So, the other day I was messing around online, just killing time, and I stumbled upon this whole world of old Japanese ads. The title that caught my eye was “Japanese Ad with Hair Splitting”. I gotta say, I was pretty intrigued. I mean, what does hair splitting even mean in advertising?
I clicked on the first thing that came up, and it was like stepping back in time. I learned that these ads were from the Meiji era, which, if you’re not a history buff, was basically the late 1800s to early 1900s. This was a big deal in Japan because the country was going through some major changes, you know, modernizing and all that stuff. And guess what? Hairstyles were a huge part of it!
Apparently, these ads used changes in hairstyles to show how Japan was becoming more modern. I dug a little deeper and found out that they used to have this thing called “Nihongami,” which is just a fancy word for traditional Japanese hairstyles. These styles ranged from way back in the Kofun period to the early Showa period. It was interesting to learn how hairstyles changed over time. It is like a story of civilization.
The websites I visited talked about how Japan was also getting into Western stuff, which led to new things like newspapers and magazines. These became the main places for ads. I even read that some people think old Japanese ads are hard to understand because something is always lost in translation. That made sense to me.
The Samurai’s Topknot
One thing that really caught my attention was the samurai’s topknot. Now,
