Why does a samurai or yakko raise only the big toe when striking a mie?

This question notices something fine. When a mie is struck, the big toe of the planted foot curls sharply upward — and this is indeed a feature common to many kata.

Start with the most common explanation. A mie is not complete stillness. The actor appears fixed like a statue, but inside, the musculature of the whole body is drawn taut — not movement stopped, but the force that wants to move being held in. Stillness under pressure. That tension is what lets a mie hold the air of the house for several seconds, and the upturned toe is explained as making it visible at the body's farthest point: force filled to the toes and spilling over.

Here it becomes interesting, for another reading is transmitted alongside. Stroke the sole of a foot and the big toe bends back toward the shin while the other toes fan out — a response that appears normally only in newborn infants. Medicine calls it the Babinski response, and it fades by around the age of two. The shape of the aragoto toe is exactly this.

The sequence is worth fixing. The reflex was reported by the French neurologist Joseph Babinski in 1896, in a note said to run to only twenty-eight lines. Aragoto, by contrast, is held to have been created by Danjūrō I in 1673 — more than two centuries earlier. Before medicine had named it as a reflex peculiar to infants, the kabuki stage had already taken the shape into its art.

How to take the coincidence is a question of keeping fact and interpretation apart. That the reflex was reported in 1896 is a matter of record, and the beginning of aragoto is traditionally placed in 1673 (with some variation among accounts). That the kata reproduces the reflex is an interpretation: no record says an Edo actor studied an infant's foot and decided upon it. And yet, remembering that the aragoto hero is so often shaped as a childlike innocent charged with more-than-human power, the reading holds together well. Many details of kabuki kata are said to have worked before they were explained, with meaning supplied afterwards — and this is the exemplary case. The raised toe, it should be added, is said to be transmitted as an art of the Danjūrō house.