Liliputin-4781

I would rather to carry out seppuku than open up my kimono ... "
Madama Butterfly


Liliputins. What, the heck, is this?
http://stihi.ru/2021/11/24/7101

To divulge information or secrets
Especially used of a firm, the colloquial American-English phrase to open the kimono, also to open one’s kimono, means to divulge information or secrets.

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open (up) (one's) kimono
To be transparently open about one's plans, dealings, or intentions.
I assure you that our company has opened our kimono about every aspect of our tax obligations to the state.
See also: kimono, open
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2022 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.
open (up) one's kimono
Sl. to reveal what one is planning. (From the computer industry, referring especially to the involvement of the Japanese in this field.) Sam isn't one to open his kimono much when it comes to new products. Even if Tom appears to open up his kimono on this deal, don't put much stock in what he says.
See also: kimono, open
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs. © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
See also:
kimono
open kimono
open the kimono
open up one's kimono
open one's kimono

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Why Corporate Executives Talk About 'Opening Their Kimonos'
NOVEMBER 2, 2014
By

Steve Haruch


Lurking behind this giant pink bow may be a ruthless executive who's decided on a policy of corporate transparency.
Calvin YC/Flickr
As business jargon goes, there are certainly duller expressions than "open the kimono."

Translation: To disclose information about the inner workings of a company.

The most widely scrutinized recent example came in 2012, when Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase said his company was "open kimono" with regulators. Here's a more recent usage, from Marie Claire in April: "Should Netflix finally open the kimono to reveal its ratings and demographic figures, we may finally have our proof that girls really do rule."

Every few years, it seems someone feels compelled to say the phrase is making a comeback. Back from where? From when? In 1998, The New York Times' Steven Greenhouse explored the corporate idioglossia of Microsoft. Here's his entry for "open the kimono":

"A marvelous phrase of non-Microsoft origin, probably stemming from the rash of Japanese acquisitions of American enterprises in the 80's, that has been adopted into the Microspeak marketing lexicon. Basically a somewhat sexist synonym for 'open the books,' it means to reveal the inner workings of a project or company to a prospective new partner."

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Like most online musings on the phrase, this one guesses at a rough time of origin but cites no evidence. Go down the search-engine rabbit-hole and you'll see references to the '70s and '80s, but either nonexistent proof or dead links. Whatever decade it comes from, plenty of people wish it had stayed there.

Forbes included "open the kimono" in a "Most Annoying Business Jargon" bracket, wherein Bruce Barry, a professor at Vanderbilt University's Owen School of Business, calls it "kind of creepy."

The idea of a corporation wearing clothes is kind of creepy, because the idea that corporations are people is creepy — as is the idea that showing skin equates somehow with sharing information. Did you write the company secrets on your chest in Sharpie or something?

Greenhouse calls it "somewhat sexist" — and there's probably a reason it's "open the kimono" and not "drop the trousers" — but a kimono is technically a unisex garment. That doesn't mean the phrase isn't read in a gendered way.

In a seething post titled "'Open the Kimono' Needs to Die," a blogger known only as "erika" calls it "a noxious phrase which manages to be both racist AND sexist." To wit:

The metaphor relies on the Western myth of the geisha: a perfectly demure, subservient sex slave, who masks her physical attributes with a big baggy kimono. It is superficially salacious, then, to invoke the geisha in a business context."

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That is a very narrow understanding of what a geisha was and is, but "the Western myth of the geisha" may well be that slight. Certainly, the kimono itself comes with a surfeit of problematic associations: "Numerous portraits were painted of Western women in kimono during the latter part of the nineteenth century," according to one abbreviated history of the garment. "The kimono could add both an exotic and an erotic flavor to a painting."

(Let us pause briefly here to allow our eyes to finish rolling.)

Similarly, "the use of the kimono in films and books was often to cast doubt on the morality of the woman wearing the garment," according to Sonia Jarvis, distinguished lecturer at Baruch College School of Public Affairs. "The early imagery equated kimono-wearing geishas with prostitutes. ... The later images expanded to include western women of questionable morality as well." (Seeming to support this notion, "open the kimono" makes a cameo in a Supreme Court case from 1914 involving a wife's alleged infidelity.)

So there is certainly a gendered dimension to the kimono in the West. But is "open the kimono" a racist phrase, exactly? Well, it can certainly lead to, shall we say, racist-adjacent behaviors like white guys dressing up in kimonos for their marketing presentations.

Maybe it's all cool, though. "In Japan, the phrase is equivalent to 'loosen your tie' meaning to get comfortable so we can talk plainly and directly," according to one blogger, Bill McDaniel. But once again, there's no citation. And that's a bit of a leap from the equivalent of "loosen your tie" to the equivalent of "unbutton your shirt."

All of this raises the question: Does the phrase even come from Japan?

In a Quora thread titled "Idioms: Is the phrase 'open the kimono' sexist?" one user responds: "What makes it weirder is that the phrase does not have its origins in the Japanese language, and is virtually unknown in Japan. The only Japanese pages talking about the phrase have been ones wondering, like me, where the heck it came from."

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According to Jarvis, the lecturer from Baruch College, "The expression 'open the kimono' actually originated in feudal Japanese times and referred to the practice of proving that no weapons were hidden within the folds of clothing."

Still, it's not clear that this sense of the expression carries over to its current usage. After all, we don't associate shaking hands with proving there are no weapons in hand.

Even if "open the kimono" doesn't come from Japan, it might come from a fear of Japan, given its predominance in business circles.

"It does make sense that this ethnically charged bit of jargon could have emerged from fears in the U.S. about the rise of Japan's economy in the '80s," Vanderbilt's Barry says. He adds that in his view the phrase is "kind of racist, frankly, especially if it is borne of fear of Japanese economic dominance."

That explanation may make sense, but like most discussion on the subject, it's basically conjecture. Unfortunately, the presumed authority on such things, the Oxford English Dictionary, hasn't updated its entry for "kimono" in a while, and makes no reference to the opening thereof.

Which brings us to The Goblin Fox and Badger and Other Witch Animals of Japan by U.A. Casal, a study from 1959 that contains this passage:

"It was believed that the wolf was shameful of sexual things, having no strong sexual instincts. He would never disclose his organ, but hide it behind his hanging tail. Should a person perchance see his sexual act, he or she would have to open the kimono and disclose his or her own organ, so as not to shame the wolf."

That is certainly interesting, but how could this possibly be the origin of the phrase in its current use? Was some mad genius business school professor making his MBA students read this obscure text to get them thinking "outside the box"? Is the wolf a wolf of Wall Street? Or something?

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"No I don't honestly think biz types were pulling out some '50s Japanese folklore," Barry says. "I'm guessing its origin is like most idioms — someone said it first, and then it caught on ... but it's difficult to impossible to know who said it first."

Steve Haruch is a writer, and a contributing editor at the Nashville Scene. You can follow him on Twitter @steveharuch.

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Why is the phrase "open kimono" considered offensive?
Saw a Twitter thread where a girl asked how she could get her coworker to stop saying "open kimono", followed by a bunch of responses about how terrible it was, and "WTF!?". I don't personally use the term, but I know it's a way of stating "full transparency" or "nothing to hide". I don't get why so many people seemed offended by it. Is it offensive to Asian-Americans? Is it because it conjures thoughts of nudity/exposure? What am I missing?

Archived post. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast.


Open kimono means to reveal what is being planned or to share important information freely. Similar to ''open the books'' or an "open door policy," opening the kimono means revealing the inner workings of a project or company to an outside party.

Yeah, it sounds kind of vulgar to me.

It doesn't take too much imagination to see why it's offensive. Since kimonos are Japanese, "open kimono" implies the Japanese have something to hide.

Because it has racist, sexist, and sexual overtones. It comes from when Japan was still viewed as exotic.

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Madama Butterfly

Synopsis
Act 1


In 1904, a U.S. naval officer named Pinkerton rents a house on a hill in Nagasaki, Japan, for himself and his soon-to-be wife, "Butterfly". Her real name is Cio-Cio-San (from the Japanese word for "butterfly" (pronounced -san is a plain honorific). She is a 15-year-old Japanese girl whom he is marrying for convenience, and he intends to leave her once he finds a proper American wife, since Japanese divorce laws are very lax. The wedding is to take place at the house. Butterfly had been so excited to marry an American that she had earlier secretly converted to Christianity. After the wedding ceremony, her uninvited uncle, a bonze, who has found out about her conversion, comes to the house, curses her and orders all the guests to leave, which they do while renouncing her. Pinkerton and Butterfly sing a love duet and prepare to spend their first night together.

Act 2
Three years later, Butterfly is still waiting for Pinkerton to return, as he had left shortly after their wedding. Her maid Suzuki keeps trying to convince her that he is not coming back, but Butterfly will not listen to her. Goro, the marriage broker who arranged her marriage, keeps trying to marry her off again, but she does not listen to him either. The American consul, Sharpless, comes to the house with a letter which he has received from Pinkerton which asks him to break some news to Butterfly: that Pinkerton is coming back to Japan, but Sharpless cannot bring himself to finish it because Butterfly becomes very excited to hear that Pinkerton is coming back. Sharpless asks Butterfly what she would do if Pinkerton were not to return. She then reveals that she gave birth to Pinkerton's son after he had left and asks Sharpless to tell him. From the hill house, Butterfly sees Pinkerton's ship arriving in the harbour. She and Suzuki prepare for his arrival, and then they wait. Suzuki and the child fall asleep, but Butterfly stays up all night waiting for him to arrive.

Act 3
Suzuki wakes up in the morning and Butterfly finally falls asleep. Sharpless and Pinkerton arrive at the house, along with Pinkerton's new American wife, Kate. They have come because Kate has agreed to raise the child. But, as Pinkerton sees how Butterfly has decorated the house for his return, he realizes he has made a huge mistake. He admits that he is a coward and cannot face her, leaving Suzuki, Sharpless, and Kate to break the news to Butterfly. Agreeing to give up her child if Pinkerton comes himself to see her, she then prays to statues of her ancestral gods, says goodbye to her son, and blindfolds him. She places a small American flag in his hands and goes behind a screen, killing herself with her father's seppuku knife. Pinkerton rushes in, but he is too late, and Butterfly dies.