Editor’s Note: Fit Check is a series about Bay Area fashion and personal expression. Find other installments here.
Enrobed in rich brown and deep green, Gengo Akiba takes a few patient moments to neatly tuck the fabric of his kimono around his crossed legs. Mid-morning sunlight diffuses through the latticed windows of the zendo — a building dedicated to meditation — and Akiba closes his eyes in its soft glow.
The 81-year-old abbot of the Kojin-an Oakland Zen Center is exactly who you might picture when you imagine an elderly Japanese priest: shaved head, small stature and the lighthearted chuckle of a person who’s made peace with the transient nature of existence. His presence, scaffolded by sturdy, rounded shoulders and gently folded hands, is buoyant and powerful all at once.
And he’s also got thoughts on beauty, fashion and regional style. (Kei Matsuda, who has been coming to the temple for decades now, translated for Akiba in late December as the abbot sipped on a mug of green tea.)
“After spending a week in Japan, I get bored of the way people dress,” Akiba says.
A take even hotter than the genmaicha Akiba’s drinking, but more on that later.
Akiba folds himself into ceremonial linen and cotton every Sunday for a 40-minute meditation at the Oakland Zen Center, where he has served as the abbot for almost 30 years. When he lights incense and leads chants, his sumptuous robes float around him. Lengthy kimono sleeves rustle as he laughs and gesticulates about the temple’s feline residents during his morning speech.
“What I wear in the zendo is a formal attire for priests,” Akiba says. “And that definitely makes me more aware of my role as priest and sort of prepares me for performing that role.”
Historically, Buddhist priests have sewn their own robes from donated scraps of fabric. Akiba’s priest-wear are no rags, but they were gifted to him by friends, he says.
Over his brown kimono, Akiba drapes one shoulder and his torso with a kesa — a rectangular shawl stitched together carefully with smaller vertical and horizontal rectangles of fabric.
“The kesa is the part that’s most visible and perhaps the most important,” Akiba says. “The basic color is brown — that’s a very typical color for the kesa.”
While brown and black are common colors worn by priests to signify a renunciation of worldly desires and pleasures, Akiba’s kesa is the deep green of dried tea leaves. His status as a priest means he gets to choose what color he wears, he says. Around his neck is a rakusu, a rectangle of fabric that is a literal representation of Buddha’s robe.
Akiba’s clothes are beautiful, without a doubt. And yet Akiba isn’t very concerned about beauty.
“I don’t really look at that uniform every time like, ‘oh, this part is beautiful,’ or anything like that — that’s just what I wear,” he says.
But for Akiba, it’s possible to appreciate beauty in clothes, in nature and in people without clinging to it.
“Beauty has a function in rituals and for people performing or attending rituals,” he says, “That is important, but it shouldn’t be the focus of attachment.”
And that “contradiction between simplicity and opulence,” as Akiba puts it, plays out in what he wears, too.
His ceremony-wear — draping and buttery, but also earthy and muted — is sumptuous and plain all at once. It’s a tension befitting the spiritual multiplicity of Zen, which holds beauty and its transience all at once.
When Akiba is clearing crumbly piles of fall leaves from the yard or carrying groceries on a long walk home, he trades his robes for samue, a more casual kimono and pants set that’s traditionally worn by priests but has been adopted by non-religious folks in Japan too.
In the cold months of the year, he layers a Uniqlo down vest and a knit button-up shirt under the kimono top and tucks a blue knit beanie over his bald head.
In spite of how casual the samue is, there’s a pleasing throughline that joins Akiba’s workwear with his ceremonial robes, like the neat stitches that join the panels of linen on his rakusu. His workwear set echoes the rich brown of his robes and are also flawlessly proportional to his short stature. The false white collar that he wears under his abbot’s clothes also peeks out from under his samue, and another rakusu — this one blue — hangs from his neck.
When Akiba takes regular walks around his Oakland neighborhood in his samue and beanie, the Buddhist priest says he’s highly entertained by the parade of people and clothes he encounters.
“When I go to Tokyo and the train stations are full of people, there are men and women dressed very fashionably in different colors and different styles,” he says. “But they also look the same to me.”
While people in Japan are fairly dressy and formal, he says, Bay Area folks dress comfortably and casually: “And I think that actually is more revealing of who each person is.”
