Comparing the eyes depicted in Japanese portraits of beautiful women: the Meiji and modern periods.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: The women portrayed in the bijin-ga of the past, particularly those from the Meiji Period (1868­1912), tended not to show much resemblance to those of women portrayed in the more modern bijin-ga (from after World War II), and such an observation came across as a possible indication that Japanese standards of beauty have changed over the two eras. To examine whether the apparent discrepancy can be interpreted as an actual change in the standards or not, a study was designed with the aim of assigning numeric values to several aspects of the eyes and testing for the presence of a statistically significant difference in each of the aspects between the Meiji bijin-ga and the modern bijin-ga. METHODS: For this study, 29 Meiji bijin-ga and 36 modern bijin-ga were selected. The eye was chosen as the subject of comparison, and five aspects were categorized and measured (1) presence or absence of a double fold, (2) eye width, (3) eye height, (4) eyebrow-to-upper lid distance, and (D) corneal diameter. The eye width, the eye height, and the eyebrow-to-upper lid distance were divided by the corneal diameter to derive standardized grounds for comparison. RESULTS: The difference in double-fold frequencies between the Meiji bijin-ga (24%) and the modern bijin-ga (36%) was not found to be statistically significant (p=0.298). There was no difference in the eye width-to-corneal diameter ratio between the Meiji bijin-ga (mean 2.57±0.6) and the modern bijin-ga (mean 2.61±0.85) (p=0.86). The eye height-to-corneal diameter ratio derived from the Meiji bijin-ga (mean 0.62±0.15) was significantly smaller than that derived from the modern bijin-ga (mean 0.82±0.18) (p=0.000). The eyebrow to upper lid distance-to-corneal diameter ratio derived from the Meiji bijin-ga (mean 2.21±0.83) was significantly greater than that derived from the modern bijin-ga (mean 1.36±0.78) (p=0.000). CONCLUSIONS: The results of the study support the notion that Westernization contributed to bringing about changes in the Japanese standards of beautiful eyes in the context of bijin-ga. However, the fact that the changeover has not occurred in all the categories in question does not indicate that the Occidental characteristics came to be emulated in their entirety. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE V This journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each article. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to the Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors at http//www.springer.com/00266.