The married woman in an Edo ukiyo-e print, when she smiled, showed teeth painted black. Strange to the present eye, this custom stood at the centre of Japanese women’s, and at times men’s, bodily ornament for more than a thousand years. Ohaguro was a compound cosmetic style uniting the representation of the married woman, the mark of maturity, and the protection of the teeth.

Ohaguro (お歯黒, written 鉄漿) is the name of the traditional Japanese cosmetic custom of dyeing the teeth black, using an iron-oxide liquid made by steeping iron filings in vinegar, combined with tannin-rich plant powder such as gallnut. This article covers the rite among aristocratic men and women in the Nara and Heian periods, its standardisation as a married-woman’s mark from the medieval period, its spread to commoners in the Edo period, and the Meiji ban and rupture.

Overview

Ohaguro formed a black film on the enamel surface of the teeth and had to be reapplied every few days. Blackening the teeth carried a compound meaning: a mark of marriage and adulthood, an aesthetic emphasis on black, and a dental-hygiene benefit, since tannin and iron suppress decay. Also called kanetsuke, it was standardised in the Edo period as the mark of the townsman married woman, while the court, the entertainment world, and the warrior class kept parallel usages.

Ancient and medieval

The origin of ohaguro is said to reach into antiquity, and human remains bearing traces of it have been excavated from Nara-period sites. In the Heian period both aristocratic men and women blackened their teeth as part of a coming-of-age rite, and Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji describes the ohaguro of aristocratic women. From the late Heian into the Kamakura period, aristocratic men’s ohaguro gradually died out and it remained a women’s custom. In warrior society men’s ohaguro briefly revived before dying out again toward the Warring-States period.

Standardisation in the Edo period

In the Edo period, ohaguro was institutionalised as the mark of the married woman. A cosmetic combining blackened teeth and shaved eyebrows became a fixed bodily representation of the married woman after marriage or the birth of a first child, spreading widely to townsman and farmer classes. Courtesans and geisha applied ohaguro in their own contexts: the highest-ranking courtesans wore it as part of the formal dress of the procession, showing a completed ornament on the stage where they received customers. Many shunga works depict married women and courtesans with blackened teeth, suggesting that the ohaguro look was a standard component of sexual appeal at the time.

The Meiji ban and rupture

In 1870 (Meiji 3), the government issued a ban on ohaguro for noblewomen, followed in 1873 by the empress dowager and empress leading its abolition. In the context of civilisation and enlightenment, a state-led shift to the value of “white teeth as Western, modern, and healthy” advanced. Ohaguro continued for a time among commoners but died out rapidly from the late Meiji into the Taisho period; it lingered among elderly rural women into the Showa period. Today, apart from its reproduction in Noh, kabuki, and period drama, ohaguro has vanished entirely from everyday life.

Changing aesthetics

The long persistence of ohaguro rested on a complex of factors: an aesthetic that linked black to depth and profundity, a Confucian and Buddhist value that prized the closed-mouthed expression of not showing the teeth, and a social system that distinguished married and unmarried bodily representation. After Meiji, with the spread of the Western value of white teeth as a sign of the smile and of health, ohaguro turned rapidly into a representation of the “old, unhygienic, and pre-modern” and broke off. Strange as it is to the present sensibility, it remains an object of study as a custom that formed the core of the long Japanese representation of the married woman.

See also

• Married women (hitozuma)
• Shunga
• Buddhism, Shinto, and sex
• Kawaii