Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity

by Edward Tenner

  Impressive as these sandal collections are by today’s standards, they are crude compared to the examples in another noted collection from the Southwest, 188 sandals from about fourteen hundred years ago, collected and first analyzed by the early-twentieth-century archaeologists Ann and Earl Morris at a site in northeastern Arizona that had been occupied by ancestors of today’s Pueblo peoples. The Puebloans’ descendants had turned to leather moccasins by the time of the Spanish conquest of the sixteenth century, but whatever the reasons, more sophisticated workmanship was certainly not among them. The examples in the Morris collection are unique and nearly flawless; learning to make them must have required careful observation of master weavers. While the Puebloans’ agriculture, houses, and pottery were unremarkable, the complexity of the sandals’ construction startled the archaeologists who rediscovered them in the 1990s. One of the investigators, Kelly Ann Hays-Gilpin, has identified at least twenty-six textile techniques used to make them, and a graduate student of another investigator prepared a master’s thesis on the toe area of the sandals alone. The investigators believe the variety and complexity of the geometric patterns, more elaborate than the designs of any of today’s footwear, were associated with communities, families, and individuals, their raised patterned soles leaving distinctive footprints to be read by friend and foe. People were living together in larger units, and the decorations may have helped to assert or maintain the identities of groups. But the sandals were functionally as well as symbolically ingenious. They had doubled-warp toes (with twice as many lengthwise fibers) for extra protection. Twill twining was used under the toes and the ball of the foot for a flexibility matched by few sandals today. Raised sole designs under the ball of the foot also improved the sandals’ grip on stony or wet surfaces. The depth of their treads, rounded and patterned heels, ridges oriented in multiple directions, edges pointing outward to expel water, all meet the latest specifications for rubber safety footwear published by the American Society for Testing and Materials. The hide moccasins that replaced the sandals by Columbus’s time were functionally and aesthetically more primitive than the earlier footgear. New materials may have unintentionally broken the transmission of refined and beautiful techniques centuries before the age of plastics.17

  THE SANDAL: JAPANESE FRUGALITY

  Steele Stewart wrote of “pan-Pacific” sandals worn for protection of the sole by the inhabitants of the volcanic cordilleras of Central and South America and of the volcanic Pacific islands whose shores are lined with sharp coral. Japan did not have the same rough terrain as other Pacific islands, but it did develop footwear well suited to a climate in which hot, humid summers alternated with cold, snowy winters. Japan is a densely populated country, with much of its land unsuitable for agriculture, and its people have had to use its limited supplies of food, timber, and other resources efficiently.18

  Traditional Japanese footwear suited this environment admirably. It also responded to religious and cultural influences. In the sixth century, under the influence of Buddhist teachings against animal slaughter, wooden clogs called geta replaced leather shoes and boots outdoors. (Even now, many leather workers are descendants of the former pariah caste of burakamin, to whom this trade was reserved.) Geta, unlike Western clogs, are flat platforms supported by two transverse blocks between two and four inches high placed far enough back so that the front end can tip forward. They were more elegant versions of the wooden planks fastened by rice straw straps that rice paddy workers had already been using for hundreds of years. Two cloth strips forming a V are fastened at the sides toward the rear of the geta and meet between the first and second toes. Geta raise the wearer above mud and puddles, originally protecting the hem of the kimono, the universal outer garment of men and women alike. Sizes were standard for men and women, and even left and right geta were interchangeable, as the forward point of the V was in the center of each platform, not toward the body’s center where the toes would naturally lie. Men’s zori and geta were (and are) square, while women’s had rounded corners. While some women’s geta were luxuriously fitted with sole coverings of plaited rushes and rich fabric thongs, male counterparts could be so similar to one another in size and appearance that drunken dinner guests often walked off with the wrong pair. The best geta were carved from a single block of pawlonia wood, sometimes covered with tatami (bamboo) insoles; others were assembled with tongues and grooves. Far from declining with industrialization, geta became affordable for most poor Japanese with nineteenth-century machine production. But artisanal techniques survived. Well into the twentieth century, craft shop owners traveled deep into Japan’s mountain forests to buy whole pawlonia trees for the best-quality geta.19

  Other footwear needed no quest for rare materials; it recycled common ones. The original Japanese sandals, waraji, made of rice straw, appeared even earlier than geta, about two thousand years ago, as rice was becoming a staple of the Japanese diet. Like their yucca counterparts in the New World, they were one of history’s most stunningly economical items of costume. Rice straw, a waste product of food production, became both a practical and a religious item. Shinto shrines have sacred straw ropes. Straw was the material of the roofs and mats of traditional houses, raincoats, and rain hats. Woven straw matting, bound with straw rope, secured food products in transit. And the same renewable straw was woven into waraji sandals with a twisted straw cord passing through loops at either side of the foot and heel and secured at the ankle. (An immense straw waraji, supported by more than twenty bearers, was recently dedicated to Tokyo’s Sensoji temple, as an embodiment of the protection of the nation.) In the ninth century, a new kind of straw sandal was introduced, the zori, following the V pattern of geta. Rush, bamboo sheaths, and other economical materials were often used instead of straw. While waraji remained country work footwear, zori ultimately were produced with many variations of design and workmanship, including luxurious white brocaded silk wedding models and others with double rice-straw soles presented by the fiancé’s family to the bride-to-be on their betrothal.20

  Straw sandals, along with geta, formed part of an economical and hygienic way of life that ultimately helped set the stage for Japan’s economic rise and world cultural influence in the Meiji era. Easily removable footwear have always been preferred in societies living at mat level rather than elevated in chairs. While part of the floor of country houses was bare earth and considered an extension of the outdoors, sandals and clogs were left at the edge of the raised wooden platform that marked a family’s living space. Even when zori were used as house slippers, they were not allowed to touch the sensitive surfaces of tatami mats. Tabi, mittenlike socks with separate room for the big toe, were always worn with sandals outdoors, and sometimes with geta. (Some Romans wore a similar woolen or leather foot covering—called a soccus, whence the English word sock —with a leather counterpart of the zori.) Untainted by the dirt of the street, tabi were ideal for indoor wear. After the introduction of indoor plumbing, users of bathrooms stepped into special zori to protect the feet (and living areas) from contamination, a custom that still prevails. The design of the sandals and clogs permitted people to change pairs rapidly without touching the footwear. So strong was this custom that, according to tradition— or perhaps it is a Japanese urban legend—when the first trains opened service in Japan in the late nineteenth century, travelers left their sandals on the platform before boarding and were surprised to find them gone when they returned.21

  Luxurious or simple, geta and zori were hygienic, and not just because they were left outside. Climate as well as belief long inhibited the development of closed leather shoes in Japan. Just as heat and humidity fostered the open-plan post-and-beam Japanese house with its sliding partitions, they encouraged open footwear. Leather shoes rot easily, and they also trap warmth and moisture. Even all-leather sandals may fall apart in the humid Pacific, as Victoria Nelson discovered when she moved from northern California to Hawaii. As closed leather shoes became more common in Japan a
fter World War II, dermatologists reported a surge in athlete’s foot, from 31 percent of all fungal infections in 1945 to 76.8 percent in 1955, according to one study. In one factory, nearly three-quarters of workers wearing closed shoes had athlete’s foot, while only about a quarter of those with sandals and slippers suffered from it.22

  Closed shoes also reshaped the feet of Japanese in the postwar era, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, when the wearing of geta and zori with tabi declined even more sharply than in the immediate postwar years. Hallux valgus, the often painful inward deformation of the big toe, was unknown in early Japan, though it has occurred among other barefoot peoples. There were no signs of it in footprints from Japan’s Jomon period (a time usually defined as from 10,000 or 6000 B.C. to about 300 B.C.) that were discovered in the north of the island of Kyushu. Two orthopedists at Kyorin University in Tokyo reported that they never had to perform surgery for hallux valgus until after 1972; then they saw eighty-five patients in less than ten years at the university orthopedic clinic. Only after children were allowed to wear fashionable shoes, beginning at age fourteen, did signs of hallux valgus appear.23

  SANDALS, SHOES, AND TECHNIQUES OF MOTION

  While zori helped protect the foot from infection and kept it closer to its natural shape than closed shoes do, they also affected how the Japanese walked. Of course, traditional Japanese differed in their walking styles even as people of all nations do today. Edward S. Morse, an American zoology professor who came to Japan in 1877, observed that the geta in a household closet displayed “the same idiosyncrasies of walking as with us,—some were down at the heel, others were worn at the sides.” But footwear still influenced gait.

  The centered thong may have encouraged the pigeon-toed gait that foreign visitors noticed among Japanese women; kimonos, apparently shapeless when laid out but worn tightly on the body, also affected women’s walking style. When the hourglass figure, with its full bosom and hips, began to influence Japanese fashion in the 1890s, women needed walking lessons to use the new foreign shoes. A satirical Japanese cartoon of the time shows one such group with the caption: “Follow me, ladies. Feet pointed straight ahead and chest out. Good! Now smile.”24

  For men, the influence of zori and Western shoes has taken a different course. In the Meiji era (1867–1912), when Japanese offices came under Western influence, male garb was much more strongly influenced by European and American fashions than women’s clothing was. Shoes went along with Western hats and coats, inconvenient as it was to remove and replace them. But boys as well as girls continued to wear clogs and sandals as they grew up; Japanese schools still require this style of footwear. The results fascinated nineteenth-century Western visitors. One of them, the American Alice Mabel Bacon, observed that geta worn from an early age strengthened young children’s feet, so that those who grew up to be artisans were able to grasp work with them: “Each toe knows its work and does it, and they are not reduced to the dull uniformity of motion that characterizes the toes of a leather-shod nation.”25

  The usual Japanese description of the difference between Japanese and Western male walking uses the contrasting metaphors of “piston” and “swing.” At least one Japanese academic who has studied gait, Michiyoshi Ae, even detected a different sound made by the walk of an American woman studying in Japan, a sharper “Ka-Ka-Ka” as opposed to the dragging pattern of the Japanese (“Klan-Klan-Klan”). Growing up wearing zori appears to be at least partly responsible for the Japanese style. A Japanese graduate student at Western Michigan University, Ko Tada, used electrical measurements of muscle contraction, videotape, and force platforms to compare the walking of ten other students, five Americans and five Japanese who had been born in Japan and grew up there. The gaits were measured both when the subjects were barefoot and when they were wearing flip-flop sandals, contemporary versions of the zori. Tada found that Japanese and American young men have different, unconscious techniques for walking in flip-flops. Americans, unaccustomed to them, tend to grip them more firmly and to insert the foot farther into them, keeping a smaller angle between foot and sandal. The American walk coordinates the motion of ankle and knee to keep the center of gravity vertically steady during motion, promoting forward acceleration into the next step. The Japanese subjects dragged the heels of the sandals as they walked. Both barefoot and with flip-flops, the Japanese landed not with the heel strike characteristic of the American subjects but with the forefoot or flat-footed, a technique that does not absorb the shock as effectively. (Ashinaka, half-footed sandals worn by medieval Japanese soldiers in wartime, saved weight by eliminating the heel altogether.) The risk of injury leads in turn to shorter strides that reduce the braking force. The Japanese stride, even barefoot, restrains the full motion of the thigh, a muscular pattern that Tada and her thesis supervisor, Mary Dawson, believe originated in the need to keep the sandal from flying off the foot like a projectile as it advances. The Japanese also tend to lean forward as they walk with rounded shoulders, while Americans have a straighter carriage, which Tada attributed to “a long history of wearing shoes with flexible soles.”26

  Ko Tada cites studies suggesting that neuromuscular patterns fixed in childhood shape not only the mature walking gait but also the style of running and jumping. Childhood footwear thus can ultimately shape sports performance. Tada notes that holders of Japanese running records, including one finalist in the 1992 Olympic Games, are athletes who developed the swing rather than the piston walk. Otherwise Japan has comparatively few world-class runners.

  Of course, as Tada recognizes, other biological and cultural differences besides footwear might affect gait, and her work is only a beginning. But anecdotal evidence from Japanese and Western sources tends to support her findings. The son of the Japanese sports scientist Michiyoshi Ae spent his first years in the United States and was not given zori or geta to wear. (He was not even allowed to ride a tricycle, as the pedaling position develops a muscle on the front of the leg associated with the piston walk.) By the first grade he was walking with the Western swing style. As he grew, he retained this stride even when wearing geta. His sister also learned to walk in the Western manner. On the other hand, some Japanese-American children who grow up in the United States wearing traditional Japanese footwear develop the piston walk. What we wear evidently helps determine how we move.27

  THE SPREAD OF ZORI: MIGRATION, WAR, AND PEACE

  More than a hundred years after the opening of Japan to the West, then, the Japanese have a dual system of footwear: traditional thong sandals for children, closed shoes for adults. Each type of footwear has positive and negative consequences for health and athletic performance. But just as the Japanese were turning gradually but decisively to Western-style shoes for adults in the postwar years, the zori was finding its way around the globe. It was becoming the first world shoe.

  As they migrated across the Pacific in the later nineteenth century, Japanese men and women brought their national footwear with them. Even an early Japanese Christian minister wore burlap sandals. The simplicity of materials—wood and fiber—meant that immigrants could fashion their own geta, zori, and waraji in nearly any warm climate. And they did. Before World War II, Japanese working on the sugar and pineapple plantations of Hawaii wore geta, if not every day, then for walking in damp fields or doing laundry in concrete-floored plantation washhouses. There were also lacquered dress geta for dancing. While the decline of rice farming cut off the straw for sandals, the saltwater marshes of Hawaii abounded in a bulrush like the rush that rural Japanese used for weaving tatami mats and footwear. A few Japanese-American artisans continue the craft to this day.28

  The manufacture of thong sandals on American soil appears to have begun in Hawaii during World War II. The firm of Scott Hawaii, established in 1932, had made rubber plantation boots for local workers. During the war, shortages of raw materials led to a shift to rubber sandals—it is not clear how many of these were zori style—and other open footwear. These also proved popular a
mong sailors of the U.S. Navy on their way to the Pacific theater. On the hot steel decks of warships in tropical climates, rubber sandals were superior to government-issue footwear. In submarines they were a must. Indeed, even during the Vietnam War, shipboard American officers and men arranged to buy locally produced flip-flops.29

  In Asia, war also helped spread Japanese footwear. Like their American counterparts, Japanese soldiers often found original-issue equipment unsuitable for local conditions. Once more, the technique of making straw goods proved its versatility. In a photograph from the 1937–38 China campaign, a group of Japanese infantrymen sit together on a straw-covered ground, looping cords of straw through their big toes as a first step in making waraji, and surrounded by well-made finished pairs. But straw was not the only material Japanese soldiers used. In Southeast Asia, they also began to cut up worn-out tires that they made into zori. During the battles for Malaya in 1941, thousands of British troops died in prisoner-of-war camps, prevented from escaping by boot-inflicted foot ailments, while Japanese troops were able to move through the jungle with what seemed eerie silence.30