Where does the Japanese word “zubon” (trousers) come from?
The French “jupon” theory is well known but unproven, and some trace it to the sound word “zubon” instead.
Come to think of it, zubon (ズボン), the everyday Japanese word for trousers, has a curious ring to it. In English it would be “trousers” or “pants,” in French pantalon. It doesn’t resemble any foreign word at all. And yet it is written in katakana, just like a typical loanword. More people these days say pantsu instead, but in expressions like han-zubon (shorts) and zubon no suso (trouser cuffs), the word is still very much alive.
So where did zubon come from? Open a dictionary, and you may be surprised to find that it doesn’t give a clear answer.
The French theory is favored, but…
The theory cited by many Japanese dictionaries is that the word comes from the French jupon. The idea is that jupon was garbled into zubon. The two certainly sound alike.
This theory, however, has a big problem. A jupon is a petticoat, the underskirt women wear beneath a skirt. In shape, and in who wears it, it is nothing like trousers, which cover each leg separately.
The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten, Japan’s largest historical dictionary, gives French as the source of zubon but adds a note that it is “not clear why” jupon, meaning petticoat, “came to be used in its current sense.” One encyclopedia goes so far as to say there is no relationship between the two in meaning. When and why this theory spread is not well understood either.
The “legs slip right in” theory
The other theory is that the word comes from Japanese sound symbolism. In Japanese, zubon (often followed by to) describes something slipping out, fitting in, or dropping down, and it appears in comic fiction from the final years of the shogunate, the 1850s and 1860s.
The Japanese dictionary Kotoba no Izumi, published in 1912, records that the word zubon was coined at the end of the Edo period by a shogunate retainer named Ōkubo (大久保誠知), because when you put trousers on, your legs go in with a zubon—or so it is said. Your foot slides in with a whoosh, and that sensation became the garment’s name.
But this account, too, is recorded as hearsay (“it is said”), and there is no firm evidence for it. As things stand, neither the French theory nor the sound-word theory can claim the final word.
From the late-Edo “danbukuro” to the Meiji “zubon”
Although the word’s origin is unclear, we do know roughly when it came into use.
In the last years of the shogunate, as Japan adopted Western-style military units, baggy Western trousers began to be worn in Japan as well. At the time, these were also called danbukuro. The word originally meant a large bag and came to refer to roomy Western trousers. Zubon is said to have been used as a colloquial name for them from those final years of the shogunate.
In writing, the term zubon-tsuri (“trouser suspenders”) appears in Seiyō Ishokujū (Western Clothing, Food and Housing), a book from the end of the Edo period that Fukuzawa Yukichi wrote under another name. In the early Meiji era, zubon shows up in Kanagaki Robun’s Seiyō Dōchū Hizakurige, alongside chokki (vest), manteru (coat) and kutsu (shoes). Various kanji were used to write it, such as 洋袴 (“Western hakama”) and 股袴 (“crotch hakama”).
The words in that list, incidentally, have quite varied origins. Manteru comes from the Dutch mantel (cloak), and chokki is said to come from the Portuguese jaqueta. The vocabulary of Western clothing in the late Edo and Meiji periods was a lively mix of words from several different languages.
When the Conscription Ordinance was issued in 1873, Western-style military uniforms were established, and that in turn led to trousers being adopted for the uniforms of government officials and students. It is also said that Japanese men, who had long worn hakama (traditional pleated trousers), accepted trousers, which also cover each leg separately, without much resistance. And so, by the early Meiji era, the word zubon had become thoroughly at home in Japanese.
The mystery of its origin remains unsolved, yet the word itself has been in use for more than 150 years. Zubon is a slightly mysterious loanword—or perhaps a word that only looks like one.