---
node: garment_meiji_yofuku
type: garment
slug: meiji_yofuku
title: "Meiji Western clothing"
lead: "Yofuku — Western clothing — entered Japan in the Meiji era from the top down: uniforms first, then officials, then the ballroom. It created the word wafuku, Japanese clothing, because until something else existed there had been no need to name it."
published: 2026-08-16
updated: 2026-08-16
image_file: meiji_yofuku.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1887-Japanese-women-Western-Bustled-fashions.jpg"
image_author: "Unknown artist — 1887 nishiki-e print of Japanese women in Western bustle dresses"
image_license: "Public domain"
---

## Overview

Western dress arrived as state policy rather than as fashion. Uniformed services took it first, and in 1872 an imperial proclamation made Western-cut clothing the official dress of the court and of officials, which put every man with a government post into wool. The order was one of a series aimed at how the body appeared in public: an 1871 decree had already permitted officials to cut off the topknot and stop wearing swords. Adoption ran along that same line of authority, so a Meiji photograph will often show a man in a frock coat beside a woman in a kimono.

## How it is worn

A Meiji man's Western outfit was a frock or morning coat over a waistcoat and trousers, with a stiff collar, a hat and leather shoes: an assembly of separate pieces fastened with buttons, in a wool that had to be imported and was accordingly expensive. Shoes were the hardest part of it for feet accustomed to zori and tabi, and the tailoring itself was a new trade, learned largely from foreign instructors. Women's Western dress was harder still — it needed a corset, a bustle frame, gloves and hair dressed up rather than back, and it could not be put on without help. Mixed wearing was normal from the start and stayed normal: a Western overcoat or an Inverness cape thrown over a kimono, Western dress for the office and kimono at home.

## History

For women the change was slower and more concentrated. The Rokumeikan, the government's Western-style social hall opened in Tokyo in 1883, put the wives and daughters of officials into bustled gowns for balls held to persuade foreign diplomats that Japan was a modern state. The print on this page dates from 1887, at the height of that programme, and its details are exact — the bustle, the hat, the gloves, the reed organ — while its fabrics are patterned to Japanese taste. When the Rokumeikan project fell out of favour at the end of the decade most women went back to kimono, and what settled by the end of the era was a division of labour rather than a replacement: Western dress for work and public life, kimono at home, and hakama with a blouse as the uniform of girls' schools. Western clothing did not become ordinary Japanese dress until well after Meiji ended.