Shimashima no Neko

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Were samurai topknots and monks' tonsures just baldness cover-ups?

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badeni.jpg

Image: Uoto, “Chi: On the Movements of the Earth” (Episode 5 “The world will keep turning even after I die,” Netflix)

Watching Father Badeni in the anime “Chi: On the Movements of the Earth,” I caught myself thinking: “Was that monk haircut just a comb-over?” and “Did samurai topknots start as a baldness hack too?”

There is, of course, a textbook rebuttal. The tonsure is a symbol of the clergy and their faith. Plenty of men with full heads of hair shaved it on purpose. Heian nobles shaved to make their court caps fit. Samurai shaved the topknot (sakayaki) to keep helmets from turning into saunas.

But once your own hairline starts fading, you see the world differently. Male hair loss can dent anyone’s self-esteem. If a regular guy feels it this hard, what about people in power?

There is
 nothing left for me

No place to grow
 no one to love
 nothing to believe in

...
Then I shall become
 the Demon Lord


That melodramatic meltdown is from the 1994 JRPG “Live A Live” (remade in 2022). Hair loss makes you think strange thoughts.

This is what “flipping stigma” looks like

“Stigma” started as a literal brand on slaves; today it means the unfair marks society sticks on you—shame, defect, inferiority.

Otaku (social misfit), poor (lazy), punishment (boring fence-painting) are all stigmas. Flip them and you get a specialist geek, a minimalist in a consumerist era, and Tom Sawyer convincing friends to envy his chore.

Reframing baldness (a sign of age or waning vitality) as wisdom or authority is the same move.

Maybe the people who popularized tonsures or topknots were quietly reframing baldness. Hide the hair-loss “mountain” by shaving a bigger bald field, or declare “bald is noble.” Could that have been part of it?

Did people in the past feel insecure about hair?

Absolutely. Martial, the Hispania-born poet writing around 40-100 CE, teases a friend in Epigrams 10.83:

Raros colligis hinc et hinc capillos et latum nitidae, Marine, calvae campum temporibus tegis comatis; sed moti redeunt iubente vento reddunturque sibi caputque nudum cirris grandibus hinc et inde cingunt:

You gather your sparse hairs from every side, Marinus, and try to cover that shiny bald plain with the hair still clinging to your temples. But when the wind blows, each hair runs back home, leaving your bare scalp ringed by big curly tufts on either side.

https://www.loebclassics.com/view/martial-epigrams/1993/pb_LCL095.393.xml

That is a comb-over roast, 2,000 years ago. Thanks, Martial.

By 50 BCE there was even “Cleopatra’s hair tonic,” a paste of ground mice, horse teeth, and bear fat. Julius Caesar is said to have tried it. Results: unimpressive. 9 Bizarre Baldness Cures | HISTORY

Caesar also gave us the “Caesar cut,” which in modern Japan looks like comedian Reiji Nakagawa’s bowl cut from the 2025 sketch show “THE MANZAI.”

So yes: people have been losing hair forever, and they cared. If commoners fretted, imagine the powerful. You could go full “Demon Lord” about it.

Power and baldness

Galen, the physician who supposedly passed down Cleopatra’s recipe, reportedly lived into his 70s or 80s (2nd century CE). https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ガレノă‚č

Stay off the battlefield, eat well, keep clean, and apparently you could reach 70 almost two millennia ago. If doctors and elites lived that long—barring daggers and chronic disease—they’d hit the age where male pattern baldness shows up.

Male hormones start rising around 15; that’s when the baldness clock starts ticking. More on that here:

Minoxidil really works — 4 months of 5% topical fixed my crown
Minoxidil really works — 4 months of 5% topical fixed my crown
en.shimashimanoneko.com/posts/minoxidil-results-4months/

Follicle damage is delayed; it surfaces in your 30s-40s. That’s also when rulers took real power. Caesar was about 40 during the Gallic Wars; he crossed the Rubicon at ~50. Winning that civil war let him wear a laurel wreath—perfect for covering a thinning crown.

Examples of flipping a complex

In ancient Rome, AGA (androgenetic alopecia) could symbolize wisdom and gravitas, but even then Caesar got teased by rivals. Publicly “bald is fine,” privately “bald still hurts.”

So what if you hide it with a wig—and then declare “only the chosen may wear this”? It’s Tom Sawyer’s fence all over again.

Louis XIV of France pulled this off. At 163 cm (5’4”) he wore red heels to look taller and decreed that only favored courtiers could wear them.

163 cm wasn’t ridiculously short for the era; historians also note red heels were simply fashionable and made him loom over others.

Louis XIV also loved wigs. He lost hair in his early twenties due to illness and wore towering pieces for years.

Stack heels plus giant wig equals the Sun King towering with borrowed height and hair. What started as hiding a complex turned into fashion.

Georg Simmel wrote about this in “The Philosophy of Fashion”: elites wear something → it signals power → nobles copy to show loyalty → elites move on to something sharper. Then the same loop repeats between upper class and commoners.

“Even if the forms of society, dress, aesthetic judgments, and all the ways people express themselves are in constant flux, fashion—that is, new fashion—belongs only to the upper class.

When the lower classes adopt that fashion and cross the boundary the upper class set, breaking the symbolic unity of belonging, the upper class abandons it and moves to new fashion. Thus they again distinguish themselves from the masses, and the game begins anew.”

Simmel-Philosophie_der_Mode_1905

Whether or not Louis XIV plotted this, it’s a neat flip. His heels and wigs only got taller and louder.

Forced baldness, not wigs

Wigs morphed into a privilege to show off power. People wanted them but couldn’t afford them—classic “North Wind and the Sun” vibes. The Sun King, indeed.

But was anyone ever forced to go bald?

Monastic tonsures were already a thing by the 5th century—over a thousand years before Louis XIV went maximalist with wigs. I used to think some ruler shouted “I’m balding, so you all shave too!” but I haven’t found that in monastic history. I did find hair mandates elsewhere.

Queue (èŸźé«Ș) - Wikipedia

The queue hairstyle (think the “Ramenman” character from the manga Kinnikuman) started with Manchus and Mongols in northeast Asia, partly because it kept helmets from snagging.

When the Manchus founded the Qing dynasty, they forced the conquered Han Chinese to wear the queue. It was a brutal identity break: “Keep your head or keep your hair.” It also made friend-or-foe checks easy—more extreme than a medieval inquisitor.

Confucianism had spread in China since the Han dynasty. One of its “Filial Piety” teachings is to cherish the body your parents gave you—hair included. Cutting hair was a punishment.

By contrast, the shamanistic Manchus (closer to Japan’s Shinto than to Confucianism) prioritized function. Helmets first, theology second.

If you want to dominate the Han and you know their values, forcing the queue is a heart-level submission tool. Terrifying.

Tonsure: abandoning stigma instead of forcing it

Tonsures were not forced on ordinary citizens.

  • Queue → a conquering group imposing a hairstyle on another people
  • Tonsure → a sign of clergy; not imposed on regular folks

Ancient poems already framed hair as vitality and strength. By shaving it, the tonsure signals “I willingly age myself,” “I lay down worldly vitality,” “I serve God, not the secular world.”

Initially voluntary, tonsure became mandatory for all clergy after the 13th century. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/トンă‚čラ

Once the medieval Church ballooned—with crusades and knightly orders—early ideals diluted. Just like with Louis XIV’s wigs, followers who joined “because it’s the thing to do” needed herding, so the hairstyle became a membership badge.

Uniform hair also boosts group cohesion (see: baseball teams). Forcing a haircut you dislike can even raise loyalty—shared discomfort as glue.

Armies love short hair for practical reasons: helmets, hygiene, easy maintenance. Tonsures lasted until 1972, when mandatory clergy shaving was finally dropped. Maybe everyone agreed it looked odd.

What about the samurai topknot?

Confucianism arrived early in Japan, bringing filial piety stories you see echoed in pop culture like the samurai-meets-fantasy anime “Ronin Warriors” (an 80s show riffing on the Hakkenden legend).

And yet samurai shaved the crown—from the Heian period on.

Comparing picture scrolls shows sakayaki (shaving the crown) in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. It began as a wartime practice to keep helmets from overheating; in peacetime men wore their hair long again. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/さかやき

Japan’s base was also nature worship; Confucian ethics got blended in rather than adopted wholesale. So “hair is a parental gift” never became absolute. Function could win: “I respect my parents, but the hair is mine.”

Helmets covered the forehead, so bangs were lethal clutter. Chop them off → scalp gets sweaty → fine, shave the whole patch (at least during war). Very warrior-brained logic. Portraits of Kamakura warlords like Ashikaga Takauji show the style; last year’s anime “The Elusive Samurai” even had an ending song called “Kamakura STYLE” riffing on it.

Complication: some men dabbed blue dye on the shaved patch to look younger. The shaved patch hid thinning hair, letting young and old look similar. But a completely smooth scalp still “outed” real hair loss, hence the makeup. Complicated indeed.

Wrap-up

Long detour, short answer: monks’ tonsures and samurai topknots weren’t invented to hide baldness. They had their own logic.

The tonsure is “voluntary baldness”: take on an aged look to step away from the secular world and mark clergy status. Later it became a formal badge, enforced only on clergy.

The topknot was “born from practicality”: a wartime shave that became standard in the Sengoku era. Young and old alike looked similar, which quietly helped the actually-bald blend in.

No “Demon Lord” tyrant shows up. If anything, the powerful kept flipping their flaws into status—heels, wigs, laurel wreaths.

Still, the thought of being conquered and having a haircut forced on you is pure dystopia.

12,000 years of hair talk


Writing is wild. Imagine people griping about hair 12,000 years ago. Okay, I’m stretching the number—that’s a wink at the anime song lyric “I’ve loved you for 12,000 years” (Aquarion) plus the old Japanese forum meme “talking about hair again.”

Martial’s epigrams are full of hair bits: “The man who insists he still has hair,” “Stories from when he had hair,” “The guy who over-grooms.” Truly eternal content.

I’ll close with Martial 6.57. Thanks for reading.

Mentiris fictos unguento, Phoebe, capillos et tegitur pictis sordida calva comis. tonsorem capiti non est adhibere necesse: radere te melius spongea, Phoebe, potest.

You fake your hair with fragrant oil, Phoebus, and cover that dirty bald dome with painted locks. No need to bring a barber to your head; a sponge can shave you better, Phoebus.

Martial VI

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