public day-school, her hair is dressed in the pretty, simple style
called katsurashita, or perhaps in the new, ugly, semi-foreign 'bundle-
style' called sokuhatsu, which has become the regulation fashion in
boarding-schools. For the daughters of the poor, and even for most of
those of the middle classes, the public-school period is rather brief;
their studies usually cease a few years before they are marriageable,
and girls marry very early in Japan. The maiden's first elaborate
coiffure is arranged for her when she reaches the age of fourteen or
fifteen, at earliest. From twelve to fourteen her hair is dressed in the
fashion called Omoyedzuki; then the style is changed to the beautiful
coiffure called jorowage. There are various forms of this style, more or
less complex. A couple of years later, the jorowage yields in the turn
to the shinjocho [6] '('new-butterfly' style), or the shimada, also
called takawage. The shimjocho style is common, is worn by women of
various ages, and is not considered very genteel. The shimada,
exquisitely elaborate, is; but the more respectable the family, the
smaller the form of this coiffure; geisha and joro wear a larger and
loftier variety of it, which properly answers to the name takawage, or
'high coiffure.' Between eighteen and twenty years of age the maiden
again exchanges this style for another termed Tenjin-gaeshi; between
twenty and twenty-four years of age she adopts the fashion called
mitsuwage, or the 'triple coiffure' of three loops; and a somewhat
similar but still more complicated coiffure, called mitsuwakudzushi, is
worn by young women of from twenty-five to twenty-eight. Up to that age
every change in the fashion of wearing the hair has been in the
direction of elaborateness and complexity. But after twenty-eight a
Japanese woman is no longer considered young, and there is only one more
coiffure for her--the mochiriwage or bobai, tine simple and rather ugly
style adopted by old women.