally in young boys, but adolescent boys often have blemishes and by adulthood darken slightly -- and think of all the boys at the Cherry Fall parties who rub paste over their pimples or natural inconsistencies, watery-eyed from the irritation, but holding back their tears because they must be beautiful at any cost?)
The whiteness of childhood, the whiteness of manhood, and also the whiteness of death -- the swift fall of the cherry blossoms, precious because of their short bloom, a rare commodity like the exotic perfumes great companies squeeze out of Sleeping farmers. The petals are "consumed"; in order to sustain the torrential fall, the flowers have to keep up a constant rate of disintegration/death, and eventually they run out. That this mass symbolic death gets poetically compared to the short loveliness of a maiden who then disappears into the house of his wife (or worse?) -- I don't think it can get more disturbing.
Apparently that's what the ladies of our great civilization desire: for little pale boys to be ravishingly beautiful, then die.
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