Ellis Amdur

Apprentices among craftsmen in Japan, even today are involved in a pretty rigid society, which involves cleaning up, taking care and serving. Sushi apprentices, for example, spend over a year merely preparing rice. European apprentices, at one time too, were veritable slaves. I cannot remember who it was, but one of the great American writers on Japan described a young sushi apprentice who refused to get the tattoos his masters had (this was a craftsman affectation, not just a yakuza thing) and they repetitively blackened his eyes for rejecting the "bond." (Tattoos separated you from society - forever - in a guild - he wasn't sure he wanted to do it.). He gave in, and the writer recalled seeing the two men tenderly washing the kid, his tats still raw, in the public bath.
In sumo stables, (sorry this one is crude, so close your eyes, delicate ones), there are some wrestlers too fat to wipe themselves after . . .so the most junior apprentice waits behind him - literally - while he does his business and cleans up afterwards. (I can imagine these kids praying - "Oh god, forget the grand championship. I don't care anymore. Just sign up someone else to the stable so I'm not junior anymore!"
Feudal was pretty bad - hakama folding would have been the least of it.
Anyway - Mary's specifically right. Once upon a time, taking off your hakama would mean taking off your pants in public - it wasn't a "practice uniform" (oh yeah, hence the wife thing I mentioned).

OTOH - I was at a koryu demo - Meiji shrine - and the elderly Araki-ryu teachers had just creakily taken off their hakama to change. My teacher nodded to the Japanese students to fold their hakama and they gave the deer in a headlight thing - they didn't know how. He was getting pretty ticked off, and moved forward to do it himself. (One should never "put" one's teacher in that position). I slid in front of him, and asked the old guys if I could fold the hakamas. They watched me like a hawk - and when I presented them back, done up right, one turned to the other - "He had the kata right, but hey, this gaijin knows how to behave too." I didn't feel degraded in the least - men who lived that long deserved a little bit extra respect.
On the other hand, if I'd ever made a move to fold my own Araki-ryu teacher's hakama, (or my 60 - eventually 80 year old - Buko-ryu teacher), they would have told me (one with a glare and the other with an expression of being put in an awkward place) to leave them alone and let them do it themselves.
All of which leads to one of the things I eventually loved most about Japan - that taught me the most - was the "case-by-case" nature of things. Sometimes it was right, sometimes it was so wrong - whatever it was. And bit by bit, it became natural and I developed a sensitivity to nuance.
Hence Takeda Sokaku having his bag carriers (Ueshiba being one) chasing after him as he scurried through the crowds in a train station, and Ueshiba later replicating this Daito-ryu training - and all the other trainings in sensitivity that the deshi had to do (the bath at the right temperature, etc.) - you learn something by this that cannot be learned any other way. Maybe you (the reader) do not care about it - maybe it is not worth it to you. Truly, however, such training is an absolute part of Japanese martial arts as they were - and maybe, to some degree still are. Because self-protection definitely meant knowing how to act within an incredibly labyrinthine social network, any mistake of which could lead to conflict. And this skill definitely transferred over to my career in threat assessment and crisis intervention.
(I developed a really powerful nikkyo once upon a time, and during an aikido dojo party, one of the older guys, really drunk, kept trying to grope my crotch. I kept telling him to stop, but he said he just had to see if I was as big there as the rest of me. (Ahem). After the third attempt, I put a nikkyo on him, and carefully, very carefully, applied increasing pressure until he yelped and begged me to stop. EVERYONE in the dojo was ticked off at me - he was drunk, they said, and meant no harm. I'm not here writing to say that the Japanese rule was to let somone squeeze you like a guernsey, but whatever I did was not "self-defense" in the context I lived in. In short, part of aiki seems to have been knowing how, when/where to apply it - if you had it.
So in conclusion, it is absolutely right to fold your teacher's hakama and so incredibly wrong to fold your teacher's hakama . . .
best
Ellis Amdur