Chapter 431 International Friends 7

1.

In this way, these young Japanese people frolicked while taking pictures, and the honorary president of Yokohama University and the president of the Yokohama University Love Charity Foundation, who led the team, did not have the slightest intention of stopping the nonsense of those Japanese young people, and the two of them, accompanied by officials and interpreters at all levels, kept talking while walking.

Ten minutes later, the group arrived at the street entrance of Yang Jiachao, a poor student of Hushan Central Primary School, located in the southernmost part of Cuijiagou Village. Yang Jiachao's home may be the most dilapidated in Cuijiagou, the house is a thatched house with earthen walls, and the roof made of wheat straw is covered with vertical artemisia annua, as if silently telling the long and vicissitudes of history of these houses; the courtyard wall is also made of loess, and many places of the earthen wall have collapsed due to the long-term wind and rain, and the owner carefully covered a few broken tiles in the collapsed place, and planted a lot of green plants along the courtyard wall, including edible lentils, and morning glories for people to enjoy, etc., the flowers are red and green, and the whole courtyard is a little pastoral although it is broken, and it looks a little poetic。

Under the low gatehouse of the small courtyard, Yang Jiachao's grandmother, who was disturbed by the noise in the village, was standing there with a smile, holding a pergola and watching into the alley at the entrance of the street. It wasn't until the old man saw the spring leading the way in front of the crowd that he quickly lifted the corner of his clothes and wiped his faint old eyes, and trotted towards the spring and the others with a nervous face.

In the spring, I also saw Grandma Yang trotting over, the old man is a small foot with bound feet, he can't do heavy work, he can't walk far, if he accidentally falls again, it's not a joke at such an old age. So, Spring had to run a few steps and reach out to hold Grandma Yang.

2.

At that time, in the Toyama area, the phenomenon of "foot binding" was still common among middle-aged and elderly women over the age of fifty or sixty. On the streets of remote villages, on rugged mountain roads, it is common to see women with small feet who carry their shoulders and walk, trembling and trembling. Even in the current Toyama area, in those remote villages, you can still see some seventy or eighty-year-old women with bound feet, all of whom are the kind of "three-inch golden lotus" that can be held in one hand, or "liberated feet" after foot binding, which has become a unique scenery in the Hushan area.

"Foot binding" has a history of nearly 1,000 years in China, and is a bad habit in ancient China, which refers to women wrapping their feet tightly with cloth to make their feet deformed and smaller, which is beautiful. Generally, women begin to bind their feet from the age of four or five, until the adult bones are shaped before the cloth is untied, and there are also lifelong entanglements.

Regarding the origin of foot binding, there have been different opinions since the Ming and Qing dynasties. According to the research of modern scholars, foot binding arose in the Northern Song Dynasty. The foot binding of the Yuan Dynasty continued to develop in the direction of slenderness. The wind of foot binding in the Ming Dynasty entered the prosperous period, and there was a "three-inch golden lotus" saying, which required the feet not only to be as small as three inches, but also to bow and bend, but the unearthed female corpses before the Qing Dynasty had not yet found those with foot binding, which showed that foot binding was not very common at that time. In the Qing Dynasty, the trend of foot binding spread to women from all walks of life, regardless of whether they were rich or poor, they all bound their feet, but there were not a few who did not bind their feet.

When it comes to the causes of foot binding, it is probably nothing more than these aspects: first, aesthetic requirements, second, the result of the development of the gender segregation system in the history of the Han nationality, third, the promotion of Song and Ming Dynasty science, and fourth, the promotion of virgin habits.

The Han people have been pursuing the beauty of women's bodies for a long time, and there is a saying in ancient times that "the king of Chu has a thin waist, and he starves to death in the palace". In the past dynasties, there are countless poems praising the beauties with delicate figures and light steps, and Bai Juyi entered the poem with the names of his two concubines in his later years: "Cherry Fan Sukou, Yangliu Xiaoman. The willow is used here to describe the female figure, which vividly shows the aesthetic view of the ancients to appreciate the delicate figure of women.

Probably people have long discovered that women with small feet can show off their figure and sway. Therefore, five generations ago, although women did not bind their feet, there were many poems that sang the praises of small feet. The woman is delicate, slow, and swaying. As soon as foot binding appeared, it was welcomed by many literati, and it was the result of the development of people's aesthetic tendencies over a long period of time.

Even outstanding writers like Su Shi and Xin Qiji have chapters of singing and appreciating foot binding. Su Shi's "Bodhisattva Man" has the sentence "It is difficult to say that it is delicate and must be seen from the palm of the hand"; Xin Qiji's "Bodhisattva Man" has the sentence "The light yellow bow-like shoes are small, and the waist is only afraid of the wind blowing down", which is often quoted by people; Mr. Lin Yutang once described the gait of a woman after binding her feet: the Chinese woman's foot binding completely changed the woman's demeanor and gait, "its effect is equivalent to a modern girl wearing high-heeled leather shoes, and produces a very restrained and delicate gait, so that the whole body forms a weak and shaky wind, so as to produce a feeling of pity." And it was this "feeling of pity" that inflated the feudal scholars' sense of superiority. Thus it breeds "the highest degree of secrecy in the ideal of sexuality".

In the late Qing Dynasty, many intellectuals had realized that foot binding caused the weakness of Chinese women, and then affected the strength of the entire nation and the country, and was one of the symbols of China's backwardness, so the anti-foot binding movement gradually emerged.

During the Daoguang period (1821 AD), the Jesus Church, founded by foreigners, launched the Tianzu Movement. Shi Ziwu's "Persuasion into the Foot Diagram" edited by Shi Ziwu of "Presbyterian Post-Learning" was the first book to publicize the popular reading technique, which was published by the Shanghai Book Company in the 20th year of Guangxu (1894 AD), but the Chinese at that time were very resistant to foreign churches, so although this reading book was a pioneer, it had little impact. During this period, due to the vigorous advocacy of Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao and other reformers, the "Tianzu Association" was established in Shanghai and Guangdong, and the Quartet responded for a time. Kang Youwei wrote an article "Quit Foot Binding", and refused to bind her feet after her daughter reached the age of foot binding, which was strongly opposed by the people in his hometown, but he still insisted on not binding his daughter's feet, which became a good story in the modern anti-foot binding movement. Since then, Kang Youwei's daughter has accompanied him to the West for investigation. In 1902, the Qing court issued an edict admonishing foot binding.

On March 13, 1912, Sun Yat-sen, the provisional president of the Republic of China, issued an order to persuade the whole country to ban foot binding, and the non-foot binding movement was launched more vigorously throughout the country. Local governments have taken various specific measures to implement "decentralization". He put forward the slogan "Don't take a woman with small feet as a wife", and even stipulated that "women with small feet under the age of 25 are not allowed to walk on the road", and collected "small foot donations" from women with bound feet to promote the emancipation of women's feet. At this point, "foot binding" was banned by law, and the custom of foot binding in China began to disappear from the big cities and gradually affected remote rural areas. But the foot-kicking exercise was also met with a lot of mockery. In 1929, the Nationalist Government issued a proclamation and sent commissioners to supervise its implementation. The complete disappearance of footbinding in China will not be until the 1940s or even the 1950s at the latest.

Female foot binding has never appeared in any other country in the world, but it has written a strong stroke in the long history of China, which makes people have to think deeply.