---
node: garment_hitatare
type: garment
slug: hitatare
title: "Hitatare"
lead: "The hitatare is a matched two-piece of jacket and hakama, tied shut with cords instead of a sash, that rose from commoners' clothing to become the samurai's ordinary dress in the Kamakura period. Both halves are cut from the same cloth, and that matching is what makes it a hitatare."
published: 2026-08-18
updated: 2026-08-18
image_file: hitatare.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hitatare_chakuy%C5%8D.jpg"
image_author: "National Diet Library — annotated plate of the hitatare from a costume manual"
image_license: "Public domain"
---

## Overview

Court dress of the preceding centuries was designed to be seen standing still: wide sleeves, trailing lengths, layers whose colours were graded by rank. The hitatare is the opposite. It began as the working clothing of people who had to move in it, and the warrior class that took power in the twelfth century adopted it rather than the court robes it displaced. The jacket is straight-cut and closes at the chest with a pair of cords; the hakama below it are wide trousers gathered at the waist. Nothing about it is loose where looseness would catch.

## How it is worn

The jacket is put on like a coat and the two front panels are tied by the chest cords, then its skirts are tucked inside the waist of the hakama so the whole reads as one garment. The distinctive detail is at the cuffs: a cord runs through each sleeve opening and is drawn tight, ending in the small tassels that hang at the wrist — the sleeve is gathered so a bowstring will not catch it. A short sword and a folding fan sit at the waist, and a soft cap completes it. Under armour the same garment is cut narrower and called the yoroi-hitatare.

## History

It kept rising. What entered as commoners' wear became the Kamakura warrior's daily dress, then formal dress, and in the Muromachi period it split into a family of related garments — the suo in plain hemp, the daimon with its large crests, the sleeveless kataginu — each fixed to a different rank and occasion. By the Edo period the hitatare proper was ceremonial only, worn at the highest levels of the shogunate, and the plate on this page comes from a manual written to record how such things were correctly put on.