---
node: garment_yayoi_dress
type: garment
slug: yayoi_dress
title: "Yayoi dress"
lead: "Yayoi dress was the kantoi, a length of woven hemp with an opening cut for the head, and for men a broad unsewn cloth wound and knotted about the body. It is the earliest Japanese clothing anyone wrote down, described in the Chinese Records of Wei."
published: 2026-08-15
updated: 2026-08-15
image_file: yayoi_dress.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Replica_of_clothes_at_Yoshinogari_Ancient_Ruins_02.jpg"
image_author: "Motokoka — kantoi replicas, Yoshinogari Historical Park"
image_license: "CC BY-SA 4.0"
---

## Overview

The kantoi is the simplest possible garment: cloth with a hole for the head. The Gishi Wajinden, the account of the Wa in the Chinese Records of Wei, reports that women passed the head through an opening in a single cloth, and that men wrapped and knotted a wide length without tailoring it. Nothing was fitted, and almost nothing was cut.

## How it is worn

The garment hangs from the shoulders and is drawn in at the waist with a cord or a strip of the same cloth. Museum reconstructions such as the one at Yoshinogari seam two lengths of hemp together and leave them undyed, the hems fringed where the weaving ends. No Yayoi garment has actually survived, so every reconstruction is an argument from excavated cloth fragments plus the Wei text, and they differ from one another in the details. People went barefoot, and ornament was for the few.

## History

Woven cloth arrived in the archipelago with wet-rice farming, and the backstrap loom turned hemp and ramie into the material of ordinary dress for the next thousand years. Silk appears at the same time in northern Kyushu but as a marker of rank rather than daily wear. In the Kofun period that followed, tailored two-piece dress came in from the Korean peninsula — jacket with trousers or skirt — and the unsewn garment was left behind for good.