Long Hair - Cultural History - Asia

Asia

Historically, East Asian cultures viewed long hair as a sign of youth and aesthetic beauty. Long hair is associated with private life and sexuality. East Asian cultures see long, unkempt hair in a woman as a sign of sexual intent or a recent sexual encounter, as usually their hair is tied up. Lay Buddhists have long hair, while Buddhist monks have shaved heads.

For Sikhs, Kesh is the practice of allowing one's hair to grow naturally as a symbol of devotion to God and lack of worldliness.

In Jewish and other cultures, shortening hair signifies mourning and sadness.

Around the seventeenth century, the Manchu people forced all men in China to adopt a hairstyle called a queue, which was basically a long braid down the back with the hair on the front part of the head shaved. This style lasted well into the nineteenth century, when the Chinese began immigrating to America. Americans at first judged them to be poor workers because their long hair brought an association with women. Both Islamic and Christian missionaries to the Chinese were strong advocates of shorter hair for their converts, but this was a small group. Around the Destruction of Four Olds period in 1964, almost anything seen as part of Traditional Chinese culture would lead to problems with the Communist Red Guards. Items that attracted dangerous attention if caught in the public included jewelry and long hair. These things were regarded as symbols of bourgeois lifestyle, that represented wealth. People had to avoid them or suffer serious consequences such as tortures and beatings by the guards. More recently, long hair was ridiculed in China from October 1983 to February 1984, as part of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign. Li Yang, a well-known, unorthodox Chinese English teacher who brands the popular Crazy English, claims the following on his website:

"What want most is for China’s youth to have long hair, wear bizarre clothes, drink soda, listen to Western music, have no fighting spirit, love pleasure and comfort!"

In Southeast Asia and Indonesia, male long hair was valued in until the seventeenth century, when the area adopted outside influences including Islam and Christianity. Invading cultures enforced shorter hairstyles on men as a sign of servitude, as well. They were also confused at the short hairstyles among women in certain areas, such as Thailand, and struggled to explain why women in the area had such short hair. They came up with several mythical stories, one of which involved a king who found a long hair in his rice and, in a rage, demanded that all women keep their hair short.

In rural areas in certain Asian countries, for example India, girls still usually let their hair grow long, and knee-length hair is not unusual.

In the medieval Japan, heian gentleman were not very interested in a woman's physical beauty and rarely had an opportunity to see it. The only physical attribute of interest was a woman's hair, which had to be thick and longer than she was tall. The fascination with long hair was one reason why a woman's becoming a nun was regarded with such seriousness - it could never again grow to its full length. This explains why Genji refuses to let Murasaki (his de facto wife in the classical Japanese novel the Tale of Genji) take the tonsure when she is ill.