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This large lot has an interesting story on how my grandmother came to acquire it:
Known provenance: My grandfather was a Lt. Col. in the U.S. Air Force and was transferred to Ashiya AFB near Fukuoka, Japan at the end of WWII. My grandmother, mother and uncle joined him in March 1947. They were one of the first American families to move there during the Occupation, and lived there for two and a half years.
This kimono belonged to their maid, Yoshiko-san. She was a woman in her late thirties or early forties from a middle-class Japanese family before WWII but had to work as a maid after the war. That is how she came to work for my grandparents. They added the honorific “san” after her name to give her the status of the older maid in the household. They had a younger maid called Yashio who was in her twenties.
Yoshiko-san probably married in her late teens or early twenties so her wedding kimono must have been made in the late 1920s. She gave the wedding garments to my grandmother to thank her for giving her husband a leather flight jacket my grandmother had worn as a member of the Civil Air Patrol. Winter was coming and he had no warm clothes, only his tropical uniform he had worn as a soldier in the war. He was a small man so it fit.
Kimono, Geta, Obi
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