Edo Period Hairstyles for Wakashū, Adult Men, and Women, from Kōshoku kinmōzui (Illustrated Encyclopedia of Love)

A page from Yoshida Hambei's Kōshoku kinmōzui (Illustrated Encyclopedia of Love), published between approximately 1664 and 1689, depicting the principal hairstyles of late seventeenth-century Japanese society - styles for wakashū (adolescent boys, marked by the partially shaved crown and the forelock that distinguished pre-adult males), young men, adult men, and women of various social classes. The pictorial taxonomy of hairstyles was a recurring subject of seventeenth-century kinmō zui (illustrated encyclopaedia) publishing, since hairstyle in Edo-period Japan was one of the most rigorously coded markers of age, gender, social class, and occupational status - so much so that hairstyle alone could identify a stranger's place in the social order at a single glance. The wakashū hairstyle, with its distinctive maegami forelock above a shaved crown, marked a male as an adolescent and as a potential object of male homoerotic attention; the transition from wakashū to adult was marked by the genpuku coming-of-age ceremony at which the forelock was shaved and the adult male hairstyle adopted. Hambei's Kōshoku kinmōzui supplied seventeenth-century readers with a practical visual reference to all such social markers, treating love and erotic culture as legitimate subjects of pictorial encyclopaedic treatment - an attitude characteristic of the Genroku-period (1688-1704) urban popular culture for which Hambei and Saikaku were among the leading visual and literary spokesmen. The illustration is preserved in Wikimedia Commons in the public domain, adapted from a seventeenth-century edition of Kōshoku kinmōzui.