Black

In Japan, black wasn't the color of funerals. White was.

Black in Japan meant dignity, formality, and mastery — the black belt in the martial arts isn't a Western metaphor. The shift toward funerary black arrived with the country's opening to the West. In other words: when a Western designer "gets it right" today by using black for mourning in Japan, they're getting it right by way of a convention their own culture exported a century and a half ago.

dignity, formality, mastery

Black is one of the four primary colors in Japanese tradition (alongside white, red, and blue). Black dye wasn't easy to obtain, so only rulers and high officials could afford it, which made it a high-status color: it was worn in the formal dress of the samurai, following a rank system inspired by Confucian thought.

Black communicates dignity, experience, and the depth that comes from long practice — the most recognizable example is the kuro obi, the black belt in the martial arts, where black represents the highest level of skill. With the opening to the West, white (which had been both the auspicious and the funerary color) became everyday wear, and black took over as the color of mourning: worn alone today, black signals grief.

• The oldest documented use of black was in tattoos: fishermen and hunters tattooed fish or prey onto themselves for protection from bad luck; later, black tattoos came to mark prisoners.
• Ohaguro: the practice of dyeing one's teeth black, considered beautiful and a sign of wealth and status. It was still practiced during the Meiji era (1868–1912).
• It's worn in Buddhist monks' robes and in formal montsuki.

imperial status and ambivalence

Same material logic as in Japan: black dye was expensive and technically difficult to produce, so wearing black was a privilege of the elite. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor in Chinese history, used black textiles for the imperial dragon robes that displayed his status.

Chinese black is ambivalent by design: it can be fortunate or unfortunate, and forms half of the universal balance through its association with darkness (yin/yang). It isn't a 'good' or 'bad' color — it's a pole, which is conceptually different from the Western reading, where black tends toward the negative or the elegant, but not toward 'a necessary half.'

mourning, authority, elegance

Black as a mourning color in the West has been tied to death and loss for centuries, and the practice is thought to go back to Roman times. It worked as a social signal: it told others that a person was in mourning.

The case that turned it into elaborate ritual: Queen Victoria mourned Prince Albert for 40 years, which inspired Victorian widows to wear black for one to two years after a husband's death. It's the same queen who, in 1840, had codified the white wedding dress: the two Western conventions we now treat as timeless both come from a single court, in the same century.