Portrait in Linen

It’s been a long while since I spent any time in deep thought over the decision to cut my hair. Once the decision was made, I did it, and I really haven’t looked back. I know there is a well of regret there, should I break the ground and start digging; God knows my heart can’t withstand anymore of that. So, I’ve kept my eyes forward and stored away my affection and reverence for kapu with all the other sacred things of hula.

Tonight’s reading of Funakoshi’s Karate-Dō brought many feelings about the hair kapu back to the surface.

He writes of the “topknot furor” in Okinawa (c. 1892), about twenty-five years into the Meiji Restoration. The “Obstinate Party” of traditionalists still had not caved to the government ban of the topknot hairstyle, but changes in the primary schools’ regulations required every student be “shorn.”

At the time, Funakoshi was an instructor, and one of his duties was to see to it the more resistant students be subdued and their topknots cut off. He recalls…

…the sight of pupils, captured after a lively scuffle, submitting to the odious shears with tears in their eyes and their fists tightly clenched as though they would like nothing better than to annihilate the despoilers of those tokens of manhood.

A scene from The Last Samurai (2003) comes to mind. The character Nobutada is a young samurai who finds himself surrounded by Imperial Guards threatening to cut off his topknot in the street.

Watching the scene for the first time was heartbreaking. If I didn’t cry throughout the entire agonizing movie (which I did, perhaps every other scene), I bawled like a baby during this one awful exchange.

Reading Funakoshi’s experience in the schools completely reminded me Nobutada, and I have to wonder if the actual events were so dramatic. I can almost imagine myself as one of the young men, held down in a chair by several teachers while someone who was not my family took the scissors to my hair.

Many things would run through my mind then. Mostly, I’d want my mom and dad there, to defend me, to protect me, and if they couldn’t, to at least be with me through the process. I’d be filled with an acute anger that is exclusive to the experience of violating oppression. I would feel as though I were at the very vertex of a great collision of good and evil, with evil dominating. And when it was all over, I’d feel shamed and naked and raped of my identity–my identity reaching all the way back through time to my ancestors.

Was it so dramatic?

Funakoshi writes of the time as if it were rather trivial.

…aware of the tremendous reforms that were changing virtually every aspect of Japanese life, I could not but regard the matter as of little importance.

He admits some lack of sympathy at this time in his life. I wonder if his perspective on the “topknot furor” ever changed over the years. The fact he includes this anecdote early in the book leads me to believe he’ll return to it later on, and I’m hoping–as a reader cheering for the hero in the height of his conflict–he comes to embrace the ideals of the common, individual man.

What does this have to do with me?

In hālau, we were all under kapu–expressly forbidden to cut our hair. In Hawaiian tradition, the dancers in the old days were under the hair kapu (among other kapu), and that rule was strictly enforced. Kumu made it very clear we were to observe the rule in the same way.

I never did learn exactly why dancers weren’t allowed to cut their hair, if it was on account of a spiritual connection to divine inspiration, or if it was considered vulgar and unclean to do so, or if it was simply a distinguishing mark of a hula dancer. But we never questioned Kumu, and I didn’t cut my hair.

As burdening as it was to care for the length, my hair became a part of my identity, a physical extension of my love and dedication to hula and Hawaiian tradition. The difficulty of maintenance, the lack of understanding and approval of those around me who didn’t understand, the lack of style options…none of that mattered at all.

What mattered was the sanctity and the promise. Even after I had to leave the hālau, I still observed kapu. Maybe my days with the hālau were done, but my love for hula wasn’t. Keeping my hair was like marking off a sacred ground inside, and I guarded it for a long time.

Of course, that didn’t last. Grief and the sense of loss turned to anger, which eventually turned to denial. That was when I packed everything away and decided to just not think of it all anymore. As more time passed, the distance between me and that feeling of belonging grew and grew until one day, I felt like a complete outsider. I suppose that’s when I decided keeping my hair was futile, and maybe on some level, I felt I didn’t deserve to observe kapu anymore.

So, I chose to cut it.

I chose to cut it.

If I’d allowed pressure or frustration to defeat me at any earlier point in time, the experience of cutting my hair would’ve been dramatic–shameful, humiliating, perverse even. I would’ve felt just like those young men in Okinawa a hundred years ago.