"opening the kimono" (1979?, 1984)

Douglas Wilson douglas at NB.NET
Sun Jun 19 02:19:24 UTC 2005


Some voices on the Web claim that "open the kimono" in its modern
metaphoric sense was already familiar in the 1960's. (I've never been
familiar with it myself BTW.)

It is not necessarily obvious IMHO that there was any Japanese reference
at all in the original metaphor. The word "kimono" was used like
"housecoat" or "dressing-gown" a few decades ago (maybe some people still
use it so?); I suppose people who gave the matter any thought knew that
the word came from Japan, but a reference to a US woman lounging around in
a kimono might not have had much (if any) reference to Japan (as an
inexact analogy, probably few native Anglophones think of India when they
think of pajamas). "Open the kimono" might have had a non-ethnic sense
like "open the bathrobe" originally, especially if it dates from before WW
II. Still it would probably have referred to a woman, I think, although
perhaps not entirely exclusively.

The quotation from the fox-and-badger article is a little peculiar since I
would expect something like "open his or her clothing" rather than "open
the kimono" in English text. Two possibilities (among others): (1) "open
the kimono" was already a fixed expression in English meaning "expose
oneself" or so; [or] (2) this was translated more-or-less word-for-word
from some Japanese conventional expression with similar meaning (with
"the" arbitrarily added in translation) (in this case the same Japanese
expression might have been translated again independently for the modern
metaphor).

-- Doug Wilson



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