Danbooru

Tag suggestion: Bandaged_torso

Posted under General

Nameless Contributor

Traditionally sarashi is worn around the midriff, not the chest. Our wiki also doesn't imply that the tag shouldn't be used for traditional sarashi, although in practice it's almost exclusively the modern bra form (though there are 287 posts in sarashi 1boy solo). Personally I would prefer a solution where sarashi is for both and sarashi_bra implies it.

If we want to keep them separate, what about bandaged_midriff? And maybe alias sarashi_(midriff) or sarashi_(male) for autocomplete.

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nonamethanks

This reminds me of the issue we had with hakama (topic #17229), where the danbooru usage didn't reflect real world usage and it caused a mess. I guess post #2685899 or post #2679327 is sarashi too.

I would support creating a sarashi bra tag, but I'm sure most active uploaders are used to sarashi meaning the bra version, so I can see them just not using the new tag for a few months if it's created. Someone would also have to garden all the current sarashi posts to move them to sarashi bra where adequate (and we also have budget sarashi).

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Admiral Pectoral

I agree with Nameless.
I did look at Sarashi while looking for an appropriate tag but the wiki didn’t mention anything (sometimes older wikis mention the original use).
I ended up only adding it to post #4604405.
With this example, we can see that both male and female characters can have it on the chest, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a female with it on the midriff too.

So for me I would suggest these two options:

  • Split up sarashi into midriff and chest versions and have them imply sarashi
  • Have it be inclusive to both
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Shinjidude

Not sure how to weigh in here, since I also looked for and didn't find bandaged torso fairly recently (in the context of a mummy wrap, such as post #4178497 which doesn't use sarashi at all), and came to the same conclusion as NNT here that we were just using sarashi synonymously with any sort of bandages around the torso.

Using the Japanese name here as we do instead of English kind of implies it should be used in an East Asian context (as we usually see it with samurai or other martial artists). Moreover like NNT also points out, we almost always see it as breast binding either for modesty or to mask the the fact that the wearer is female as opposed to the more historical wrap around the belly. That's more due to the nature of anime art and the fact that female characters are overwhelmingly common.

Interestingly, looking at Wikipedia, the English article makes no mention of a fighter's garment or protection but more for it's use by women to bind either their chest or pregnant belly while wearing kimono, (since traditionally the body is supposed to be "flat" when wearing one). The Japanese article places more emphasis on the fact that it's bleached fabric (which is where the Japanese word comes from), and moreover points out its use (as a fabric) in things we wouldn't use the term for like juban, fundoshi, and haramaki (which comes closest in our idea of a torso wrap here, though its specifically for the stomach as in what Admiral Pectoral is pointing out here and the modern form is a full garment made of sheets of cloth rather than a wrapped strip). The Japanese article doesn't mention wrapping at all actually. A Japanese dictionary lookup is even worse, only mentioning it as "bleached cloth", or "public humiliation as a punishment" as general entries, everything else having to do with specialized usages in Kabuki or other performance art.

I'm thinking the Danbooru and greater English-speaking Japanese enthusiast meaning of "sarashi" may be more English than Japanese. Knowing that, would it make sense to generalize it to simply bandaged_chest, bandaged_stomach and/or together as bandaged_torso? Would keeping sarashi but restricting it to just mean a "chest or body wrap for martial arts and east asian outfits" independent of other body wraps be of value? For the latter quite a bit of manual gardening would be involved.

I know I'm opening too many cans of worms here, but we've also got things like arm wrap vs bandaged arm which we appear to use mostly synonymously with each other, despite the wikis stating that the *_wrap tags the ones meant for non-medical usage. In practice very few bandaged_* usages appear to be medical in nature. Visually they are almost identical without context. Would it be worth merging these? Should we try keeping them separate and keeping bandaged_* only in the case of clear injury? That'd be another big and not particularly easy gardening job.

Perhaps for the case at hand we should simply have wrapped_chest and wrapped_stomach and clean up everything else? I'm not sure.

I do feel sarashi as we've used it, has value for say post #130993 due to the common known meaning in anime art, or post #2610645 as English speakers have used it in reference to Japanese garments. Bandaged arm might be (more) valuable in being able to distinguish posts like post #3249329 where there are clear injuries as opposed to the way we use bandaged leg for Megumin where it's worn basically just to look cool. To keep those specialized meanings might mean a lot of work though because what we have right now is a bit of a mess.

tldr: Our usage of sarashi seems to differ from how the word is used in Japanese. Our usage of the more generic bandaged_* and *_wrap are currently almost synonymous. Perhaps we should either generalize everything under *_wrap for uniformity (chest_wrap, and stomach_wrap in this case), or otherwise figure out a better way to distinguish, sort, and clean up related tags with very similar meanings.

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