Overview
The Gishi Wajinden, the account of the Wa in the Chinese Records of Wei compiled in the third century, is the earliest written description of Japanese clothing. It reports that women passed the head through a hole cut in a single cloth — the kantoi — and that men draped and knotted a broad length of cloth around the body without tailoring. Archaeology agrees with it. Yayoi sites yield spindle whorls, loom parts and fragments of cloth, but no cut-and-sewn garment: everything was wrapped, tied, or slipped over the head.
Key garments and style
Cloth was woven on the backstrap loom from hemp and ramie, the bast fibres that stayed the ordinary person’s material for another thousand years. Sericulture reached northern Kyushu during the period, and silk fragments survive from jar burials in what is now Fukuoka and Saga — the earliest silk in Japan, and a marker of rank rather than daily wear. Plant dyeing gave reds, blues and yellows.
What distinguished one person from another was less the garment than what was worn with it. Comma-shaped magatama of jasper and jade, glass and tubular beads, and bracelets cut from southern shells or cast in bronze are buried in quantity with the high-ranking and scarcely at all with anyone else. The Wei chronicle adds two details that no excavation would have supplied: Wa men tattooed their faces and bodies, and everyone went barefoot.
Transition
Continental contact deepened through the Kofun period that followed, and tailored two-piece dress took hold — a front-fastening jacket over trousers for men, and over a pleated skirt for women. The style came by way of the Korean peninsula and is what the haniwa figures wear. Wrapping gave way to cutting and sewing, and Japanese dress never returned to the unsewn garment.