While nursing is our first technique--and, for many of us, the bottle of our first technology--the first right of technical passage for the greater part of humanity is the use of footwear. We are not the only animal that uses external things to modify its body: hermit crabs, for example, inhabit discarded shells of other creatures. Nor are we the only animal that makes things to modify its body: chimpanzees sometimes use large leaves for walking, as they do for eating. But we are the only animal that both makes and needs these objects for its well-being. None changes us more significantly than shoes. Footwear alters the foot itself, sometimes disastrously, but it helps prevent conditions that may have even worse effects. It changes not only our contact with the world but our perception of it. And through the meanings which have been assigned it, it affects how we relate to others socially.

The footwear consultant and columnist Dr. William Rossi has identified seven and only seven styles of shoe: moccasin, sandal, boot, clog, pump, mule, oxford. The moccasin, a piece of leather wrapped around the foot and fastened with a leather thong or other material, is though to be the oldest foot covering. But sandals--pieces of leather or other material held on the foot with straps or other devices--are almost as ancient. Other footwear forms are combinations or extensions of the moccasin and sandal. Our word sole is derived from the Latin solea, a sandal made of heavy leather or woven straw with loops for straps of plaited straw or rawhide, and many of our other shoe styles are moccasins sewn or bonded to a sandal platform. North American Indians had three styles: moccasins with continuous soft soles, hard-soled moccasins, and (especially in what is now the U.S. Southwest and parts of Central America) sandals of hide or plant materials.¹ 

Because true moccasins are unsuitable for contemporary paved roads and sidewalks, the sandal remains the most ancient form of footwear in common use. In fact, rubber and plastic sandals are among the most plentiful manufactured objects on the earth's surface. No official international statistics are available, but the Canadian shoe industry specialist Phillip Nutt estimates that in the last sixty years, the earth's factories have produced fifteen billion to twenty billion pairs. The thong sandal, with two straps anchored at three points, forming a V with its apex between the first and second toes, is know to nearly every nation and social class. The variety of its names in English alone reflects its ubiquity: zori (zories is the official term of the U.S. Custom Service), thongs (originally Australian), flip-flops (originally New Zealand), slippers (Hawaii), slaps, flaps, beach walkers, and go-aheads. On one Caribbean luxury cruise, the writer David Foster Wallace counted over twenty makes. Used apparently independently by societies around the world for millenia, the thong, or zori, went into mass peacetime production more than fifty years ago thanks to new materials and manufacturing techniques. Like other body technologies, it helps shape body techniques. But to understand the zori, we must start by asking why people need even this simplest of footwear.² 

Sandals, like other footwear, are a compromise. The naked foot functions best without them. While bipedalism, as the performance of apprehended drunken drivers trying to walk a straight line suggests, becomes hazardous whenever sensation and balance are compromised, the structure of the foot is not to blame. The foot is one of a complex series of adaptations to bipedal locomotion, and one of the last to achieve it current configuration. It is a masterpiece of 26 bones, 33 joints, 107 ligaments, and 19 muscles that can withstand the repeated forces of up to 600 pounds while running. Yet each square inch of the sole has 1,300 nerve endings to make possible the constant adjustments needed for its role in weight bearing, balancing, and propulsion. The human foot is unique in the animal world for its two arches, transverse (side to side) and longitudinal (lengthwise). These let us stand upright by spreading the weight on the plantar surface (sole) of the foot as broadly as possible and by forming a tripod, absent in other primates. (Chimpanzees and gorillas can walk on their hind legs for a limited distance, but they cannot stand still bipedally on the ground without an object for support.) The first digit of the human foot, the big toe, or hallux, has grown to bear the stress of locomotion, and the ball of the foot cushions us and helps us push off. The human foot also retains surprising potential dexterity. People born without normal hands have been known to develop complex manipulative skills in their feet, transferring the brain's motor control from one set of limbs to the other. A French physician, commenting on the mediocre work of the armless painter César Ducornet (1806-1856), once widely exhibited in provincial museums, noted that the mind that conceived the work was inferior, but that the foot had executed it correctly. ³ 

People in industrial societies may assume that the tender sole would soon be ravaged by its environment without the protection of footwear. In fact, wearing shoes creates this sensitivity. After a week of barefoot living, the foot forms a protective thickened layer that, unlike calluses, does not generally block the pleasurable sensations of contact with the earth. A billion people on earth still go barefoot--some of them in harsh conditions, like the Seri of the Sonoran coast of Mexico, opposite Baja California, whose feet are toughened by the sand until they form a "Seri boot." In the rough, hilly regions of the Congo, unshod indigenous people developed a keratin coating on their soles so thick that they were able to walk on live coals without feeling pain. Some urban workers have managed without shoes. One investigation of several hundred barefoot rickshaw men of Shanghai, whose work took them over twenty miles of cobblestones and pavement every day, found that arch deformities and foot ailments were rare.⁴ 

Even in the industrial West, a surprising number of enthusiasts for barefoot living remain, despite a cultural bias dating from Roman times, when Greek barefoot customs disappeared, sandals represented imperial power, and bare feet became a mark of slavery or the most extreme poverty. In Coptic Christianity and later in some Western monastic orders, abandonment of footwear signified deep humility and poverty. St. Francis embraced the custom as a way of imitating Christ, though the order he founded later turned to sandals. But many other men and women, and especially children, have avoided footwear not to mortify the flesh but to indulge it. Well into the twentieth century, country children often went barefoot, especially in Ireland. So strong was the custom that Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, reported that Irish immigrants were spreading it, especially to "the poorer native women and children of the factory towns." At the turn of the twentieth century, many Irish children still wore no shoes, even in the strictly uniformed schools. In fact, some schools barred shoes as ostentatious. To urban Americans of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, John Greenleaf Whittier's "barefoot boy with cheek of tan" represented rural innocence, and now signifies nostalgia. In the sleepy county seat of Belvidere in northern New Jersey, for example, I have seen a plaque marking the "shoe tree," where rural children were said to have put on their shoes before entering a nearby church, reversing the injunction to Moses to "out off thy shoes" in Exodus 3:5. (Even in the United States, bare feet are still permitted in some Amish and Hawaiian classrooms.)⁵ 

In the early twenty-first century there is a vigorous barefoot hiking movement; one of its most active groups is led by an English-born theology graduate living in Connecticut, Richard Keith Frazine, who literally seeks to tread lightly on the earth. "Walking barefoot, as Nature intended," he explains, "humans hardly disturb even the most delicate ground cover and can delight in the soft, carpet-like feel of moss in good conscience." His fascinating book shows how the technique of barefoot walking must be relearned. Months of conditioning may not be necessary, as skeptics believe, but it takes several miles of practice on well-maintained trails a few days a week for two or three weeks to accustom the feet to what was once their natural activity. The rush of new sensations from the environment, while ultimately pleasurable, can at first be overwhelming in their unfamiliarity, as though we had grown up with our ears covered. And barefoot hiking requires learning a somewhat different technique of walking, not just for enjoying contact with the forest floor, but for noticing and avoiding obstructions and poison ivy and dealing with insects. "You must choose each footfall," Frazine explained to a local reporter as they crossed a stream. "Anticipate each step. If you kick, shuffle or drag your feet, your chance of injury multiplies enormously." Proper barefoot hiking demands a vertical step in which the foot conforms itself to the forest floor. A Canadian barefoot hiker describes a maneuver for reacting to sharp objects: rolling the foot and rolling off to the side. Even the return to intimacy with nature demands learning technique--and using technology like insect repellant, and lanolin as a foot conditioner.⁶ 

Despite the still flourishing, innocuous fetishism of the baby shoe, the unshod child's foot remains an exemplar of the body's uncorrupted state. Bare feet appear to be safer for children than many shoes, according to one study of injuries seen in the emergency room of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in 1988. Falls cause half of all childhood accidents, and the study showed that injuries from loss of footing were more common among children with smooth-soled shoes than among the barefoot.⁷ 

Two generations ago, medical and popular opinion recommended children's shoes not only for safety but to prevent flat feet. The stigma of the flat foot appears to date from nineteenth-century military medicine, preoccupied with foot irregularities as signs of physical and mental degeneration and unfitness for service. (In German-speaking Europe, Jewish feet were especially suspect.) Medical authorities believed in early mechanical intervention for healthy foot development. As late as 1920, a medical text warned that "infants should be taught to creep, and early walking discouraged." Orthopedists and pediatricians favored stiff shoes with corrective inserts, some still used in special cases and others long forgotten. By the 1930s, so fewer than fifty "doctor's" shoes and one hundred types of arch support were available in the United Kingdom. Manufacturers in the United States (following the lead of the physician, shoemaker, and master salesman William Mathias Scholl) were equally zealous in producing "corrective" juvenile shoes. As William Rossi later observed, these shoes had no scientific basis. Even now there is no standard for a healthy or unhealthy, high or low arch.⁸ 

And at least in the United States, the military itself has changed its stance. For decades, North American army doctors rejected conscripts and volunteers alike for flat feet, even star athletes like Satchel Paige (who thereby enjoyed a lucrative civilian career during World War II) and accomplished hikers like the professional hunter who was turned down after walking two hundred miles to Edmonton to enlist. A 1947 Canadian army survey of foot problems warned that training recruits with low arches was a "useless waste of time, effort and money." This opinion was challenged only in 1989, when scientists at the U.S. Army Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, Massachusetts, found that soldiers with low arches had half as many foot problems as those with high insteps. High arches may be more rigid and unstable; flat feet, unless they are painfully so, are more flexible and better equipped to absorb the shocks of exercise. One of the study's investigators told a reporter: "I've seen drill sergeants with arches as convex as the bottoms of rocking chairs, who are active and successful."⁹ 

Beginning in the 1970s, medical researchers began to question the value of many corrective shoes prescribed for children. They saw great variation in normal, healthy young feet. A study of the feet of 2,000 children, published in 1971, revealed that of those who were wearing special shoes for flat feet, only 43 percent had true pes valgus (the technical term for an abnormally low longitudinal arch). The "corrective" shoes that these children had been wearing had not had any effect on their arches. In the early 1990s, orthopedists in India examined the static footprints of 2,300 children and found that the incidence of flat feet among those who used footwear, especially closed shoes, was three times higher than among children who were exclusively barefoot, although the longitudinal arches of the great majority of the flat-footed children recovered naturally after the age of eleven. Studies elsewhere found that 80 percent of two- to four-year-old children were beginning to show malformation of the toes as a result of wearing shoes; that nearly three-quarters of children's shoes are between a half size and 3.6 sizes too small; and that the lasts (wooden or plastic forms on which shoes are built) of children's shoes differ from the dimensions of normal children's feet. After a review of the literature, the orthopedist Lynn T. Staheli concluded that the best criterion for children's shoes is how well they approach the barefoot state, including their spaciousness, lightness, flexibility, and porosity. Except in cases of congenital deformity--some flat feet and other conditions can be painful and do benefit from treatment--the dream of molding ideal feet through stiffly engineers shoes is as dated as the idea of the superiority of formula to mother's milk.¹⁰ 

Children's and adults' feet still need protection, and not just from hostile terrain and climate. The domestication of dogs, for example, has exposed humanity to the risks of the bloodsucking hookworm, endemic in the tropics and subtropics. In the glorious days of shoeless youth in the American South before World War I, there were nearly four million cases of hookworm infection, and even one barefoot enthusiast in Charleston, South Carolina, acknowledged that he needed hospital treatment for it while growing up. Hookworm larvae usually enter the body through exposed toes and multiply in the intestine; the parasite can rob children of up to a quarter of their normal growth and drain the energy of adults. Elsewhere in the world, many of the most dangerous parasites are waterborne, notably the flatworms that cause schistosomiasis (bilharzia), which affects up to 200 million people globally. Footwear can be a barrier against the larvae, which are transmitted by snails spread inadvertently since the nineteenth century by migration, colonization, and irrigation projects. The alternative to covering one's feet may be chronic damage to internal organs from the massive release of eggs by the females. Next to sanitation, footwear has been such a major theme of antiparasite campaigns that Southern critics of the 1909 (John D.) Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease accused the philanthropist of planning to enter shoe manufacturing. These critics were overlooking the drop in the rate of infection once children reached the "shoe age" of fourteen. And during Henry Ford's unsuccessful attempt to grow rubber in the Brazilian Amazon, the seringueiros (rubber gatherers) balked at the company doctor's campaign to combat hookworm by replacing their sandals with shoes.¹¹ 

There are other risks in modern life. Ubiquitous rusty nails can transmit tetanus. Even the original habitat of barefoot hiking, the woodlands of the northeastern United States, are infested by deer ticks bearing Lyme disease. Urban environments present risks as well. In the 1950s, physicians at the University of Hong Kong found the feet of the city's unshod fishermen and -women more mobile and structurally far healthier than those of a group of their shoe-wearing patients. Impressed as they were with the fishers' ability to grasp lines and nets with their toes, they also found in their keratinized soles "many minor lacerations due to traumata" and observed that striking stones and other objects on the ground had produced toenails that were "thick, cornified, and short with uneven and jagged edges." Footwear, then, may not correct but it can protect. Each modification of the environment increases the pace of the technological treadmill. Once we have stepped on it, we have stepped into footwear.¹² 

The simplest solution is the sandal: open footwear, secured by leather, fiber, or other material or, especially in India, grasped by a know between the first and second toes. Sandals may have appeared independently in widely different societies, or they may have been diffused and elaborated during the thousands of years of migrations by which the earth was peopled. One of the first depictions of sandals, on a five-thousand-year-old Egyptian palette, is of the barefoot King Narmer followed by a servant bearing a pair of them. The Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty (1567-1304 B.C.) wore sandals of leather and of woven palm-leaf strips little different in appearance from some of today's beachwear. By the end of this period, there was a hieroglyph for sandal, a long oval with an inscribed, upside-down V representing the thong, that would be universally recognizable today. We know more about sandals and shoes than about most other items of apparel from prehistory through modern times. Many of the plant fibers used to make the sandals of desert peoples were unappealing to insects, while tannin has prevented the biodegradation of leather deposited in bogs and even in the remains of the Titanic on the North Atlantic seafloor.¹³ 

Today sandals evoke primitive simplicity and a return to the natural. And they do affect our feet far less than closed shoes. They may be the most gender-neutral footwear of all, removed from the swagger of boots and the swaying walk of high-heeled shoes--even though recent medical research has suggested that the latter do not have nearly the radical effects on posture that laypeople and professionals alike had supposed. But sandals, while denoting naturalness, are far from simple. They have inspired not only elaborate techniques of manufacture but unexpected changes both in the feet and in the act of walking.¹⁴ 

One of the first memorable descriptions of these differences occurs in Herman Melville's Typee (1846): the toes of the Marquesas Islanders are "like the radiating lines of the mariner's compass, pointed to every quarter of the horizon." Steele F. Stewart, an orthopedist who studied barefoot peoples around the world a century after Melville's voyage to the South Seas, underscored the differences between these and shoe-wearing nations. The fourth and fifth toes have a prehensile curl toward the midline of the foot, and barefoot peoples grasp things with their toes. Their normal gait is smooth and restfull, a rolling motion beginning on the heel, continuing with the outer edge of the foot, and ending with the ball of the foot and the toes, which extend and contract as the foot makes contact, helping give a final push while walking. While Stewart did not believe that sandals interfered with the foot--at least, not if they were cut to the foot's natural shape--later studies suggest that even the simplest footwear starts to rearrange the bones of those who habitually use it. A team of Japanese medical researchers compared the feet of barefoot East Javanese, sandal-wearing Filipinas, and shoe-wearing Japanese, and discovered that the second were in some ways closer to the third than to the first. In the Filipinas, the ratio of foot breadth to foot length in proportion to their body mass was similar to that of (shod) Japanese women. Sandals also interfere with the roll that Stewart observed. And while they do not deform the small toes as most closed shoes do and preserve and even develop the toes' natural gripping abilities, thong sandals do increase the separation between the big and second toes of children who grow up wearing them. Japanese authorities, it is said, were able to distinguish assimilated Koreans from ethnic Japanese during World War II by inspecting their bare feet, as Koreans generally did not wear zori. On the other hand, expatriate Westerners are sometimes bemused to find their children growing up with such a gap. Those who take to zori later find the adjustment less natural. A young American teacher who came to Hawaii in the 1960s, Victoria Nelson, took months to develop the necessary "zori callus" between her toes, alternating several pairs so that the blister, whose location varied from pair to pair, had time to heal.¹⁵ 

To judge from extensive remains that have been found, early sandal technology makes much of today's mass-market footwear appear crude, no matter how elaborate the machinery that produces it. Armed with a new carbon dating method, accelerator mass spectrometry, which spares all but a tiny sample of ancient textiles, archaeologists have been discovering that complex and beautifully produced sandals were older than they had thought. Some sagebrush-bark shoes from Oregon turn out to be nine thousand years old, and various remains from a single cave in Missouri have been dated as between eight hundred and eight thousand years old. The earliest was a padded sandal of plant fiber with a pointed toe, a sling-back formed from twisted lengthwise elements, and a cord zigzagging through loops across the foot, tied down at the ankle. (Some sandals were made from Eryngium yuccifolium, or rattlesnake master, considered an antidote to snake venom.) From the Anasazi people of the desert Southwest, the Utah Museum of Natural History has hundreds of sandals made from yucca leaves and cordage, dating from seven hundred to two thousand years ago, and also exhibiting an impressive variety of forms, weaves, and tying systems that are surprisingly like the technology of today's open footwear.¹⁶ 

Impressive as these sandal collections are by today's standards, they are crude compared to the examples in another noted collection from the Southwest, 188 sandals from about fourteen hundred years ago, collected and first analyzed by the early-twentieth-century archaeologists Ann and Earl Morris at a site in northeastern Arizona that had been occupied by ancestors of today's Pueblo peoples. The Puebloans' descendants had turned to leather moccasins by the time of the Spanish conquest of the sixteenth century, but whatever the reasons, more sophisticated workmanship was certainly not among them. The examples in the Morris collection are unique and nearly flawless; learning to make them must have required careful observation of master weavers. While the Puebloans' agriculture, houses, and pottery were unremarkable, the complexity of the sandals' construction startled the archaeologists who rediscovered them in the 1990s. One of the investigators, Kelly Ann Hays-Gilpin, has identified at least twenty-six textile techniques used to make them, and a graduate student of another investigator prepared a master's thesis on the toe area of the sandals alone. The investigators believe the variety and complexity of the geometric patterns, more elaborate than the designs of any of today's footwear, were associated with communities, families, and individuals, their raised patterned soles leaving distinctive footprints to be read by friend and foe. People were living together in larger units, and the decorations may have helped to assert or maintain the identities of groups. But the sandals were functionally as well as symbolically ingenious. They had double-warp toes (with twice as many lengthwise fibers) for extra protection. Twill twining was used under the toes and the ball of the foot for a flexibility matched by few sandals today. Raised sole designs under the ball of the foot also improved the sandals' grip on stony or wet surfaces. The depth of their treads, rounded and patterned heals, ridges oriented in multiple directions, edges pointing outward to expel water, all meet the latest specifications for rubber safety footwear published by the American Society for Testing and Materials. The hide moccasins that replaced the sandals by Columbus's time were functionally and aesthetically more primitive than the earlier footgear. New materials may have unintentionally broken the transmission of refined and beautiful techniques centuries before the age of plastics.¹⁷ 

Steele Stewart wrote of "pan-Pacific" sandals worn for protection of the sole by the inhabitants of the volcanic cordilleras of Central and South America and of the volcanic Pacific islands whose shores are lined with sharp coral. Japan did not have the same rough terrain as other Pacific islands, but it did develop footwear well suited to a climate in which hot, humid summers alternated with cold, snowy winters. Japan is a densely populated country, with much of its land unsuitable for agriculture, and its people have had to use its limited supplies of food, timber, and other resources efficiently.¹⁸ 

Traditional Japanese footwear suited this environment admirably. It also responded to religious and cultural influences. In the sixth century, under the influence of Buddhist teachings against animal slaughter, wooden clogs called geta replaced leather shoes and boots outdoors. (Even now, many leather workers are descendants of the former pariah caste of burakamin, to whom this trade was reserved.) Geta, unlike Western clogs, are flat platforms supported by two transverse blocks between two and four inches high placed far enough back so that the front end can tip forward. They were more elegant versions of the wooden planks fastened by rice straw straps that rice paddy workers had already been using for hundreds of years. Two cloth strips forming a V are fastened at the sides toward the rear of the geta and meet between the first and second toes. Geta raise the wearer above mud and puddles, originally protecting the hem of the kimono, the universal outer garment of men and women alike. Sizes were standard for men and women, and even left and right geta were interchangeable, as the forward point of the V was in the center of each platform, not toward the body's center where the toes would naturally lie. Men's zori and geta were (and are) square, while women's had rounded corners. While some women's geta were luxuriously fitted with sole coverings of plaited rushes and rich fabric thongs, male counterparts could be so similar to one another in size and appearance that drunken dinner guests often walked off with the wrong pair. The best geta were carved from a single block of pawlonia wood, sometimes covered with tatami (bamboo) insoles; others were assembled with tongues and grooves. Far from declining with industrialization, geta became affordable for most poor Japanese with nineteenth-century machine production. But artisanal techniques survived. Well into the twentieth century, craft shop owners traveled deep into Japan's mountain forests to buy whole pawlonia trees for the best-quality geta.¹⁹ 

Other footwear needed no quest for rare materials; it recycled common ones. The original Japanese sandals, waraji, made of rice straw, appeared even earlier than geta, about two thousand years ago, as rice was becoming a staple of the Japanese diet. Like their yucca counterparts in the New World, they were one of history's most stunningly economical items of costume. Rice straw, a waste product of food production, became both a practical and a religious item. Shinto shrines have sacred straw ropes. Straw was the material of the roofs and mats of traditional houses, raincoats, and rain hats. Woven straw matting, bound with straw rope, secured food products in transit. And the same renewable straw was woven into waraji sandals with a twisted straw cord passing through loops at either side of the foot and heel and secured at the ankle. (An immense straw waraji, supported by more than twenty bearers, was recently dedicated to Tokyo's Sensoji temple, as an embodiment of the protection of the nation.) In the ninth century, a new kind of straw sandal was introduced, the zori, following the V pattern of geta. Rush, bamboo sheaths, and other economical materials were often used instead of straw. While waraji remained country work footwear, zori ultimately were produced with many variations of design and workmanship, including luxurious white brocaded silk wedding models and others with double rice-straw soles presented by the fiancé's family to the bride-to-be on their betrothal.²⁰ 

Straw sandals, along with geta, formed part of an economical and hygienic way of life that ultimately helped set the stage for Japan's economic rise and world cultural influence in the Meiji era. Easily removable footwear have always been preferred in societies living at mat level rather than elevated in chairs. While part of the floor of country houses was bare earth and considered an extension of the outdoors, sandals and clogs were left at the edge of the raised wooden platform that marked a family's living space. Even when zori were used as house slippers, they were not allowed to touch the sensitive surfaces of tatami mats. Tabi, mittenlike socks with separate room for the big toes, were always worn with sandals outdoors, and sometimes with geta. (Some Romans wore a similar woolen or leather foot covering--called a soccus, whence the English word sock--with a leather counterpart of the zori.) Untainted by the dirt of the street, tabi were ideal for indoor wear. After the introduction of indoor plumbing, users of bathrooms stepped into special zori to protect the feet (and living areas) from contamination, a custom that still prevails. The design of the sandals and clogs permitted people to change pairs rapidly without touching the footwear. So strong was this custom that, according to tradition--or perhaps it is a Japanese urban legend--when the first trains opened service in Japan in the late nineteenth century, travelers left their sandals on the platform before boarding and were surprised to find them gone when they returned.²¹ 

Luxurious or simple, geta and zori were hygienic, and not just because they were left outside. Climate as well as belief long inhibited the development of closed leather shoes in Japan. Just as heat and humidity fostered the open-plan post-and-beam Japanese house with its sliding partitions, they encourages open footwear. Leather shoes rot easily, and they also trap warmth and moisture. Even all-leather sandals may fall apart in the humid Pacific, as Victoria Nelson discovered when she moved from northern California to Hawaii. As closed leather shoes became more common in Japan after World War II, dermatologists reported a surge in athlete's foot, from 31 percent of all fungal infections in 1945 to 76.8 percent in 1955, according to one study. In one factory, nearly three-quarters of workers wearing closed shoes had athlete's foot, while only a quarter of those with sandals and slippers suffered from it.²² 

Closed shoes also reshaped the feet of Japanese in the postwar ear, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, when the wearing of geta and zori with tabi declined even more sharply than in the immediate postwar years. Hallux valgus, the often painful inward deformation of the big toe, was unknown in early Japan, though it has occurred among other barefoot peoples. There were no signs of it in footprints from Japan's Jomon period (a time usually defined as from 10,000 or 6000 B.C. to about 300 B.C.) that were discovered in the north of the island of Kyushu. Two orthopedists at Kyorin University in Tokyo reported that they never had to perform surgery for hallux valgus until after 1972; then they saw eighty-five patients in less than ten years at the university orthopedic clinic. Only after children were allowed to wear fashionable shoes, beginning at age fourteen, did signs of hallux valgus appear.²³ 

While zori helped protect the foot from infection and kept it closer to its natural shape than closed shoes do, they also affected how the Japanese walked. Of course, traditional Japanese differed in their walking styles even as people of all nations do today. Edward S. Morse, an American zoology professor who came to Japan in 1877, observed that the geta in a household closet displayed "the same idiosyncrasies of walking as with us,--some were down at the heel, others were worn at the side." But footwear still influenced gait.

The centered thong may have encouraged the pigeon-toed gait that foreign visitors noticed among Japanese women; kimonos, apparently shapeless when laid out but worn tightly on the body, also affected women's walking style. When the hourglass figure, with its full bosom and hips, began to influence Japanese fashion in the 1890s, women needed walking lessons to use the new foreign shoes. A satirical Japanese cartoon of the time shows one such group with the caption: "Follow me, ladies. Feet pointed straight ahead and chest out. Good! Now smile."²⁴ 

For men, the influence of zori and Western shoes has taken a different course. In the Meiji era (1867-1912), when Japanese offices came under Western influence, male garb was much more strongly influenced by European and American fashions than women's clothing was. Shoes went along with Western hats and coats, inconvenient as it was to remove and replace them. But boys as well as girls continued to wear clogs and sandals as they grew up; Japanese schools still require this style of footwear. The results fascinated nineteenth-century Western visitors. One of them, the American Alice Mabel Bacon, observed that geta worn from an early age strengthened young children's feet, so that those who grew up to be artisans were able to grasp work with them: "Each toe knows its work and does it, and they are not reduced to the dull uniformity of motion that characterizes the toes of a leather-shod nation."²⁵ 

The usual Japanese description of the difference between Japanese and Western mail walking used the contrasting metaphors of "piston" and "swing." At least one Japanese academic who has studied gait, Michiyoshi Ae, even detected a different sound made by the walk of an American woman studying in Japan, a sharper "Ka-Ka-Ka" as opposed to the dragging pattern of the Japanese ("Klan-Klan-Klan"). Growing up wearing zori appears to be at least partly responsible for the Japanese style. A Japanese graduate student at Western Michigan University, Ko Tada, used electrical measurements of muscle contraction, videotape, and force platforms to compare the walking of ten other students, five Americans and five Japanese who had been born in Japan and grew up there. The gaits were measured both when the subjects were barefoot and when they were wearing flip-flop sandals, contemporary versions of the zori. Tada found that Japanese and American young men have different, unconscious techniques for walking in flip-flops. Americans, unaccustomed to them, tend to grip them more firmly and to insert the foot farther into them, keeping a smaller angle between foot and sandal. The American walk coordinates the motion of ankle and knee to keep the center of gravity vertically steady during motion, promoting forward acceleration into the next step. The Japanese subjects dragged the heels of the sandals as they walked. Both barefoot and with flip-flops, the Japanese landed not with the heel-strike characteristic of the American subjects but with the forefoot or flat-footed, a technique that does not absorb the shock as effectively. (Ashinaka, half-footed sandals worn by medieval Japanese soldiers in wartime, saved weight by eliminating the heel altogether.) The risk of injury leads in turn to shorter strides that reduce the braking force. The Japanese stride, even barefoot, restrains the full motion of the thigh, a muscular pattern that Tada and her thesis supervisor, Mary Dawson, believe originated in the need to keep the sandal from flying off the foot like a projectile as it advances. The Japanese also tend to lean forward as they walk with rounded shoulders, while Americans have a straighter carriage, which Tada attributed to "a long history of wearing shoes with flexible soles."²⁶ 

Ko Tada cites studies suggesting that neuromuscular patterns fixed in childhood shape not only the mature walking gait but also the style of running and jumping. Childhood footwear thus can ultimately shape sports performance. Tada notes that holders of Japanese running records, including one finalist in the 1992 Olympic Games, are athletes who developed the swing rather than the piston walk. Otherwise Japan has comparatively few world-class runners.

Of course, as Tada recognizes, other biological and cultural differences besides footwear might affect gait, and her work is only a beginning. But anecdotal evidence from Japanese and Western sources tends to support her findings. The son of the Japanese sports scientist Michiyoshi Ae spent his first years in the United States and was not given zori or geta to wear. (He was not even allowed to ride a tricycle, as the pedaling position develops a muscle on the front of the leg associated with the piston walk.) By the first grade he was walking with the Western swing style. As he grew, he retained this stride even when wearing geta. His sister also learned to walk in the Western manner. On the other hand, some Japanese-American children who grow up in the United States wearing traditional Japanese footwear develop the piston walk. What we wear evidently helps determine how we move.²⁷ 

More than a hundred years after the opening of Japan to the West, then, the Japanese have a dual system of footwear: traditional thong sandals for children, closed shoes for adults. Each type of footwear has positive and negative consequences for health and athletic performance. But just as the Japanese were turning gradually but decisively to Western-style shoes for adults in the postwar years, the zori was finding its way around the globe. It was becoming the first world shoe.

As they migrated across the Pacific in the later nineteenth century, Japanese men and women brought their national footwear with them. Even an early Japanese Christian minister wore burlap sandals. The simplicity of materials--wood and fiber--meant that immigrants could fashion their own geta, zori, and waraji in nearly any warm climate. And they did. Before World War II, Japanese working on the sugar and pineapple plantations of Hawai wore geta, if not every day, then for walking in damp fields or doing laundry in concrete-floored plantation washhouses. There were also lacquered dress geta for dancing. While the decline of rice farming cur off the straw for sandals, the saltwater marshes of Hawaii abounded in a bulrush like the rush that rural Japanese used for weaving tatami mats and footwear. A few Japanese-American artisans continue the craft to this day.²⁸ 

The manufacture of thong sandals on American soil appears to have begun in Hawaii during World War II. The firm of Scott Hawaii, established in 1932, had made rubber plantation boots for local workers. During the war, shortages of raw materials led to a shift to rubber sandals--it is not clear how many of these were zori style--and other open footwear. These also proved popular among sailors of the U.S. Navy on their way to the Pacific theater. On the hot steel decks of warships in tropical climates, rubber sandals were superior to government-issue footwear. In submarines they were a must. Indeed, even during the Vietnam War, shipboard American officers and men arranged to buy locally produced flip-flops.²⁹ 

In Asia, war also helped spread Japanese footwear. Like their American counterparts, Japanese soldiers often found original-issue equipment unsuitable for local conditions. Once more, the technique of making straw goods proved its versatility. In a photograph from the 1937-38 China campaign, a group of Japanese infantrymen sit together on a straw-covered ground, looping cords of straw through their big toes as a first step in making waraji, and surrounded by well-made finished pairs. But straw was not the only material Japanese soldiers used. In Southeast Asia, they also began to cut up worn-out tires that they made into zori. During the battles for Malaya in 1941, thousands of British troops died in prisoner-of-war camps, prevented from escaping by boot-inflicted foot ailments, while Japanese troops were able to move through the jungle with what seemed eerie silence.³⁰ 

The crucial time for the worldwide spread of the zori was the decade after the war. The details are not clear, but it is likely that rubber footwear was one of the early products of a recovering Japan. Japan no longer controlled the rubber plantations of Malaya, but the plantations and other Asian rubber producers still needed a market for their product. The manufacture of closed leather or even plastic shoes requires dozens of specialized machines; thong sandals need only a few. Extremely light, they can be shipped without individual boxes. Natural, synthetic, or recycled rubber can be used with fillers and blowing agents to create different grades and densities. The better models do require individual molds, but cheap sandals can be die-cut by semiskilled workers from a large sheet with tread patterns embossed on either side. For the most common thong sandals, the soles are drilled with a narrower hole at the top and wider ones at the bottom, and the molded plastic thongs are inserted into the three holes with large tools resembling crochet hooks.³¹ 

Best of all, the new zori could be made of materials other than rubber. A growing number of synthetic polymers became available to the industry: synthetic rubber, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and ethyl vinyl acetate (EVA). Where the straw zori and waraji had represented self-sufficient frugality and use of agricultural waste, these nonrenewable materials symbolized the cosmopolitan and technologically advanced postwar Japanese economy.

Rubber and plastic zori were not limited to Japan. In fact, as interest in closed footwear grew after the war, the Japanese considered them neither traditional nor Western. In the memory of one Japanese-American scholar who was a young man in the 1950s, it was Harry Belafonte who popularized rubber sandals simply by walking down the main street of Kyoto wearing them during a tour in the middle of the decade. Belafonte's style impressed crowds and began a national fad. But the new zori was more than a Japanese event. It was a technological reincarnation of what Steele Stewart, as we have seen, described as the pan-Pacific fiber sandal.³² 

In the United States, rubber sandals began to appear in California in the early fifties. Allan Seymour, a surfing entrepreneur and historian of the sport, recalls seeing the first cheap models in Laguna Beach, where he was growing up, worn by soldiers returning from the Korean War. Bins of them at 29 cents a pair appeared outside liquor stores and markets in Laguna; they became wildly popular on the beaches, and the standard attire for surfers. They were badly made. The straps often broke or "blew out"--the phrase is an unconscious reminder of the role of automobile tires in the early history of rubber sandals. They lasted for a month of surfing, and broken and discarded sandals littered the beach at low tide, but they were priced as disposables. In northern California the Beats are said to have adopted zori as part of the culture of Zen. By the early 1960s rubber sandals had made their way down the coast to northern Mexico, and were selling under the trade name Havaiana (Hawaiians) in Brazil. In Mexico and South America, they were originally considered plebeian rather than chic. Mexico City residents disdained them; in Brazil, they inspired the phrase pé de chinelo--literally "slipper foot"--for the downtrodden. The Brazilian government included them in its working-class price index, along with milk, bread, and beans.³³ 

All the while, zori were spreading slowly to the American heartland as an exotic novelty. A small advertisement in the May 1958 issue of House Beautiful presented sandals in men's, women's, and children's sized "[f]rom an Oriental Teahouse . . . For Beach, Pool, Shower or Street." The text lauded the sponge-rubber product as the "[n]ewest style-rage inspired by the mystic East and imported direct from Japan--yet practical and modern as Miami. Strong, sturdy, lightweight, comfortable, long wearing . . . skid-proof, silent," and only $1.95 postpaid. Six years later, they were no longer a novelty. Another advertiser was offering women's Japanese-made "Dress Zori Sandals" with leather insoles and straps for $2.95.³⁴ 

In Australia, too, postwar beach (if not bohemian) culture created a ready market. Australia's giant tire manufacturer Dunlop was already beginning to make sandals in 1954, using inflating rubber with air bubbles in molds and letting it shrink to size in steam rooms. The real boom started with the arrival of the Japanese swimming team at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, wearing rubber zori as part of their uniform. By 1957, the David Jones department store in Sydney was selling them to delighted customers from a bin at the door. Soon local makers were cutting them out of sponge rubber sheets, three pairs at a time. Even then, demand seemed insatiable. A Dunlop executive ordered 300,000 cut-rate pairs on a single short trip in 1959. But while in largely chillier North America they remained beach accessories, in Australia they became everyday mass footwear. Dunlop alone sold a pair for every man, woman, and child in Australia. A local joke was that you could tell the bride at an Australian wedding because she was the one wearing new thongs. By the late 1980s the sandals were not so funny, and certainly not chic. One newspaper critic, Leo Schofield, called them "the national symbol of bad taste," on a level with furry toilet seat covers, and "[t]he ugliest and least practical kind of footwear. Also dangerous." In 1995 the director of the Melbourne School of Fashion, Miriam Cuna, declared them "vulgar" and "awful." David Jones had dropped them, and even a spokeswoman for Kmart told a journalist, "We don't advertise them." But they remained popular. In 1995, a single large distributor imported 2.5 million pairs of high-fashion models annually, and Kmart itself sold 240,000 pairs in the state of Victoria alone.³⁵ 

Meanwhile, another style of sandal was making news. The North Vietnamese army and Vietcong, perhaps taking a leaf from the Japanese army's book, made their own sandals from rubber tires. The soles had multiple slits for straps--the design resembled the sandals of the Romans--and, according to an American physical anthropologist who examined recovered specimens later, could last for years. Ho Chi Minh, who had worn white sandals during the independence movement against the French, now himself set an even more austere example by keeping the same pair of rubber-tire sandals for years, refusing to replace them. But this austerity lost its prestige after victory. The civil servants of Ho Chi Minh City were under orders to shed their sandals for closed shoes at work as a symbol of their country's new economic realism and aspirations.³⁶ 

In Hawaii during the 1960s, zori showed how the simplest of technologies could evolve into a complex system of ethnic symbols. The first civilian sandals produced by Scott Hawaii after the war had crossed straps over the instep, but zori emerged as favorites by the early 1950s. Steve Scott, a son of the founders of Scott Hawaii, recalls his family making the early models from molded pieces of EVA from Japan, fitting them with leather insoles and thongs. By the time Victoria Nelson arrived in the late 1960s, Japanese students at the University of Hawaii wore lauhala, a local version of the classic zori with a bottom made from native plant leaves and a velvet thong, also known as Jap slaps. Haole (mainland European-American) surfers wore thick black rubber zori with a racing stripe down the side and a thong of parachute fabric. For the fashionable there were "cork-soled plastic-thonged steamboats [presumably local slang for bulky footwear] made in Taiwan or Brazil" and the "Hollywood forties-style wedgie with bejewelled thong favored by Dragon Lady types." Some had holes running through them for draining water; others had no thongs at all but came with a preparation for sticking them directly to the wearer's sole. Stores served locals with seemingly unending varieties to match the tacit dress codes. If Hawaii was a cradle of multiculturalism, zori were its baby shoes. And even today, zori are as ubiquitous in Hawaii as in Australia. Their secret, according to Steve Scott, is the variety of materials--including EVA soles injection-molded with a new technique borrowed from the athletic shoe industry--that keep production costs low and styles and colors easy to change.³⁷ 

The zori did not remain confined to the Pacific Rim, though many of the world's sandals are still made there. It became one of humanity's first universal manufactured goods, much more so than the branded soft drinks and cartoon-character merchandise that in many places could be bought only by the relatively well off. During Nelson's tropical idyll of the 1960s, Mitsubishi and other giant Japanese concerns took over the small factories of Kobe, where many zori were made, and decided to shift production to Taiwan, where costs were lower. Taiwanese manufacturers had experience in producing synthetic goods like plastic tablecloths, and it was not hard to convert their machinery to the production of footwear uppers. Existing technology, some of it located in duck huts and hog houses, needed mainly the spread of new techniques. The Japanese trading company inspectors, as one of them later put it in an interview, "moved around like bees spreading pollen among separated manufacturers so that innovations in manufacturing spread quickly." At the same time, the Republic of China (Taiwan) was beginning a drive to expand its export industries because it expected American aid to be phased out. Despite or because of the presence of the Japanese giants and the skills they brought, opportunities opened for smaller companies. Especially for the supply of PVC, which was winning favor over rubber (because of the latter's high vulcanization cost), Taiwan had an excellent base: the plastic industry had burgeoned from only two factories in 1948 to more than four hundred in 1966. Sandal and shoe plants followed. (Zori probably were not the only sandal forms made but almost certainly were the most common.) From 1969 to 1988, the number of registered footwear firms increased from 75 to a peak of 1,245. Even after a decline in production in the 1990s as cheaper labor costs in mainland China, India, and elsewhere led to a shift in production, Taiwan remains a major center of capital, design, machinery, and supplies.³⁸ 

A 1982 publication of the International Labour Organization in Geneva provides a clue to the spread of sandal manufacture. While zori manufacture of course requires far more capital than artisanal leather sandal making, it can be done efficiently in a relatively small shop. The report lists thirty-one stages of closed-footwear making and only two of the injection molding of flip-flop sandals. A large shoe manufacturer can gain an advantage from adding additional equipment and workers at many steps. It pays to be big. The maker of PVC-injected sandals needs no skilled employee, only two or three operators and a packer. There is no equipment that would reduce costs substantially for high-volume plants. Because opportunities for automation were so limited, Taiwan government statistics from 1976 showed that in the plastic footwear industry, the few very large factories of a thousand or more employees actually added only two-thirds the value per employee that the many plants with under thirty employees added.³⁹ 

With a global market in machines and variety of materials, sandal production could move wherever there was a market and capital. For international giants like the Canada-based, originally Czech manufacturer Bata, the largely barefoot parts of the developing world were a challenge to promote the "shoe-wearing habit." Thong sandals, at an international price of 30 to 40 cents, cost less than an unskilled worker's daily wage, and even the higher-quality models could sell at retail for only 65 cents. In Kenya, for example, Bata was able to build its sales from 972,000 pairs in 1964 to two million in 1968. (Even in 1997, many villagers in Kenya were still barefoot, risking threadworm infection transmitted in outhouses; a resourceful Japanese community development specialist was teaching rural women to make straw zori.) But there was room for many local entrepreneurs, too. Because plastic zori wear out in as little as three months and are not readily repairable, the market is steady. Urbanization makes footwear increasingly necessary. There is evidence that a number of prominent families in developing countries formed at least part of their capital with zori factories. And sandal making can become big business indeed; in less than forty years the Brazilian company Alpargatas, once a manufacturer of rope-soled canvas moccasins, has sold two billion pairs of its Havaianas brand flip-flops. Sales are now at 125 million pairs a year, and Alpargatas is producing high-fashion lines for sale at luxury outlets overseas.⁴⁰ 

Sandals have built not only wealth but nations. In the early 1980s, overseas Eritreans presented the Eritrean Popular Liberation Front (EPLF) with an Italian PVC injection molding machine that could produce a hundred pairs of black (for camouflage) plastic sandals per hour. The rebels imported base granules of PVC but supplemented it by recycling the worn-out footwear of their troops. Just as family companies later diversified from sandals into higher-margin activities, the EPLF later was able to open pharmaceutical factories using foreign feedstocks to make 40 percent of the basic drugs Eritrea needs. (EPLF sandals had straps across the foot rather than thongs.)⁴¹ 

The zori sandal appears to be wonderfully universal, improving the health of people in the developing world yet adaptable to the high fashion of the West. The president if Alpargatas calls his Havaianas "the most democratic product made in Brazil. The guy who owns a mansion wears Havaianas and the guy that cleans his swimming pool wears them, too." Queen Silvia of Sweden delighted her hosts on a recent state visit by wearing the company's Havaianas Brazil model, with its little national flag. In the United States, a leading magazine for young women urges its readers to "let the air breeze between your toes--and . . . show off your sexy feet." The illustrated sandals closest in appearance to the original Japanese zori are made by Calvin Klein of wood with leather thongs and cost $245. They probably are not much more or less comfortable than many of their discount-store plastic counterparts.⁴² 

In their global reach, though, sandals unfortunately represent more than affluence and glamour. As the footwear of the world's poor, they also stand for the replacement of the frugal environmental ethic of early Japan with a worldwide throwaway society. Occasionally old flip-flops are recycled; in fact, an enterprising Liberian artisan, Saarenald T. S. Yaawaisan, has fashioned entire working toy helicopters, blade tips and all, from a rainbow of discarded sandals. The throwaway society still has a way of prevailing, even in Monrovia, where Yaawaisan ultimately had to buy brand-new sandals from a local factory to meet growing demand for his delightful playthings. Unfortunately, it is probably more usual to burn sandals with other refuse, potentially generating dangerous dioxin. And dumping them may not be much better for wildlife. It is not only a few surfers who abandon broken sandals on the beach today. Discarded plastic footwear is a major component of the world's flotsam, washing up in surprising places. In 1996 the Australian Cocos and Keeling Islands, home to a number of endangered species, were assaulted by hundreds of thousands of discarded flip-flop sandals, rejects of Indonesian manufacturers. After touring the islands, an Australian member of parliament, Julian McGauran, declared: "The beaches are the home of the green sea turtle and the blue rubber thong. One of them has to go.⁴³ 

Meanwhile, on other sands, thousands of miles away along the Arabian Sea in the Indian state of Gujarat, 35,000 men from remote villages were earning as little as $1.50 a day for breaking up the world's rusty, unwanted ships, riddled with asbestos and toxic chemicals. The men wore only plastic sandals on their feet. In New York harbor, Brazilian merchant seamen embark on the North Atlantic wearing shorts and sandals. In Calcutta, children make flip-flops with scissors nearly the length of their arms. In Jakarta, Indonesia, shacks are build over a surface of old rubber sandals retrieved from refuse piles. And in formerly prosperous developing countries, the plastic sandal is a harbinger of the return of bad times; in Iraq in 1998, a former computer science student was selling them in a marketplace.⁴⁴ 

The zori's universality has a double meaning. To billions of people it is a foothold on an arduous climb to sharing the prosperity of the developed nations. But it is an insecure foothold, and where parasites or other natural hazards are not serious issues, it may not be an improvement over the pleasure of walking the earth on broad, bare feet. But it is too late to return. The pioneer surfer Allan Seymour put it aptly: "We called them go-aheads, because you can't walk backward in them.⁴⁵ 

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