Japan's hijab critics, and the veils women in their own society once wore

Nineteen hours after it was posted, a short message on Threads had been seen 273,000 times. "Dear Japan's Hijab Critics," it read. "When your ancestors did it, it was Japanese culture. When a Muslim woman does it, suddenly it's a problem." Attached were photographs of okosozukin, a Japanese woman's hood that covers the head and the lower face, eyes only showing.

The replies split immediately, and predictably. Some Japanese commenters called the comparison absurd. Others offered a specific counter-argument, repeated enough times across the thread to answer properly: okosozukin was cold-weather clothing, one wrote, nothing more, taken off indoors. Another argued that veiling in the Arab world began the same way: because of heat and sand, not faith.

Japan's own historical record complicates that. Covering a woman's head and face was not, across its history, only something Japanese women reached for against the weather. At its clearest, it was an established norm, a mark of propriety tied to how a woman of standing was expected to present herself in public.

Okosozukin: real winter wear, honestly

Okosozukin (おこそずきん) itself, the garment in the viral post, is a square hood, tied under the chin, in use by the Kyōhō era (1716–1736) and fashionable across Japan by the mid-18th century, staying in use into the Meiji period. It was worn mainly in winter, often made of silk crepe, and Japanese sources classify it, correctly, as cold-weather clothing. This is the weakest of the examples here, and it's worth saying so plainly rather than stretching it: the shape happens to leave only the eyes exposed, but that alone doesn't prove the concealment was the point rather than a consequence of a warm hood's construction. Okosozukin is evidence that Japanese women once covered most of their faces routinely. It is not, on its own, evidence of a modesty rule.

Ichimegasa and mushi no tareginu: an established ensemble

Centuries earlier, in the Heian period and the Kamakura period that followed it, women travelling in public wore the ichimegasa (市女笠), a wide, woven sedge hat, combined with a mushi no tareginu (虫の垂衣): a sheer veil hung from the hat's brim, covering the face. This was not improvised weatherproofing added on a windy day. It was part of a recognised travelling costume, tsubo-shōzoku, worn by women of the aristocratic and upper samurai classes, in which the veil was an established feature of how a woman of standing dressed to appear in public.

Kazuki: the clearest case

The strongest evidence by far is kazuki, or uchikatsugi (被衣): an outer robe worn draped over the head, hiding the face and upper body, traceable to the late Heian period and at its most iconic through the Muromachi and Edo periods, worn widely across Kyoto and Edo by women of high status and, later, by townswomen as well. Museum sources describing surviving examples are direct about its purpose: to keep a woman's face from being seen while she was out in public, tied to the etiquette expected of women of standing. Protection from sun and dust and questions of fashion appear in the record too, and concealment wasn't the garment's only job. But among these four, it is the one where hiding a woman's face from public view is documented as a stated reason for wearing it, not inferred after the fact from its shape. It functioned as a mark of social standing at once, a rule of how a respectable woman appeared outside her home, worn as a matter of course.

Across these different periods and social classes, forms of Japanese women's head- and face-covering ranged from purely practical to explicitly tied to etiquette, propriety and social standing. At the kazuki end of that range, in particular, keeping a woman's face from public view was not incidental. It was the point.

Hijab is not up for a stranger's veto

None of that history is needed to establish that a Muslim woman may wear hijab. It is a religious obligation, recognised across the established schools of Islamic jurisprudence, to cover the hair before men outside her immediate family, tied to her practice of her faith rather than to fashion or custom. What the history above removes is the excuse for treating that obligation as something alien to civilised life, something a Japanese commenter is entitled to mock, question, or demand an explanation for, as though covering a woman's head were self-evidently backward.

We readily understand that a Sikh man's turban, or a nun's veil, carries a religious meaning an employer shouldn't casually demand be set aside. A Muslim woman's hijab deserves that same seriousness — not a debate, not a demand to defend her faith to a comments section, just the ordinary respect other religious dress is given without a second thought.

Japan forgot its own history

Modern Japan can regard a covered Muslim woman's appearance as foreign even though forms of women's head- and face-covering are deeply present in its own historical record. That is not a timeless Japanese standard of what counts as normal dress. And when historical Japanese coverings are treated as culture while Muslim covering is dismissed merely as alien, the standard is being applied selectively. That contradiction, given documented prejudice toward Islam in Japan, including toward Muslim women specifically in Japanese workplaces, is harder to dismiss as simple unfamiliarity.

Japan does not need to recognise hijab as a Japanese tradition, and this essay isn't claiming it is one. It only needs to stop pretending that a covered woman is inherently alien to Japanese history. It isn't. Japan's own past made room, more than once, for exactly this, under its own names, for its own reasons.

Sources. Threads — introvertmilo, "Dear Japan's Hijab Critics" · Old Photos of Japan — Okosozukin and Furoshiki · Kyoto Costume Museum (Iz2.or.jp) — Kamakura-period travelling dress · The Metropolitan Museum of Art — kazuki/katsugi · Dar al-Ifta al-Misriyyah — on covering the head as a matter of fiqh consensus · academic research on discrimination faced by Muslim women workers in Japan (EJournal Universiti Malaya)