Foot binding has never been practiced in Japan, and the Japanese footwear style evolved in in a very different manner to the Chinese style.

Japan took a lot of influence from Chinese court culture, including in fashion, but that was during the Tang Dynasty. Footbinding in Chinese history seems to date back to the Song Dynasty, with twelfth century references to the practice. So, by the time footbinding was a fashion in China, Japan had been turned inward for its fashions for a few hundred years.

The ladies of the Japanese Heian (794-1185) court wore shitauzu: "white silk substitutes for stockings fastened at the top with a drawstring." (p. 166, OKAGAMI, The Great Mirror: Fujiwara Michinaga (966-1027) and His Times by Helen Craig McCullough.) The average woman, of course, went barefoot, or wore straw sandals without socks.

However, by the fifteenth century, a new form of footwear had emerged: the tabi, which is now an essential part of the "standard" Japanese traditional dress. The tabi is an ankle-high cloth foot covering with a division between the big toe and other toes. The strap of a straw sandal or geta (a platform wooden sandal) runs through the gap. So, fashionable Japanese women - including Geisha - in their crisp white tabi actually showed off the spread of their toes. Observer Isabella Bird was not a fan of the style, "Foot mittens of white cloth, with a separate place for the great toe, are worn, and make the naturally small feet look big and awkward." (- p. 37, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: Volume 1 - Isabella Lucy Bird)

One footnote: the Japanese government took over Taiwan in 1895, and portrayed their campaign there against footbinding as an example of Japan's more enlightened attitudes, as opposed to China's attachment to ancient ignorance. In this, they were selling themselves as model modern colonizers, who were there to "lift up" "degraded" natives.