Craft Culture in Early Modern Japan: Materials, Makers, and Mastery 9780520382497

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Craft Culture in Early Modern Japan

the franklin d. murphy lecture series David Cateforis, Series Editor (2014– ) Established in 1979 through the Kansas University Endowment Association in honor of former chancellor Dr. Franklin D. Murphy, the Murphy Lectureship in Art brings distinguished art historians, critics, and artists to the University of Kansas, where they participate in the teaching of a graduate seminar in the Kress Foundation Department of Art History and deliver two public lectures, one at the Spencer Museum of Art and one at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Those lectures serve as the basis for the books in this series. the franklin d. murphy lecturers in art 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1983 1984 1986 1987 1987 1988 1989 1990 1992 1994 1994 1996

Pierre Rosenberg Brian O’Doherty Xia Nai Richard Field Robert G. Calkins Svetlana Alpers Nobuo Tsuji David Rosand James Cahill William Vaughan Walter S. Gibson Thomas Lawton Johei Sasaki Marilyn Aronberg Lavin and Irving Lavin Lothar Ledderose John Szarkowski Karal Ann Marling

1996 1998 1999 2001 2001 2003 2004 2005 2007 2008 2009 2010 2012 2014 2017 2018 2020

John M. Rosenfield Serafin Moralejo Helmut Brinker Yi Sŏng-mi Wanda M. Corn Donald McCallum Roberta Smith Tamar Garb Okwui Enwezor David M. Lubin Christopher M. S. Johns Toshio Watanabe Michael Brenson Cynthia Hahn Christine M. E. Guth Erika Doss Carol Armstrong

Craft Culture in Early Modern Japan Materials, Makers, and Mastery

c h r ist i n e m. e. gu t h

u n i v ersi t y of c a l ifor n i a pr ess in association with the Spencer Museum of Art and the Kress Foundation Department of Art History, the University of Kansas

Th e publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contributions to this book provided by the University of Kansas Provost’s Offi ce and the Franklin D. Murphy Lecture Fund through the Spencer Museum of Art and the Kress Foundation Department of Art History, the University of Kansas. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Christine M. E. Guth Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on fi le at the Library of Congress. isbn 978-0-520-37981-7 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-38249-7 (ebook) Manufactured in Malaysia 30

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For my colleagues and students at the V&A/RCA

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Acknowledgments

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Prologue 1 Introduction 9 1. Natural Resources 21 2. Picturing the Early Modern Craftscape 57 3. Craft Organizations and Operations 4. Tacit Knowledge

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5. Technology, Innovation, and Craft Mastery 165 Conclusion 193 Notes 197 Bibliography

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List of Illustrations Index

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a c k n ow l e d g m e n t s

Writing this book has been central to my life for the past five years, but my thinking about how to re-present Japanese crafts dates back to 2007, when I began teaching in the V&A/RCA history of design program. “Craft” featured in the team-taught course organized around keywords in material culture and design history. Initially, craft theorist Glenn Adamson led this session; later, Marta Ajmar, a global Renaissance specialist, and others took it on, each bringing to the topic fresh and provocative perspectives. The lively discussions and readings that developed in and around that course fi rst spurred me to question existing approaches to early modern Japanese crafts. More than a decade has passed since that time, and it is hard to recall the many individuals who have influenced my approach to the subject, but colleagues and students associated with the design history program figure prominently among them. I especially want to thank Marta Ajmar, Sarah Cheang, Sarah Teasley, Simona Valeriani, Verity Wilson, and students Dorothy Armstrong, Ning Huang, and Yoshika Yajima. Object handling sessions led by V&A curators Rosemary Crill, Julia Hutt, Greg Irvine, and Luisa Mengoni enhanced my understanding of particular craft processes. I also benefited from many fruitful conversations with Rupert Faulkner on Japanese

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ceramics and Anna Jackson on Japanese textiles. Shayne Rivers gave me valuable insights into lacquer conservation and also led us on a memorable adventure in Bangkok in quest of thitsi lacquer. In Japan, I am indebted to Kobayashi Koji, who invited me to present my research on rayskin in a 2016 conference on Nanban lacquer at the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties and then included me, together with conservator Ulrike Korber, in a lacquer research trip that took us from museum storerooms in Tokyo to Naha, Okinawa. I have learned enormously from both of them. I extend special thanks also to Shirahara Yukiko, chief curator at the Nezu Museum, who permitted close and extended examination of Haritsu’s lacquer teabowl. Once I began writing, an international network of friends and colleagues read and commented on drafts (more than I want to remember) of individual chapters and of the full manuscript. Joe Earle helpfully commented on sections on lacquer and sword making. Leon Kapp helped bring greater nuance to my presentation of Yoshihara Yoshindo’s work. Sarah Teasley lent me her expertise on technology by reading and commenting on chapter 5. Louise Cort, Sherry Fowler, Greg Levine, and Miriam Wattles read the entire manuscript and offered insightful responses that led to significant revisions that much improved its structure, flow, and content. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Amanda Stinchecum-Mayer, who graciously offered comments and questions on textiles as well as wise editorial tips. An anonymous reviewer gave valuable guidance for revisions. Impromptu conversations and email exchanges with Yukio Lippit and Melissa McCormick sharpened my thinking on craft issues. Advice and encouragement from Barry Blesser, Merton Flemings, Deborah Klimburg-Salter, Linda Salter, and Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis were an enormous help in more ways than I can say. Gathering the necessary images for a publication such as this is always a challenge, and I owe a special debt of gratitude to Guenther Heckmann and Leon Kapp, who provided photos I might not otherwise have secured. I also

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want to acknowledge the help of members of the Japan Art History Forum who responded to several requests for assistance in locating photographs. Finally, I am especially grateful to University of Kansas graduate student Ying Zhu, my photograph and reproductions assistant, who ably handled the correspondence with many museums to secure images for this publication. A monthlong trip to Japan in June 2014 to investigate needles and needlework was supported by the Pasold Research Fund. In 2015–16 I was fortunate to spend a semester at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. There, in addition to delving deeply into materials on Japanese natural resources and agricultural practices at the Princeton University Library, I benefited from discussions with colleagues at the Institute and at Princeton University. I am deeply grateful to both organizations. I am also indebted to the Franklin D. Murphy Fund which underwrote the lectures on which this publication is based. I also want to extend my gratitude to Archna Patel at University of California Press, who helped see the manuscript from submission through to publication, and to Erica Soon Olsen, an eagle-eyed copyeditor who saved me from many errors. The writing of this book has carried me through a physical and intellectual journey that I could not have made without the help of family and friends too numerous to mention, but I owe special thanks to my stepmother, Jenny; my sister, Germaine; my cousin John; and my children, Elise and Justin.

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Prologue

I met Mr. Fukui, a tatami maker, at work in a small shop not far from my hotel on Sanjō Avenue on the afternoon of my arrival in Kyoto. As I strolled down the street assessing how the neighborhood had changed since my last visit, I saw him attaching the fabric edging to a tatami with a long curved needle. My curiosity piqued, I stopped to ask about the tools and methods of tatami making. Needles for sewing tatami, he told me, could be bought commercially, but every maker customized them, usually by adjusting the curve to suit the individual hand. A curved needle was essential for attaching the border since the thread had to pass through the thick rice-straw core and rush covering at an angle. It was demanding work since the junctures of the crest-like pattern on the edging fabric had to be perfectly matched. Most tatami today are machine-made, since these cost a fraction of those made by hand. The rush coverings may even be imported from China, though the quality of these imports is inferior to domestically made ones. The tatami Mr. Fukui was finishing, he told me, was machine-made for a hall in Chionin temple, but it still required hand-finishing by the addition of the edging. At a time when demand for tatami in private residences had declined, refurbishing the tatami in temple halls sustained his profession. He was fortunate to live in Kyoto, where there were so many temples! He worked alone, but when he needed an extra hand, he hired a student or a graduate of the training program just outside Kyoto run by the Tatami Makers’ Guild, of which he

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was a member. An award he had received from this organization, which provides solidarity and helps to maintain standards, was displayed on the wall of his workshop. Today, as in the past, such organizational networks are critical to craft culture. I went to Japan in June 2014 intending to focus on the needle as an early modern technology that was overlooked because of its simple form, size, and identity as a gendered domestic instrument. How and where were needles made? Where were they purchased? Who used them and for what purpose? What were their implications for the formation of gendered behaviors? Why was a special ritual carried out for their disposal? My chance meeting with Mr. Fukui made me realize that needles are part of a much wider ecology than I had imagined and that men were as likely as women to make use of them. This encounter, followed by visits to the studios of and conversations with an embroiderer, a specialist in wood joinery, and a lacquerer, by capturing revealing aspects of Japanese craft as they are practiced and experienced today, did much to shape the intellectual trajectory of this book. An appointment at the Nagakusa Embroidery Workshop (Nagakusa nui kōbō), a hereditary house specializing in Kyoto-style embroidery located in the Nishijin district, brought further insights into needles and the wider culture of which they are a part. Nagakusa Sumie received me in a large tatami-matted room dominated by a kimono elaborately embroidered by her husband and displayed on a lacquered wooden stand. Once she had overcome her surprise at the nature of my questions, she was eager to tell me about her craft. She and her husband, Toshiaki, who work together, use handmade needles for their embroidery. She wouldn’t reveal where she purchased them—it was a secret, she said—but I later learned through a simple Google search that a company in Hiroshima supplies them. I was particularly curious about the shape of the eyes of Japanese needles, which, unlike those of their Western counterparts, are round rather than elongated. Even contemporary machine-made needles retain this conventional shape. Why

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Prologue

was this? I asked. Contrary to my expectation that she would justify this as “tradition,” she carefully explained the material logic of this feature: an elongated oval eye tends to compress the strands of a thread, whereas a round one helps to keep them separate, thus enhancing their ability to catch and reflect light when stitched to the fabric surface. This feature of the needle is critical in achieving the shimmering effect that distinguishes Kyoto embroidery. Nothing in my readings before or after made mention of this. Mrs. Nagakusa’s insights drew attention to the importance of tacit knowledge in craft culture. Our conversation also underscored both the importance and the fragility of the networks that ensure the transmission of craft skills and knowledge. Mrs. Nagakusa made a point of explaining that embroidery involves much more than putting needle and thread to fabric. In order to make strong, lustrous thread, an embroiderer has to know the technique of twisting filaments using a special device that holds the thread taut, whose use she demonstrated while kneeling on the tatami-matted floor. To create a suitable palette for a kimono, the embroiderer also has to be familiar with the colors of the threads, whose poetic names and combinations are rooted in the aesthetics of the Heian court. Ongoing availability of silk threads in the variegated hues used in her craft was of special concern because the elderly specialist who dyed them had no apprentice. It was a difficult profession that held little attraction for young people today, she told me. Mrs. Nagakusa replied patiently to my many questions while keeping an eye on the five middle-aged women in the adjacent room who were practicing embroidery stitches. This second-generation family business, like that of many practitioners of traditional crafts, is partly sustained by teaching hobbyists, one of many ways in which it has adapted to a changing world. The Nagakusas have also devised new products, such as embroidered handbags and eyeglass cases, alongside kimono, Noh costumes, wrapping cloths (furoshiki), bags for tea utensils (shifuku), and mountings for paintings. They have

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even filled commissions for Paris fashion houses including Hermès and JeanLouis Scherrer. Just as woodblock prints and books helped to bring center and periphery into a wider commercial ambit during the early modern era, so, too, today, the Nagakusa Embroidery Workshop has overcome the limitations of the domestic market by developing a bilingual website to promote its business globally. Professional success in the craft world demands resourcefulness and adaptability. My introduction to Ichise Kohee, a specialist in joinery, came via a student who was a longtime friend of Ichise’s wife. Before I visited Ichise’s studio, my student gave me some sense of the hidden sociocultural forces that may inform the life of an aspiring young Kyoto craft professional today. Foreign visitors are charmed by Kyoto’s traditional wooden houses, but these are drafty and lacking in the modern conveniences that young Japanese women have come to expect. Many are reluctant to marry into traditional craft families because of the behaviors, responsibilities, and lifestyle the profession imposes on them. Codes of propriety would subtly shape their manners and mores—how they dress, talk, and relate to their husbands. Born in 1972, Mr. Ichise was by far the youngest of the professionals I met. He works out of a small wooden house in central Kyoto with the space that would normally function as a garage filled with planks of various woods and sizes, some of them more than one hundred years old. The small airconditioned room where clients are received is furnished with overstuffed armchairs and a handsome shelf made by Mr. Ichise himself. By way of introduction to the proud lineage to which he belongs, he showed me a fresh-water container (mizusashi) for the tea ceremony made by his greatgrandfather that was carefully enclosed in multiple boxes, all made by family members. He then guided me up a narrow staircase to an insufferably hot, tiny work space located just under the roof. The room was crowded with tools and a low table designed for working cross-legged on the floor, but it had been cleared of any work in progress.

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Prologue

Mr. Ichise belongs to a branch line of the Komazawa, one of the group of specialists in ten crafts (jūshoku) patronized by the Urasenke school of tea since the late seventeenth century. As a member of an established craft lineage, he is enmeshed in a web of relationships with expectations of shared behaviors, practices, and values. The Komazawa supplied tea masters and their students with articles ranging from shelves and boxes to hold utensils to fresh-water containers for the tea ceremony. To a large extent, ongoing Urasenke patronage also continues to inform Mr. Ichise’s practice by dictating the creation of forms and styles of wares that conform to the taste of famous tea masters of the past. He was recently commissioned to fashion a cypress wood mizusashi joined with nails in a style said to have been favored by Sen no Rikyū along with a bentwood waste-water container. Both were made for display in an exhibition centered around Chigusa, a famous tea jar that had been purchased by the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. That Mr. Ichise’s talents encompassed both joinery and bentwood, two techniques that were once practiced by different professionals, provoked questions about patterns of occupational diversification. The expansive residence and studio of Murose Kazumi in Tokyo was befitting a makie lacquerer who in 2008, at the age of sixty by Japanese count, was designated a “Living National Treasure.” The most cosmopolitan of the craft professionals I met, he has good-humoredly shouldered the national and international responsibilities that come with this honor. He welcomes workshop visits, gives demonstrations, speechifies at museums in Japan and abroad, and has even given a TEDx talk. He is particularly concerned with managing the international reputation of Japanese crafts, an issue bound up with the politics of the nation’s “soft power.” The inadequacy of the terms craft and lacquer to express the specifics of Japanese practice is a recurring theme in both his public presentations and his private conversations. He strongly advocates the replacement of the English and other Europeanlanguage terms for lacquer with the Japanese urushi to distinguish the latter

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Prologue

from its counterparts in other parts of the world. A further preoccupation, similarly reflecting the projection of modern Western values on Japanese craft practice, is the failure to recognize the cultural significance entailed in the making of copies of celebrated works of the past. Making copies does not necessarily deny creative individualism, he argues. The qualities that make each individual hand singular are expressed in ways that are difficult to see. This is a self-reflexive concern since much of Mr. Murose’s work involves conservation and making copies of historically important makie lacquers. When I visited his studio, well-appointed with sleek wooden cupboards for drying lacquerwares, four apprentices, including two of Mr. Murose’s sons, and an elderly female hobbyist were working seated on chairs before a long table. All were polishing small boxes or bowls, but an impressive Edoperiod palanquin awaiting conservation sat in the space beyond. My questions about the sources of his lacquer were rewarded at the end of the visit when Mr. Murose requested that a tub of lacquer be brought to us. He had received it recently from the Jōhōji plantation in northern Iwate Prefecture, where he reserved an annual supply for his exclusive use. Few lacquer plantations are in operation in Japan today, because demand is limited and the labor is highly specialized, costly, and time intensive. Consequently, like their counterparts in tatami making and papermaking, many lacquerers of lesser stature than Mr. Murose rely on cheaper imports of raw or semiprocessed materials from China or Southeast Asia, even as they claim these to be of inferior quality. I had had occasion to see raw lacquer in Bangkok during a conference cosponsored by the National Department of Forestry, which was leading efforts to expand commercial lacquer production, and the Department of Art and Culture, charged with developing quality Thai lacquer products for export. The viscous tarry black thitsi lac was in a tin can with a dirty printed label. This was in stark contrast to the experience at Mr. Murose’s, where a handsome large tub made of cryptomeria wood bound with a bamboo belt and sealed with paper and a wooden lid was brought to the master

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by one of his apprentices. It bore a handwritten label with the date when it was tapped, the weight of approximately three and a half kilos, and other information. The craftsmanship that had gone into the creation of the container was equal to that of its contents. One cannot assume that any practice, whether transmitted orally or in writing, is consistent or resistant to modification over time. Repetition invariably produces change. Craft cultures have histories, and those histories account for many of the practices and habits that one sees among craft makers today. It is common to refer to the “enduring” crafts of Japan, and in so doing to emphasize the degree to which contemporary practitioners preserve “traditional” practices, but the use of tables and chairs in the Murose studio serves as a reminder that these traditions remain only up to a point. Mr. Murose’s early modern ancestors would have worked on the floor, and only from dawn to dusk. They did not benefit from artificial light, central heating, or other modern conveniences. They did not share our sense of time and space. They lacked access to the kinds of scientific knowledge that, even if not directly applied, informs contemporary making practices. These developments, to name only a few, have fundamentally altered the environment in which craft makers operate today. Craft culture is dynamic, and the passage of time has led to both change and resistance to it. Just as the terms used to refer to crafts have changed over the centuries, so too have the bodily, cognitive, social, and imaginative processes associated with their creation. How modern makers navigate their world can provide a guide, but to understand what made early modern craft culture distinctive, it is important to take into account both continuities and discontinuities.

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Introduction

Most existing studies of early modern crafts in Japan approach the subject as a linear historical narrative, from the perspective of individual masters and media, or within the realms of collecting, curation, and display. This book takes a different approach. By titling it Craft Culture in Early Modern Japan: Materials, Makers, and Mastery, I mean to draw critical attention to the dynamic, multidirectional network of forces—both material and immaterial—that underlie the extraordinarily rich, diverse, and aesthetically sophisticated culture of Japan during the period from roughly the 1580s to the 1860s. This includes the particular materials and tools and the people who wield them but also the institutions, modes of thought, behaviors, and the reciprocal relationships among them. Shared assumptions fundamental to ways and values of making that transcend the specifics of each practice constitute what I call “craft culture.” Craft has been defined by materials (clay, wood, metal), by techniques (throwing, carving, forging), and by the functional products of the interaction between them (teabowls, household furnishings, swords).1 In the broadest sense, however, it evokes the human capacity to make, with skills developed through experience. I use the term here very loosely to refer both to the process of making with specialized skills and techniques and the results of this activity, ranging from architecture to automata. Consequently, this book is as much a study of process and practice as it is of product.

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Today craft is commonly assumed to mean handmade, in opposition to machine-made, but this is not necessarily true since craft making has always required tools of some sort. As woodworker and craft theorist David Pye wrote in a peevish rebuttal to this misapprehension, “some things actually can be made without tools, it is true, but the definition is going to be rather exclusive for it will take in baskets and coiled pottery, and that is about all!”2 Objects made by the human hand, even if mediated by tools, have a unique aesthetic appeal that can evoke a world outside modernity. A desire to situate beautifully handcrafted objects beyond the quotidian industrial and postindustrial world and to see them as culturally and historically other has contributed to the enduring esteem that those created in Japan enjoy among Euro-Americans. This appreciation often goes hand in hand with their essentialization and decontextualization. The historical and relational approach adopted here seeks to overcome these tendencies and bring new insights and nuance to the interpretation of early modern crafts in Japan. There are many challenges in addressing this subject. We are far from the lived material reality of an era in which craft making was based largely on tacit knowledge. We do not share the sociocultural framework within which the resulting artifacts were used and understood. In the industrialized EuroAmerican world, crafts no longer emerge from within the culture in which they are consumed and, indeed, are often the products of different cultures altogether. In early modern Japan, however, crafts—especially dwellings, their furnishings, and dress—constituted forms of material culture critical to daily life. They were also powerful carriers of knowledge, sociality, and identity. How and from what substances they were made were matters of serious concern among all classes of society. Craft theorist Glenn Adamson has argued that crafts today are “supplemental” to “the narrative of progress and conceptual discovery” of the history of modern art.3 This view is a legacy of Renaissance Europe, where crafts

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Introduction

were defined epistemologically in opposition and subordinate to the fine arts. This distinction was not true of early modern Japan, where the category saiku, the closest analogue to “craft,” included painting as well as utilitarian objects made of lacquer, ceramics, and other materials. Most craft makers were officially classified as artisans, shokunin, but could belong to other classes as well. Their relative social stature was informed by factors including patronage, materials, and level of expertise. Because of the intrinsic value of lacquer, gold, and silver and of the intricate techniques with which makie lacquerers worked to create articles with luxurious pictorial decor, they enjoyed higher esteem than potters, who worked with clay. Within a particular profession, there might be further hierarchies: those (invariably male) who fired kilns and threw pots enjoyed higher social and professional status than those who dug and pugged clay (who were sometimes female). A further challenge to recovering early modern craft culture is the enormous symbolic burden that crafts have carried, especially within Japan. Kōgei, the modern Japanese term for craft, like its counterpart bijutsu, fine art, is a recent coinage.4 It was first used as a collective category for the ceramics, lacquer, metalwork, and textiles in the context of the Vienna International Exposition of 1873 in order to bring Japanese taxonomies in line with those prevailing in Europe. Since that time, its connotations have evolved in response to a complex interplay of domestic and international social, political, and economic circumstances. Discourses on tradition, colonialism, and nationalism, among other forces, have contributed to its mutations. Today the meaning of kōgei is widely debated, especially by practitioners and curators seeking to draw a sharp line between Japanese materials and making practices and those in other parts of the world. This has included promoting the use of the word kogei (without the macron) rather than its local translation in foreign language publications, an effort bound up with classifying Japanese crafts in a way that does not imply the Western dichotomy of fine arts versus crafts.5 Despite its local inflections,

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the concept of craft in Japan today cannot be disassociated from patterns of thinking and expectations characteristic of many parts of the industrialized world. Whatever the terminology, it is clear that bringing specialized knowhow, skills, technologies, and aesthetic sensibility to making things of use to society has long been integral to the material culture of Japan. For more than a century, through world expositions and the exports associated with them, crafts have been deemed among Japan’s greatest contributions to world culture—creations that distinguish Japan from and even elevate it above other modern nations. Japanese craft exceptionalism is widely attributed to its makers’ special sensitivity to natural materials, technical mastery, and design sense, as brought equally to vernacular and elite functional and decorative objects. The modern Japanese discourse on craft also has a strong dialectical dimension in the sharp division drawn between useful articles made for the urban elite and those made for rural commoners. The former are often associated with celebrity makers such as Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558–1637), Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716), or Ogata Kenzan (1663–1743). By contrast, folk crafts (mingei), a subcategory of kōgei, are extolled as the products of nameless makers, part of a rural aesthetic tradition that represents an authentic Japan lost to Western modernity.6 It is widely assumed that these “unknown craftsmen” were male, despite the fact that women in rural areas were active participants in many crafts, especially textiles and papermaking. Whether implicitly or explicitly, perceptions of all early modern Japanese crafts are bound up with the values of “tradition,” commonly understood to be unchanging and rooted in the past. This outlook has been institutionalized in the modern system designed to protect and preserve the nation’s craft heritage, wherein contemporary practitioners identified as holders of the title of “Important Intangible Cultural Property” (Jūyo mukei bunkazai), popularly known as “Living National Treasures,” have rigid guidelines for the “traditional” tools and techniques they may use, even

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Introduction

when such practices are no longer feasible.7 In this system, tradition is construed not as a constantly evolving process but as fixed, and thus involving preservation of an imagined status quo. Setting aside assumptions of Japanese exceptionalism, of a division between “art crafts” and “folk crafts,” and of tradition as fixed is a necessary precondition for entering the dynamic world of early modern crafts. Although this study focuses on Japan, I have framed it as “early modern” rather than within the Momoyama (1573–1603) and Tokugawa (1603–1868) periods to overcome parochialism and encourage comparison with artisanal developments in other parts of the world between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.8 While the specifics of Japanese craft making may differ—for instance, Japanese saws cut on the pull rather than the push stroke—the deployment of tools must still obey fundamental laws. Making a physical object is a creative process requiring a plan, spatial thinking, knowledge of the laws of nature, experimentation, and consideration of the network of things to which the thing belongs. It has a language bound by rules that govern the codes of its social production and exchange. These rules are first and foremost natural, involving as they do the laws of physics and the limitations of the human body. A further commonality is that the skill to make most crafts in the early modern world was acquired primarily through embodied practice rather than verbal exegesis or symbolic representation in ways that simultaneously engaged both mental and physical activity. In The Craftsman, Richard Sennett wrote that “ten thousand hours is a common touchstone for how long it takes to become an expert . . . . This seemingly huge time span represents how long researchers estimate it takes for complex skills to become so ingrained that these become readily available tacit knowledge.”9 Yet art historians have devoted surprisingly little attention to the physiological implications of this prolonged period of “body work” (roughly the equivalent of a seven-year apprenticeship) in the context of premodern Japanese crafts.

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Introduction

There has been a tendency to frame workshop training as mechanical, mindless, and lacking in creativity, often by contrasting it to innate “talent.”10 The work of sociologists Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others, has challenged this mechanical/talent outlook, arguing that mind and body are not separate but inextricably bound up with one another.11 Historians of science and material culture such as Lissa Roberts and Pamela Smith have brought this phenomenological thinking to their studies of early modern Europe. The interpenetration of mind and body is encapsulated in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation, the title of an edited volume on early modern craft production in Europe.12 As the title indicates, its authors see craft professionals not just as makers of things but also as makers of knowledge. This study brings these interpretive approaches to the examination of training and practice in early modern Japan. Situating Japan in an early modern chronology is further justified because Japan participated in global exchanges that transformed the world and the way people saw themselves within it. Contrary to oft-cited claims of national seclusion, interactions with the Asian continent and beyond continued throughout Tokugawa rule. The responses to these interactions had profound implications for political, economic, and sociocultural developments and, more specifically in the context of this study, for the migration of craft specialists, the circulation of technical knowledge, and the availability of raw materials and luxury goods. The forces of early modern globalization, among others, contributed to the growth of capitalism and urbanization. By 1700 Edo had a population of more than a million, Kyoto five hundred thousand, and Osaka four hundred thousand. Many castle towns had populations of more than ten thousand. There was also significant rural economic growth thanks to expansion in arable land, improved agricultural technology, and the development of cottage industries, resulting in increased and accelerated capacity to make

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Introduction

things. Challenging the sentimentalization of rural craft culture as selfsustaining, cooperative communities tied to traditional customs and values as advanced by proponents of mingei, these flourishing cottage industries were highly competitive and open to innovation. They were also well integrated into nationwide communication and commercial networks through the mediation of merchants who supplied makers with equipment and materials, paid them on the basis of piecework, and marketed the finished products. These developments shaped and reflected a flourishing market economy dominated by newly affluent urban and rural commoners with the desire and the means to buy goods previously exclusive to the elite. There are many issues at stake in the study of early modern craft culture. To tease out the interpretive possibilities of all of them is beyond the scope of this book. Two themes that thread through its chapters follow from “Gender, Ritual, and Needlecraft” and “Wit and Wisdom in a Japanese Teabowl,” the Murphy Lectures I gave in Lawrence, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, in April and May 2017. The first focused on female agency in craft culture through the lens of needlecraft and the second on a lacquer simulacrum of a Raku teabowl created by Ogawa Haritsu (a.k.a. Ritsuō; 1663–1747) and its material and sociocultural implications. These led, on the one hand, to exploration of the wider role of women in the crafts and, on the other, to exploration of craft makers’ relationship with materials. Lacquer, a medium of exceptional social, cultural, and economic importance in early modern crafts, is a touchstone throughout this study that serves to illuminate larger issues concerning the nexus of materials, makers, and mastery. This study is guided by the conviction that craft production does not simply involve humans imposing their will on materials using specialized training and equipment. The craft practitioner is only one actor in a complex multidirectional network whose functioning depends on and incorporates a host of other equally important actors, including media representations, gender, workshops and the social and physiological training these provide,

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Introduction

the spread of technology and innovation, and the mutually constitutive relationships among them. The word network in the context of writings on early modern Japan often calls to mind social practices, especially the participatory literary and artistic circles that contributed to many of the period’s distinctive forms of cultural expression.13 My thinking about the role of social institutions such as workshops and patronage is informed by such research. Yet even as I take an anthropocentric view by positioning the craft maker as the prime referent, my interpretation of craft culture also draws on Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory.14 In so doing, it acknowledges the distribution of agency among both human and nonhuman actors by attending to reciprocity in the human engagement with materials, tools, and technologies. Carpenters, for instance, had to take into account the agency of wood—its ability to expand and contract in keeping with changes in temperature and humidity and to shrink because of moisture loss. The book is organized thematically. Chronological development is not a major concern, beyond drawing attention to important economic shifts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when craft production expanded from the urban centers of Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo to rural areas, as farmers devoted more time to profitable by-employment in crafts ranging from sericulture, silk spinning and weaving, to papermaking. The first chapter introduces the range of natural resources available domestically for craft making and the problems attendant on their sustainable management in an era when population growth, urbanization, and rising standards of living put increasing pressure on the environment. Also examined is the role of Neo-Confucian practical studies (jitsugaku) and investigating things (kaibutsu) in bringing about a new awareness of the material world. In discussing the pragmatic, mercantilist outlook that guided thinking about the exploitation of natural resources and the tools brought to it, questions are raised about the stereotype of the Japanese love of nature.

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Introduction

The skills, talent, inventiveness, and, above all, industriousness of craft professionals played a key role in transforming the constructed landscape in city and country alike. The second chapter turns to these makers, focusing on the extraordinary occupational diversity and specialization characteristic of the early modern era. To form a historically contextualized picture of the craftscape, it draws on woodblock-printed books and single-sheet prints that classified makers by occupational specialty, gender, and locale. Careful attention is given to the taxonomies and hierarchies that informed images of and writing about artisanal activities. Publications giving expression to a classificatory zeal that was a feature of the times make visible the role of artisans, shokunin, as well as of farm households in the expanding commercial craft economy. They also throw light on gender, a critical but often overlooked factor that shaped the early modern craft world. In Tokugawa society, where people were defined occupationally, the professional artisan was presumed to be male, an assumption reinforced by the reality that women could not become members of patriarchal craft guilds. Visual and textual evidence, however, testifies that women in both city and countryside, though defined by convention as wives and mothers, actively participated in a wide range of craft activities as an extension of their household duties. The third chapter turns from visualizing craft professionals to the systems that formed them. The ie, house or household, was an institution that had a decisive impact on who became a craft maker, how they practiced, and how their work was made available to the public. It determined the practitioner’s mental framework, language, categories of thought, and behaviors. Documentary evidence combined with surviving works pertaining to Kōami Nagasuku (1661–1723) and Ogawa Haritsu, two eighteenthcentury lacquer specialists, provide a deeper understanding of workshop operations as well as of questions of lineage, training, patronage, status, and innovation.

17

Introduction

Following an examination of this organizational system, in chapter 4 I analyze how craft skills were reproduced through the transmission of embodied knowledge, drawing on examples involving both male members of formal workshops and female members of households. Also considered here as part of the mindset resulting from extended training and experience is “material consciousness”—that is, how makers related to the materials of their craft.15 This did not necessarily imply a particular sensitivity to or reverence for nature but rather an intense awareness of the physical properties of materials and how they interact with one another through the tools and techniques brought to their manipulation. Chapter 5 examines the role and nature of technology and innovation as critical constituents of craft mastery. In the first part of the chapter, a range of technological transfers from continental Asia and their processes of domestication are introduced, drawing attention to the degree to which this involved creative imitation. In the second part, focusing on historical and cultural contingency, I argue that to fully understand early modern craft production in Japan requires considering developments on their own terms rather than using European industrialization as a measure. Rather than expanding market share through the development of mass production, the focus in early modern crafts was on product differentiation and the development of niche markets. While operational efficiency and economies of scale did develop in some crafts, in others, innovation brought greater refinement through technical virtuosity. At a time when we are increasingly drawn to handmade articles using natural materials, we are preconditioned to view Japanese crafts through an aesthetic lens. While there is good reason to admire them from this perspective, it should not be at the expense of neglecting their function or how their creators interacted with their environment—or how that environment came to be in the first place. This multiperspectival study explores the complicated relationship that makers have had with the natural resources required

18

Introduction

in the successful practice of their profession as part of the network of relationships that undergird craft production. It recognizes that practitioners’ lives are crucially shaped by institutions including workshops, family, and the media that put them in positions of privilege or disadvantage based on gender. In focusing on key nodes in this tightly interwoven system, I hope this study will provide a framework for wider conversations about craft culture in early modern Japan.

19

Introduction

ch a p ter on e

Natural Resources

The slender trunk of the lacquer tree (Rhus vernicifera) is scarred by the marks of repeated tapping (figure 1.1). Clusters of horizontal cuts, at about thirtycentimeter intervals, beginning just above ground level and continuing to the height of the tapper, are darkened in patches where the sap has flowed over the bark. In a few spots, the old bark has been scraped away to prepare for new incisions. His hands and arms well protected from contact with the liquid lacquer, a skin irritant, the tapper—seemingly impervious to its noxious fumes—makes a fresh cut. Over a season extending from June to October, he must maintain a balance between his desire to extract the maximum quantity of lacquer and preserving the tree’s health: too many incisions risk killing the tree. Today, when Japanese lacquer, urushiol, a natural polymer, has been largely replaced by plastic, a synthetic one, few tappers still practice their craft; most, like the individual photographed here, are in northern Iwate Prefecture. Yet both his technique and the curved knifelike tool he uses would have been familiar to Miyazaki Yasusada, the agronomist who, in 1646, published the first manual for farmers detailing the procedures for tapping lacquer.1 At that time, lacquer was ubiquitous in Japanese material culture. It was used to protect and decorate domestic furnishings, architectural interiors and exteriors, vessels for eating and drinking, and ritual implements, and even to give thread a lustrous sheen.

21

Figure 1.1. Tapper preparing to draw sap from a lacquer tree. Photo courtesy of Guenther Heckmann.

Lacquer’s connotations of luxury made it a valuable natural resource. In the early modern era, men and women alike were deeply concerned with the facture of their houses, furnishings, clothing, and other goods—how, by whom, and of what materials they were made. Indeed, with rising standards of living and growing purchasing power among commoners in both city and countryside, many articles that had previously been luxuries now became necessities. The flourishing market economy fostered growing consumption across all levels of society, and many craft professionals found employment in the manufacture of goods for domestic use. Furniture historian Koizumi Kazuko estimates that by 1800, urban households owned a profusion of arti-

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cles: assorted wooden storage boxes and cabinets; folding screens and floor coverings (tatami, which were movable, were regarded as a form of furniture); devices for lighting and heating; articles for hygiene and beauty, such as basins, mirrors, and cosmetic stands; an array of utensils for preparing and eating food; games and other articles for leisure activities; personal effects; and articles for devotional needs.2 Some items, such as wadded cotton bedding and cushions, wooden chests fitted with drawers (tansu), and sets of glazed ceramic dishes, first made their appearance during this era, while others, such as folding screens and tatami mats, whose ownership previously was restricted to the elite, became more widely available. Sumptuary laws issued in 1799 in Morioka domain, in modern Iwate Prefecture, testify to the degree to which such articles became established in commoner households even in the countryside: “It is said that farmers’ domiciles have become extravagant, that they employ paper and wooden doors and keep their possessions in tansu or trunks. This demonstrates a lack of recognition of their status . . . [T]hey should return to the old form of housing, destroying that which is not suitable to the lifestyle of farmers.”3 Sumptuary laws, which were promulgated frequently over the course of the Tokugawa period, though often to little effect, gave expression to the overriding importance the government attributed to making visible official status distinctions through ownership of goods. Their determination was frequently premised on the materials or techniques of their manufacture. Makie lacquer, in which gold and silver powders were used to create elaborate pictorial designs, was a frequent target of regulation.4 Just as the volume and variety of goods in the home grew during the early modern era, so too did that of clothing. Men and women with the means to do so—predominantly those living in Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo— owned more than one set of garments, their number and the material from which they were fabricated determined by disposable income, social class, and locale. Silk was the fabric of the elite and cotton that of commoners,

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while asa (ramie and hemp), even as it was made into luxury summer garments, served for farmers’ clothing in northern regions where cotton could not be cultivated because of the unsuitable climate. The availability of domestically grown and woven silk and cotton, dramatically lowering the price of clothing, prompted more frequent purchases among commoners. Men and women alike started out the New Year decked in new clothes and sported seasonally appropriate wear for special outings, such as cherry blossom and autumn leaf viewing or visits to shrines and temples. As dress became part of a fashion system, the importance of being up-to-date made fabric choice, textures, patterns, and colors subject to frequent change. The demand for novelty created a steady market for new (or often secondhand) clothes, making textiles one of the most dynamic craft industries of the early modern era. The proliferation of crafted goods in the consumer society of the early modern era had critical implications for the environment. In constructing an ever richer and more sophisticated material world, makers often used resources that were in short supply or unrenewable, or whose extraction caused ecological damage. The new materials and technologies they brought to their practice sometimes had unintended consequences. Materials opened a world of possibilities, but by the same token, resource depletion could close that world. Craft professionals, whatever their specialty, depended on a reliable supply of raw or semiprocessed materials. What kinds of resources were available for craft making in the early modern era, and how was the need for them met and sustained when population growth, urbanization, agricultural expansion, and rising standards of living put increasing pressure on the environment? To address these questions, this chapter examines the range of materials most widely mobilized by craft makers, taking into account as well the farmers, forest workers, and merchants who were critical links in the supply chain, and the mercantile capitalism that guided resource

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management. The materials and skills of artisanal practice were carried out in a social context: craft makers did not act in isolation, independent of the thinking of the times. Their initiatives shaped and reflected the changing values of the wider environment. Notable among these were policies regarding the exploitation of the natural world espoused and promoted by Tokugawa government officials under the Neo-Confucian banner of “practical studies” (jitsugaku) and the “investigation of things” (kaibutsu). This mode of thinking raises questions about the pervasive myth that Japanese crafts express a special love of nature on the part of their makers and users.

nat u r a l r e s ou rc e s a n d t h e i r m a nage m e n t Today, Japan is often regarded as a resource-poor country because of its lack of oil and the poor quality of its now largely depleted coal deposits, but from the perspective of early modern craft culture, the archipelago was rich in natural resources that, if maintained in a sustainable manner, could be mobilized to fabricate things of use to society. There was an abundant supply of the “five metals” (gokin), gold, silver, iron, copper, and tin, for crafting luxury articles such as swords and Buddhist ritual implements as well as agricultural tools. Japan’s mountainous topography and climate, ranging from subarctic in Hokkaido to subtropical in Okinawa, fostered the growth of a wide range of evergreen and deciduous trees suitable for construction and household furnishings. Myths recorded in the eighth-century Chronicles of Japan (Nihonshoki) relate that trees were created from various parts of the body of the deity Susanoo no Mikoto—from his beard came cedars (sugi), from the hair on his chest cypress (hinoki), from his eyebrows camphor trees (kusu), and from the hair on his buttocks black pines—but these were only a few of the many varieties of trees to be found in Japan.5 There were lac trees for lacquer and candle wax; mulberry trees, whose leaves fed silkworms; and shrubs such as kōzo, whose fibers could be used for making paper and clothing. The islands also boasted hundreds of varieties of bamboo, which

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could be used in construction (for fences, scaffolding, and ladders) as well as for utilitarian articles such as baskets, sieves, and fish traps. Deposits of clays suitable for making earthenware and stoneware were also widespread. Kaolin, white feldspathic clay used for porcelain, was first discovered in the Arita region of northern Kyushu, with smaller pockets discovered later in Kaga, modern Ishikawa Prefecture. The early modern ecosystem was further expanded and altered through the introduction of commercial crops that had an impact on the crafts, most notably cotton and indigo. While the craft maker’s materials of choice were determined largely by domestic availability, imported resources were deployed to supplement these. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, huge quantities of rayskin for sword hilts, sappanwood for dye, deerskins for footwear, raw lacquer, and ivory for carving netsuke were imported from Southeast Asia.6 In 1705, in a now famous passage, scholar/bureaucrat and advisor to the shogun Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725) wrote that “among the types of wealth extractable from the soil, the five grains and the raw materials used for cloth were like the blood, flesh, and hair of the human body.” Even if used excessively, they were replenishable, but gold and silver were the “bones of the earth” and “once used, they will not grow again.”7 A century later, in 1815, an anonymous samurai calling himself Buyō Inshi wrote of the exhausting of the mountains and the forest, the silting up of rivers, and flooding, all because of greed.8 These critiques, though motivated by moral outrage at perceived rampant luxury consumption, spoke to genuine and serious concerns about the despoliation of the environment by unsustainable exploitation of the country’s natural resources—especially gold, silver, copper, and timber. Although Hakuseki saw substances extracted from the earth as finite and those grown in the earth as renewable resources, at the time of his writing, most of the primeval forests of Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu had been exhausted, and the country’s timber needs were being met by newly cultivated woods.

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Metalworking in Japan dates to the Yayoi period (300 BCE–300 CE), and mining is recorded in eighth-century chronicles, but the surging exchange value of gold, silver, and copper between 1540 and 1700 led to the opening of many previously untapped mines.9 Initially, warlords controlled these mines and used the precious metals extracted from them to finance military campaigns and castle construction and decoration. With the consolidation of Tokugawa power, however, most mines were taken over by the shogunate. In addition to financing the importation of luxury goods such as porcelain and silk from China, these three metals were used as currency and for craft making. In the seventeenth century, mining was carried out more systematically and efficiently and at greater depths than previously by searching for ore veins rather than randomly digging tunnels through bedrock. This socalled “survey mining technique” (sunpō-kiri) was, in turn, made possible by the production of harder iron chisels, hammers, and picks.10 Gold and silver were mined on Sado Island, off the west coast of Honshu, with much of the labor carried out by convicts. Interest in mining techniques led to the creation of many illustrated scrolls on the subject. An anonymous nineteenth-century scroll in the New York Public Library showing operations at the Sado mines is typical of the genre (figure 1.2). The scene illustrated shows the labor carried out underground. In the top gallery, surveyors and other officials are preparing to chisel into the rock wall to determine the quality of a new seam. In the smaller galleries below, miners extract ore. The wooden pillars holding up a straw mat and a rooflike structure in the deepest tunnel offer protection from falling rock.11 In the early seventeenth century, production of silver from the Sado mines is estimated to have been between sixty thousand and ninety thousand kilos annually.12 A substantial amount of the silver circulating in global trade between the 1540s and the 1640s emanated from the Iwami and Ikuno silver mines, in modern Tottori and Hyogo Prefectures. The scale of

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Figure 1.2. Sado gold mines, 19th c. Handscroll, ink and colors on paper. H 27.2 × L 1,444 cm. Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library.

production there can be imagined from the fact that in the early seventeenth century, Tokugawa Ieyasu was sent tribute in the amount of twelve thousand kilos of silver from a single shaft of the Iwami mine.13 Much of the silver outflow, though mediated by Spanish and Portuguese traders, was destined for China, where the exchange value of silver was disproportionately higher

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than in other parts of the world.14 When the global exchange rate of silver stabilized in the 1640s, copper replaced it as a major export.15 Nihon sankai meibutsu zue (Illustrated famous specialties of the mountains and seas of Japan; 1754) further testifies to the importance of the mining industry by devoting an entire volume to its various operations.16 Whereas

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this publication gives locations associated with other famous products, there is no reference to the specific locations of mines, in all likelihood because this was privileged information. The illustrations and accompanying brief explanatory captions emphasize the specialist skills, hard work, tools, and technology that made possible the extraction and refining of the five metals. The reader is guided through the rituals associated with the building of a mine tunnel, the array of tools required for breaking through the stone and hauling the ore, work inside the tunnel, the sorting of the precious metal (a job carried out by women), various smelting techniques, the sluicing and smelting of iron sand, and the packing of large round gold and silver ingots for shipment. One double-page spread lays out the array of tools used in mining: shovels, hammers, pickaxes, baskets for hauling the ore, and, most importantly, arranged horizontally at the lower edge of the illustration, the wood and bamboo hand-driven hydraulic pumps that were used to drain water from the tunnels by lifting it into buckets, which were then hauled to the surface (figure 1.3). Mining was a dangerous profession and flooding a major concern. It also had consequences for those living nearby since the poisonous silt from the refining processes could be carried downstream and pollute rice paddies.17 Most of the iron deposits in Japan were in the form of iron sand (satetsu), found close to the surface in regions in modern-day Shimane, Iwate, and Aomori Prefectures. Nihon sankai meibutsu zue shows the iron sand that was collected in baskets and poured into swiftly flowing water, where the heavier grains sank to the bottom and could be easily retrieved. If charcoal was available, the iron was then smelted nearby in a clay furnace (tatara) using foot-pedaled bellows that could push air into the furnace so as to maintain the temperature of 1400°C necessary to reduce the carbon content sufficiently to produce steel. This bellows system was among the important early modern innovations in smelting technology.18 The resulting steel, or hagane, the text tells us, was also written with the characters for blade and gold, a

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reference both to its preciousness and to the blades into which it could subsequently be forged.19 Swordsmiths and makers of agricultural tools as well as craft professionals in other areas of metalwork were all dependent on the quantity and quality of the smelter’s labor. Today 67 percent of Japan is covered in forest, one of the highest percentages in the modern industrial world, but by 1600 the archipelago (not including Hokkaido) was at the brink of ecological disaster due to deforestation. How did this happen? Wood was historically the primary material for building temples, residences, and castles. However, it was also essential fuel for heating and firing the kilns for clay roof tiles, as well as for the charcoal used for making arms and armor. Profligate use of lumber for these and other purposes had made deforestation a problem since medieval times. Scarcity and cost are among the factors that are thought to have contributed to changes in the residential architecture of the elite such as the replacement of wood paneling with plaster walls and wood flooring with rush-covered straw tatami.20 By the late sixteenth century, the problem had become increasingly acute, as population growth required the felling of forests to open new land for rice cultivation. Prime cedars and Japanese cypress, whose height and straight grain made them the preferred timbers for construction, became especially hard to come by. The mountains in the capital region that had once supplied the wood for the huge temple complexes in Kyoto and Nara were exhausted and could no longer meet the needs of new rulers eager to display their power and authority in monumental architectural form. Castle building in the 1570s and 1580s by rival warlords, most notably Oda Nobunaga’s Azuchi Castle, on Lake Biwa, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s castles at Osaka, Fushimi, and Jūrakudai, consumed vast quantities of timber. The warlords’ temple building and repair added to the pressure on forests. In 1586, when Hideyoshi sought a tree to serve as ridgepole for Hōkōji temple in Kyoto, one more than eighty feet in length was sent from the foot of Mount Fuji, some two hundred miles away. Transporting it to Kyoto took

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Figure 1.3. Mining tools, from Illustrated Famous Specialties of the Mountains and Seas of Japan (Nihon sankai meibutsu zue), 1797 edition. Woodblock-printed book. National Diet Library, Tokyo.

three months, required fifty thousand man-days of labor, and cost 1,000 ryō in gold.21 Later, fires in the metropolitan centers added to the problem. The Meireki-era fire of 1657, in which 20 percent of Edo’s population lost their lives, laid waste to Edo Castle, 500 daimyo mansions, and 779 residences of lesser samurai as well as 350 temples and 400 blocks of commoner houses.22 Edo Castle’s keep was never rebuilt owing to the cost and difficulty of finding timber of the requisite size. The scarcity of prime timber also led to sumptuary regulations enacted in 1663 forbidding woodworkers in Edo from making household articles of Japanese cedar or cypress.23 This fire is thought to have been a critical turning point in the shogunal government’s determination to implement regulations concerning the control and protection of forests nationwide.24 In response to the scarcity of timber, Tokugawa government officials as well as regional daimyo began systematic efforts to manage forests through use regulations and silviculture. Peasants and the warrior elite competed over sylvan resources. To satisfy the needs of both, regulations for communal use of forests and woodlands stipulated that certain forests be reserved by the shogunate and the daimyo for construction of buildings and public works; peasants were permitted use of woodland brush for fertilizer, fuel, and fodder and edibles such as mushrooms; and individual households had the right to use certain woodlands.25 The ambiguity of these regulations, however, frequently put these disparate stakeholders at odds with one another. Alongside this regimen, government authorities fostered silviculture on the lands under their jurisdiction. On most plantations, deciduous broadleaves were cultivated rather than the cypress and cedar characteristic of the primeval forest. These measures, by helping to bring supply and demand into balance, led to greater ecological sustainability. The importance of the timber industry is reflected in many woodblock prints and illustrated books. “In the Mountains of Tōtōmi Province,” an inventive print in Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, celebrates the

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physical strength and skill sawyers brought to their work as a foil to the drama of towering Mount Fuji (figure 1.4). Two men using large, rectangular one-man ripsaws (maebiki oga) simultaneously saw a giant log propped up at an angle matching that of Fuji’s slope, one while standing precariously atop it and the other while crouched beneath. Beyond them another sawyer sharpens his saw, a reminder of the importance attributed to good care and maintenance of professional tools. While it may seem strange to cut a felled log propped in this way, it reflects actual practice: it was much harder to cut a large log into planks flat on the ground using a horizontal stroke. This way, the sawyer above could throw his entire weight into his work. It is highly unlikely, however, that a fellow sawyer would actually work directly beneath with sawdust falling in his face! Unlike European saws, the maebiki oga was held with both hands and cut on the pull rather than the push: the movement toward the body made it easier to maintain a straight line. The size and shape of the ripsaw varied, but according to one eighteenth-century source, it was usually sixty-one by thirty-five centimeters and could weigh as much as four or five kilos. The maebiki oga’s first documented use was at the end of the sixteenth century, in the construction of Hideyoshi’s Hōkōji temple, where it replaced the older and more labor-intensive two-man ripsaw.26 The ripsaw was so efficient and quiet compared to the ax that in some areas its use was banned to prevent illegal logging.27 Provisions to ensure availability of hardwood timber for use in construction were the focus of major reforestation projects, but demand for lacquer also led to the establishment of lacquer plantations in at least twenty-four provinces.28 These projects were generally undertaken at the direction of daimyo hoping to develop regional lacquer craft industries, and there was considerable competition among them. The beginnings of dedicated lacquer tree plantations in the domain of the Tsugaru, located at the northern extremity of the Honshu Peninsula, date to the early seventeenth century.

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Figure 1.4. Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), “In the Mountains of Tōtōmi Province” (Tōtōmi sanchū), from series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei), 1830–31. Woodblock print, horizontal ōban. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. William Sturgis Bigelow Collection. 11.17658.

Domainal records indicate that beginning in 1624, ten thousand trees were planted annually for five years.29 A lacquer workshop was opened under Nobumasa (1646–1710), who undertook a wide-ranging infrastructure plan that also included the promotion of sericulture. His domain produced lacquerware in a distinctive regional style, known today as Tsugaru-nuri, distinguished by its flat, multicolored mottled background.30 As will be discussed in chapter 3, the fifth daimyo Nobuhisa (1669–1746) sought to improve the quality of local production by sending Ogawa Haritsu to oversee the workshop. In the eighteenth century, lacquerwares produced there were commonly referred to as kara-nuri, Chinese-style lacquer, a likely reference to the Chinese motifs that featured in its decor, as seen in the example illustrated here (figure 1.5).31 The systematic cultivation of lacquer trees in other domains likewise led to the emergence of other distinctive regional styles of lacquerware destined for local use rather than gift giving, as was Tsugaru domain’s kara-nuri. Wajima, on the Noto Peninsula in modern Ishikawa Prefecture, for instance, achieved a reputation for its utilitarian, high-footed, lathe-turned bowls and other vessels (figure 1.6).32 Yet it is worth keeping in mind that such beautifully formed artifacts were sometimes produced at the cost of the living tree. As noted above, too many incisions to extract lacquer at one time could kill a tree in a single season. Lacquer, like paper, cotton, indigo, and other commercial crops, was an important source of tax revenue for regional daimyo facing chronic budget deficits. The imposition of unreasonably high taxes, however, often resulted in protests by rural growers that impacted production. Such was the case in Yonezawa, the domain of the Uesugi in modern Yamagata Prefecture, where asa (hemp and ramie) and lacquer were the two main crops. Domain officials not only required that lacquer sap be sold at a low rate to them but also, between the 1680s and 1690s, levied a tax increase of more than 200 percent on the output from each tree. As a result, as historian Mark Ravina has written, “farmers found it more economical to uproot their trees than to pay

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Figure 1.5. Oval Tsugaru-nuri inkstone box with Chinese recluse Lin Bu greeting a crane, dated 1731. Lacquer with inlays, 5.6 × 25.7 × 34.6 cm. 1996.242.25.A-B. Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, The Elaine Ehrenkranz Collection of Japanese Lacquer. Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

taxes on them . . . . Despite edicts banning the destruction of lacquer trees, lacquer cultivation steadily declined from over 260,000 trees in 1689 to some 190,000 in 1772.”33 Historically, lacquer was produced in many parts of the country. Before the sixteenth century, the region of modern-day Wakayama Prefecture was noted for the quality of its lacquer, but over the course of the early modern era, lacquer tree cultivation became increasingly concentrated in northern

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Figure 1.6. Spouted Wajima ware bowl, 18th c. Red lacquer, 21 × 36 × 36 cm. Jeffrey Montgomery Collection MC 180. Photo © Yuki Seli.

regions. Although trees could grow on relatively poor soil, they required ten years to mature, and only very small amounts of sap could be drawn annually from each one. Trees were tapped three or four times a year, from June through October, from both the trunk and the branches. Because of the different methods of tapping and the age and health of the tree, it is difficult to determine the annual harvest, but one modern estimate claims it to be a mere 150–200 grams per tree.34 The limited output and the labor required to tap and refine lacquer help to explain the high cost of the goods coated with it. Lacquer was used as a protective coating on a multitude of household goods, but in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it was also extensively deployed in the decoration of buildings such as the

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Chikubushima Shrine, originally built in Kyoto, and the Ōsaki Hachiman Shrine far to the north in Sendai.35 So great was the use of lacquer in the interior and exterior decor of temples, shrines, and residences that local supplies could not keep up with demand, and raw lacquer had to be imported to fill the gap. Excavation of an early seventeenth-century lacquermaker’s shop on Oikedori in Kyoto between 2003 and 2004 brought to light large four-eared storage jars and tools still bearing traces of Thai thitsi lacquer.36 Dutch ships continued to supply large quantities of lacquer from Southeast Asia throughout the century; between 1650 and 1680, an average of more than four thousand pounds a year was imported.37 Thitsi was thought to be inferior in quality to Japanese urushi because of its viscosity, dark color, and long drying time. Consequently, it was generally applied only to the foundation layers of fine domestic lacquerwares, but it seems to have been used more extensively for those goods made for export to Europe, where it was often mixed with urushi. Price may have been a motivating factor in the use of imported lacquer since it was considerably cheaper than the domestic product.38 Lacquer trees were among the shiboku sansō, the “four trees and three grasses” that Miyazaki Yasusada (1623–1697) promoted in his Nōgyō zensho (Complete compendium of agriculture), the first and enduringly influential agricultural tract to be published during the early modern era. The other “trees” included mulberry, kōzo, and tea, and the “grasses,” cotton, hemp, ramie, indigo, and madder (used to produce a red dye). Miyazaki sought to provide practical information to help farmers increase their output. Though of warrior class background, he devoted himself to farming before writing his magnum opus, which takes a systematic approach to the seasons, weather, local climate, soil conditions, fertilizer, and irrigation, as well as individual crops and forest management. The cultivation of cotton, for instance, required considerable fertilizer, and at a time when brush and other plant by-products were scarce, he recommended the application of commercial fertilizer made from dried sardines and pressed oil waste.39

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Echoing wider concerns of the time, he also stressed the value of agricultural management in developing domainal wealth.40 Kōzo was such an important commercial crop that an entire book, Kamis­ uki chōhōki (A handy guide to papermaking; 1798), targeting a more general readership, was devoted to its cultivation and processing.41 Papermaking had been an important craft since at least the eighth century, but it assumed new importance in the seventeenth owing to the vast bureaucratic needs of the shogunal and domainal authorities as well as the flourishing publishing industry. Paper was also used to make many articles of daily life ranging from clothing and umbrellas to hair ties (motoyui). (See figure 3.4.) Distinctive styles of paper were produced in many parts of the country, and even within one region, there could be considerable specialization. The inventory of the contents of the shogunal storehouse compiled in 1617, following the death of the first shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, lists forty-eight varieties, ranging from hōsho, the paper most commonly used for documents and printing, and paper for shoji screens, to chagami, the special paper used to seal the mouth of the large jar in which tea was stored.42 Kunisaki Jihei (act. late 1700s), the author of Kamisuki chōhōki, was a paper merchant based in Echizen, historically one of the leading producers of fine paper. As Jihei notes in his introduction to this well-illustrated publication, papermaking involved grueling physical labor, which was carried out chiefly by the female members of farm households during the winter months. In regions such as Echizen, however, it was such an important industry that it was made throughout the year. Makers benefited only minimally from its production. Like rice, it was something that peasants produced but were not permitted to consume since most domainal authorities required that the output be sold to them at below market rates. Paper may be made from many organic substances, but the chief sources in the early modern era were the bast fibers of one of three plants, kōzo (Broussonetia papy­ rifera), mitsumata (Edgeworthia papyrifera), and ganpi (Wikstoemia canescens).

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Kōzo and mitsumata were cultivated, while ganpi was harvested in the wild. Kōzo fiber was used to make about 80 percent of the paper, because it could be grown almost anywhere on the archipelago, from the Ryukyus in the south to Niigata Prefecture in the north.43 Jihei guides the reader through each stage of the laborious papermaking process, from the cutting of the shrub to the packaging and shipping of the finished product (figure 1.7). With the exception of the cutting of the paper mulberry, women figured conspicuously in all these operations. To prepare the pulp, first, branches were steamed to loosen the black outer bark. This bark was stripped to reveal the inner white pulp, which was then washed and cleaned of impurities in a fast-flowing river. Next, these long white strips were boiled in a cauldron. Finally, the long fibers were pounded into a pulp and poured into a large vat with cold water and a binder made from a variety of the hibiscus root. Sheets of paper were made one by one in a mold by dipping a bamboo screen into the pulpy liquid and shaking it back and forth until an evenly distributed layer had formed. (See figure 2.12.) This physically demanding procedure produces the dense crisscross pattern of long fibers that gives Japanese paper its exceptional strength and durability. Once the sheet was formed, it was removed to a press to extract the excess liquid and transferred to a wooden frame for drying in the sun. Since most paper was made in the provinces, metropolitan readers may not have been familiar with all the operations involved, but they are likely to have seen the final stages of pounding the pulp, couching the paper on bamboo screens, and drying it in the sun on boards, because these activities sometimes were carried out in urban workshops, most notably in the vicinity of the Kamisukigawa in Kyoto and in the Asakusa district of Edo.44 These steps were also required in the recycling of paper, which was an important part of the early modern paper industry in most cities, especially in Edo, where discarded paper, worn secondhand books, and paper scraps

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Figure 1.7. Kunisaki Jihei (act. late 18th c.), Cutting kōzo, from A Handy Guide to Papermaking (Kamisuki chōhōki; 1798). Woodblockprinted book. Photo after 1925 facsimile, Harvard Yenching Library.

were systematically collected by door-to-door buyers. In some cases, wholesalers purchased and distributed the waste paper to papermaking villages and then bought back the recycled product.45 Recycled paper was of low quality, but it was cheaper than new paper. One of its chief commercial uses was to form the layered inner covers of printed books.46 Access to material resources tied craft practitioners to particular places and times, unless the material was readily portable. Thus, smelting metals

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and firing ceramics generally took place in the vicinity of mines and sources of clay, respectively, but paper could be made in the city, because kōzo branches or semiprocessed fiber were light enough to be carried by packhorse from farm to workshops elsewhere. The manufacture of some materials could even be distributed across multiple sites, as was cotton, the most important commercial crop. Cotton had significantly replaced bast fibers, principally asa, as a material for peasant clothing in the late seventeenth century and came to be used for household furnishings such as cushions and bedcovers as well. It had the advantage of being softer, warmer, and quicker to produce than asa but the disadvantage of requiring the application of costly fertilizer. It was grown, ginned, spun, and woven in many regions for household use, but in the eighteenth century, commercial production became concentrated in the Kinai region, where both climate and proximity to the Kyoto and Osaka markets led it to develop rapidly, often displacing rice in importance.47 Initially, farmers sent the ginned cotton to Osaka to be processed, but later, the growth of household-based industry in rural regions where labor costs were lower displaced urban wholesalers. Rural cotton production involved a well-organized division of labor spread across many sites: farmers who harvested and separated the fibers from the seed often sold the ginned cotton to merchants who in turn gave the semiprocessed material to other farm households to make into yarn and cloth. According to agrarian historian Thomas Smith, “cotton in the early nineteenth century commonly passed through fourteen or more hands from raw material to finished cloth.”48 Weaving, the final stage in this process, was generally carried out by women. A skilled weaver could produce in one day as much as one tan (about twelve meters), the amount required to make one kosode, the precursor of the kimono.49 Some areas, such as Tanba, northwest of Kyoto, specialized in cloth with distinctive patterns of woven stripes or checks while others became known for pressure-resist or stencil-printed patterns (figure 1.8).

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Figure 1.8. Fragment of cloth of plain silk and cotton weave with stripes, 19th c. Tanba region. T.100Q-1969. © Victoria and Albert Museum.

Cotton was the principal fabric for clothing worn by commoners, and indigo was its primary dyestuff. The variety grown in Japan was Polygonum tinctorium (in Japanese, tade ai; dyer’s knotweed), a subtropical annual or biannual plant. Specialist dye shops (kon’ya) had flourished in villages and metropolitan areas throughout western Japan since the introduction of cotton in the fifteenth century. Although many villages with nearby indigo fields developed specialty indigo fabrics, in the early modern period, commercial cultivation of this dyestuff was concentrated on the island of

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Figure 1.9. Indigo vats at Higeta Indigo House, Mashiko, Tochigi Prefecture. Photo by Lauren L. Lancy, The Kindcraft.

Shikoku, in the province of Awa (modern Tokushima Prefecture). Indigo seeds were planted in beds in February and transplanted to the fields in May. Leaves were harvested twice, once before the flowers appeared in July and again in September. The harvested leaves were then shredded and winnowed, and the resulting leaf mass spread out in sheds, covered with a straw mat, and dampened and raked periodically to encourage fermentation. After about three months, when the leaves had darkened and solidified through oxidation and enzyme action, the compost, or sukumo, was further fermented in a vat with the addition of water and lye. Large commercial enterprises might have as many as seventy-two vats, as does Higeta House, in Mashiko (in modern Tochigi Prefecture), which has been in operation since

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the Edo period (figure 1.9). Cotton could be immersed in the resulting dyebath, or, if the dye was to be sold elsewhere, the indigo dye could be further reduced in size and weight by being pounded into a powder and formed into cakes that specialist merchants could easily transport. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the growth of merchant networks led to an increasingly integrated market system that was sustained by a well-maintained network of highways and roads connecting even distant regions to one another and to the city. Chief among them were the Five Highways—the Tōkaidō, Kisokaidō or Nakasendō, Kōshūdō, Nikkōdō, and Oshūdō—each punctuated at regular intervals by post stations. Travel on these roads was driven by the sankin kōtai system, in which feudal lords and their retinues had to spend alternate years in Edo. The Tōkaidō, the 560-kilometer (351-mile) coastal road between Kyoto and Edo, carried the heaviest traffic, but the inland Kisokaidō was also well traveled. Raw and semiprocessed materials as well as finished goods circulated along these highways as well as on river and sea routes.

pr ac t ic a l l e a r n i ng a n d t h e i n v e s t igat ion of t h i ng s The availability of natural resources and the development of tools and technologies to exploit them became matters of keen interest among government officials from the start of Tokugawa rule. While official rhetoric continued to proclaim that the warrior class should devote itself to the military and literary arts (bu and bun), practical administrative skills were required to manage the country during the prolonged peace that followed the Tokugawa consolidation of power. The Zhu Xi school of Neo-Confucianism, which became the shogunate’s guiding philosophy, was chiefly concerned with ethics, but under the banner of “practical learning,” jitsugaku, and “the investigation of things,” kaibutsu, it also legitimated the study of natural history and technology. In the Zhu Xi worldview, nature and its exploitation

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were not separate from political and economic considerations, because it was held that the morality of the ruler determined the natural order. As the scholar Kumazawa Banzan (1619–1691) put it, “If the state is immoral, the ether of Heaven is out of harmony, and the five grains do not ripen completely.”50 It is difficult to know to what extent this scholarly discourse reached beyond elite circles, but there is no doubt that the new culture of empiricism and the monetization of the natural world that followed from it impacted those who cultivated and made things from its resources. Hiraga Gennai’s (1728–1780) development of Gennai-yaki, a green, yellow, and brown lead-glazed stoneware, exemplifies the way these material and economic conditions informed craft practice (figure 1.10). Gennai was a low-ranking samurai who resigned his position in service to the lord of Takamatsu to devote himself to the study of the natural sciences (honzōgaku). Among other accomplishments, he organized exhibitions of flora and fauna, conducted surveys of mineral resources in northern Akita domain, developed a technique for glassblowing, conducted experiments with static electricity, and attempted (unsuccessfully) to develop a fireproof fabric made of asbestos and to raise sheep for wool. Many of his activities were motivated by a desire to reduce the country’s dependency on foreign goods by better exploiting its own natural resources and craft skills and to promote local industry and enterprise (shokusan kōgyō). Medicinal ginseng, printed cotton chintzes imported from India, and silks and ceramics from China loomed large among the goods for which domestic substitutes were sought. In 1755, following a visit to Nagasaki, where Gennai became aware of the importance of international trade, he developed a new style of ceramics in kilns in his hometown of Shido in Sanuki Province (in modern Kagawa Prefecture). Stonewares called Shidoyaki, after the town, were already made there, but Gennai immodestly named the new wares Gennai-yaki. These were predominantly in the form of square, hexagonal, octagonal, and foliate dishes made serially using press molds that lent themselves to the application

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Figure 1.10. Square plate; stoneware with overglaze enamels (Sanuki ware, Gennai type); 18th c.; H 4.4 cm (1 ¾ in.); W 22.2 cm. (8 ¾ in.). The Harry G. C. Packard Collection of Asian Art, Gift of Harry G. C. Packard, and Purchase, Fletcher, Rogers, Harris Brisbane Dick, and Louis V. Bell Funds, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and The Annenberg Fund Inc. Gift, 1975. 1975.268.591. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.

of pictorial surface designs in sharp relief. By glazing them in a brown, yellow, and predominantly green enamel palette, Gennai wanted to evoke the luxury Kōchi wares from Fujian Province in China that were popular among practitioners of the tea ceremony. (The Japanese term Kōchi comes from the Chinese Jiaozhi, a reference to the region around present-day Vietnam where these

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ceramics were thought to have been made.) While the wares produced in Gennai’s kiln shared the palette of brightly colored enamel Kōchi ceramics, their decorative forms and motifs were adapted from a variety of sources. Some, like the one reproduced here, feature motifs of Chinese inspiration.51 Others put Gennai’s global awareness on display by designs of maps of Japan, Europe, and even the Americas. Gennai’s grand ambitions for the marketing of his ceramics are clear from a request to extract clay from Amagusa Island, off Kyushu, submitted to domainal authorities there in 1770. The Japanese place great value on foreign things and we lay out great sums of money for them . . . . In the case of pottery . . . if the Japanese ware is good, then naturally we will not spend our gold and silver on the foreign commodity. Rather to the contrary: since both the Chinese and Hollanders will come to seek out these wares and carry them home, this will be of everlasting benefit. Since this is originally clay, no matter how much pottery we send out, there need be no anxiety about a depletion of resources.52

Contrary to Gennai’s reassuring claim, depletion of clay resources was a concern. The Nabeshima, who operated domainal kilns in Arita, had guards protecting their porcelain clay sources.53 Likewise, in the Seto region, which was under the rule of the Owari branch of the Tokugawa, the number of kilns was restricted “in order to avoid exhausting raw materials and firewood or glutting the market with inferior goods.”54 The pioneers in practical learning were chiefly physicians, botanists, and scholars who sought to identify, sort, and classify useful medicinal and other plants on the basis of firsthand observation. The introduction and circulation of Li Shizhen’s Bencao gangmu (1603), a Chinese publication on materia medica known in Japan as Honzō kōmoku, which included plants, animals, and minerals thought to have medicinal applications, was a catalyst for their investigations, but their evidential research, collection, and analysis focused on Japan. Kaibara Ekken (1630–1714) was an early proponent of jitsugaku

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whose exceptional breadth of scholarship had a lasting impact on many fields, especially botanical studies. His encyclopedic Yamato honzō (Medicinal herbs of Japan; 1709) served as a model for many subsequent botanical publications. His belief in the importance of agricultural research for the education and well-being of the people also informed his colleague Miyazaki Yasusada’s Nōgyō zensho (An agricultural compendium; 1697), for which he wrote an introduction.55 Policies implemented between 1716 and 1745 by Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684–1751) to redress agricultural shortages and the negative balance of trade with China served as catalysts for the spread of such systematic, empirical, and commercially oriented interventions into the natural world. He established a medicinal garden at Edo Castle and urged the establishment of others across the archipelago. He also ordered a nationwide survey of flora and fauna, Shobutsu ruisan (ca. 1734–36), a landmark in the collection and classification of authoritative information about the country’s natural resources. This ambitious publication comprised 638 volumes, naming, describing, and classifying 3,590 species of plants and animals as well as metals, stones, and jewels in domains across the archipelago. Yoshimune’s undertaking led to similar inquiries into exploitable resources and to the implementation of new agricultural policies in many domains, with the aim of bringing in additional revenue.56 The promotion of cash crops and related craft industries was often framed in terms of the “prosperity of the country,” kokueki, a reference not to the nation but rather to the domainal state.57 In many domains, the promotion of new crops went hand in hand with that of crafts that made use of local resources such as clay. In 1678, for instance, Yamauchi Toyomasa, the lord of Tosa domain in Shikoku, ordered Morita Kyūemon, a low-ranking samurai trained as a potter, to travel to Edo to promote the Odo ceramics he made in a workshop near the domain castle, where suitable clay had been found. There was precedent for such an endeavor since the Matsuura and Nabeshima lords had been successfully

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sponsoring the production of luxury porcelains since early in the century. The sources of desirable clays and procedures for forming, glazing, and firing were closely held workshop secrets, but complex interdomainal negotiations enabled Kyūemon to stop at various ceramics production sites to collect samples of finished wares from which he could learn. Information gleaned by such traveling craft professionals played an important role in the diffusion of specialist knowledge. Kyūemon carried with him a portable potter’s wheel and local clay in order to demonstrate his technique before members of the lord’s house, visiting daimyo, and other government officials in Edo. Over the course of more than thirty demonstrations, he received guidance from attendees about desirable shapes and styles that he carried back to Tosa together with commissions from a powerful government official. Owing to the latter’s fall from grace, however, the commission was never completed, and Odo ware did not succeed in expanding beyond a local pottery that supplied utilitarian wares.58 No examples are known today. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the “investigation of things” spread from the daimyo elite to a wider public. Enthusiasts formed social circles centered on the collection and display of animal, plants, and minerals. The Osaka sake merchant Kimura Kenkadō’s celebrated collection of rare shells, bamboo, fish, and insects became the focal point of a convivial cultural salon that brought together men of different social classes from across the country with a common interest in the natural world.59 Information about plants, animals, fish, insects, and minerals to be found on the archipelago was further shared through product exhibitions (bussankai) held in Edo and elsewhere, where collectors, regardless of background, were encouraged to display specimens. Gennai organized the most successful of these exhibitions, held in Edo in 1762. His pragmatic, utilitarian mode of thinking, in which experience was privileged over text-based knowledge, was symptomatic of the evolving attitudes and problem-solving habits of the late eighteenth century, when the focus of practical learning shifted

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from ethical concerns to a stress on material investigations in order to understand the forces underlying change in the natural world. It is often claimed that the Japanese people have an innate love of nature and live in harmony with it, and that this outlook is expressed in the special sensitivity to materials evident in its crafts.60 It is difficult to reconcile this view with the reality that overexploitation of the forest for timber to build temples, palaces, and castles, for fuel for kilns and heating, and for fertilizer for rice fields led early modern Japan to the brink of ecological disaster.61 This cultural stereotype, as pervasive among Japanese themselves as it is among Euro-Americans, is said to grow out of the ethos of Shinto, an ancient belief system in which some trees, rocks, and other natural phenomena were identified with the divine. However, as environmental historian Conrad Totman has pointed out, “The ‘nature’ of this sensibility is an aesthetic abstraction that has little relationship to the ‘nature’ of a real ecosystem.”62 Government policies regarding the management and use of natural resources of all kinds were unabashedly pragmatic. Forest workers, Totman argues, shared this outlook: “People who labored to salvage Japan’s forests were not especially concerned with beauty or driven by any ideological sense of the aesthetic of nature. They had other matters on their mind.” And, he continues, “we do not find any themes of Buddhist reverence for ‘sentient beings’ showing up as reason or rationale in forest policy.”63 Yet not all saw the forest strictly in the utilitarian light of domainal administrators. While many exponents of practical learning dismissed beliefs in Buddhist and Shinto deities as superstitious, peasants and craft makers nonetheless carried out rituals to appease them when their abodes were disrupted or to harness their creative powers.64 Nihon sankai meibutsu zue informs the reader that when a mine was opened, a shrine dedicated to the deities residing on the mountain was built at its entrance, and on festival days, theatrical performances and exhibitions were held there to gain their protection.65 Craft makers struggling to control materials and processes,

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such as the fermentation critical to making indigo dye, whose workings they did not fully understand, offered prayers to the deities who were believed to aid in their successful completion. Even today, many dyers continue to make offerings of sake to the indigo gods to ensure successful fermentation.66 Ritual was a given in the daily lives of those involved in extracting, growing, and making, but the attribution of sacred qualities to a particular place or process is not synonymous with a love of nature or with environmental sensitivity. The relationship between religion and environmental ethics in Japan is a modern phenomenon. Early modern attitudes toward the natural world and its resources were complex, filled with ambiguities and contradictions. They were informed by many factors, among them lived experience, religious beliefs, and sentiments that were colored by class and locale. There were pronounced differences between those living in urban and rural settings that both shaped and reflected the gap between the lived realities of nature and how it was represented in poetry and painting. The idealization of nature was a predominantly urban phenomenon, a construct manifested in poetry, painting, and other arts as a surrogate for the actual experience of the natural world.67 Moreover, thinking about natural resources was neither uniform nor unchanging. Lacquer, because of its seemingly magical capacity to metamorphose from a liquid into a hard, durable, waterproof substance, may have had magical and spiritual connotations in the ancient and medieval eras, but by the eighteenth century, it was no longer “the material of the sacred” but just one of many desirable natural products (bussan) to be exploited for human welfare.68 Essentializing claims of a homogeneous and unchanging Japanese love of nature ignore the social, economic, and political realities surrounding the cultivation, extraction, and deployment of natural resources.

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c h a p t e r t wo

Picturing the Early Modern Craftscape

The familiar view of Japan’s early modern craftscape is that it was urban, structured hierarchically around secretive hereditary workshops comprised of artisans (shokunin) who were concentrated in the three cities of Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo. The geographical and human reality, however, was far more complex. Artisanal work, it is true, was conspicuous in these cities, which had some 15 percent of a total population that, by the nineteenth century, had reached roughly thirty million. In the urban environment, craft makers tended to live in close proximity to one another, facilitating interaction among them. The areas those of particular professions once inhabited can still be identified today in names such as Kon’ya-chō (dyers’ quarter) and Kaji-chō (smithy quarter) in Tokyo’s Kanda district, or the Kamisukikawa (papermakers’ river) in northwest Kyoto (figure 2.1). During the construction boom of the early seventeenth century, when the population of many castle towns swelled to more than ten thousand, dynamic artisanal communities also formed there, practicing trades that initially supplied basic necessities and later, elite products such as lacquerwares, ceramics, silk textiles, and metalwork. Artisanal production became increasingly dispersed over the eighteenth century, as feudal lords sought to stabilize local economies through a concerted program of diversification from rice monoculture

57

Figure 2.1. Utagawa Hiroshige I (1797–1858), “Dyers’ Quarter, Kanda (Kanda Kon’ya-chō),” from series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei), 1857. Woodblock print, vertical ōban. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. William Sturgis Bigelow Collection. 11.36876.50.

to silk, indigo, lacquer, and papermaking, and rural entrepreneurs also looked for ways to improve their lives by making salable goods using local resources. These new centers ranged from small-scale family textile operations in Echigo, in the northern reaches of modern-day Niigata Prefecture, to industrial-scale porcelain production in Hizen, on the southern island of Kyushu. The print media played a critical role in disseminating information about artisans, their practices, and their products. Woodblock-printed books and single-sheet prints made artisans visible as a recognizable class possessed of a diversity of specialized skills that individually and collectively made productive contributions to society. Although their motivations, techniques, audiences, and goals differed widely, these publications were all constituents of what historian Mary Elizabeth Berry has called the “library of public information.”1 Like the contents of any library, the information they provided was not always up-to-date or even accurate. Their longevity through circulation and recirculation through lending libraries as well as the reprinting and adaptive reuse of individual images often meant that the stereotypes they disseminated did not keep up with reality. Nonetheless, they often continued to inform the way that the public imagined making things long after their initial appearance. This chapter uses woodblock-illustrated books and prints in circulation beginning in the late seventeenth century as a lens through which to understand the world of craft makers, the locales where they worked, and the things they made. Jinrin kinmō zui (Illustrated encyclopedia of humanity; 1690) offers, as part of its occupational inventory, a particularly comprehensive picture of the profusion of crafts practiced at the time of its publication.2 Onna daigaku takarabako (Treasury of greater learning for women; 1716) is one of the earliest publications to systematically address women’s work.3 It is characterized as a moralizing etiquette book (ōraimono), intended to establish proper Neo-Confucian patterns of behavior, appearance, and attitude,

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but it is also a household manual that provides illustrated guidance in the practical skills deemed suitable for women of different social strata both inside and outside the home.4 Nihon sankai meibutsu zue (Illustrated famous specialties of the mountains and seas of Japan; 1754) and Sankai meisan zue (Illustrated famous products of mountain and sea; 1799) are publications organized topographically, highlighting, as their titles indicate, noteworthy products of mountain and sea ranging from edible delicacies to crafts.5 Their depictions of craft making in rural areas across the archipelago complement those in the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Humanity, which is primarily concerned with the three cities. These books, which represent only a tiny sampling of publications showcasing the manifold talents of craft professionals, reveal the geographic scope and diversity of the early modern craftscape. It is important to keep in mind, however, that they project idealized images of artisanal activity, not necessarily accurate, empirically informed representations of reality. All paint an optimistic picture of the social and economic empowerment of the artisanal class. Such publications represented a world their creators wanted to see, but they were also operative images, in the sense that they could become part of the way both makers and viewers thought and acted.

o c c u pat iona l di v e r si t y Jinrin kinmō zui is a particularly rich inventory of the range of professional specializations within the crafts. It became part of a discursive economy of circulating images made familiar through adaptation and repetition in other publications. It absorbed and reformulated the pictorial conventions for representing artisans from earlier scrolls and screens, but its descriptive scope is more comprehensive, its approach both more didactic and commercially oriented, and its intended audience more socially diverse. Its inventory of hundreds of professional activities is a microcosm of society at the time of its initial publication in 1690. Although the precise rationale for the ordering of

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the artisanal activity represented is not always easy to discern, the hierarchical structure of its seven volumes clearly expresses the view of an orderly society where everyone has a designated place. In this sense, the encyclopedia sustains and is sustained by the prevailing system of belief and institutional practices in which a benevolent ruler assures a smoothly running society divided into four classes, from high to low: warrior, farmer, artisan, and merchant. Shokunin was the officially designated artisanal class within the fourpart hierarchy instituted by the Tokugawa shogunate.6 The term is usually understood today to refer to one whose profession is the making of things with the hands. This is the definition offered in the Kojien dictionary, but it is a modern one that does not take into account the range of activities shokunin engaged in during the early modern era. At that time, its members were understood to be the possessors of specialized skills of benefit to society, but these did not invariably involve making things. This class also included shamanesses, acrobats, and physicians. In this respect, what was understood as craft in early modern Japan had much in common with the Greek term techne (“skill”). As Larry Shiner has written of Greece in The Invention of Art, “techne embraced things as diverse as carpentry and poetry, shoemaking and medicine, sculpture and horse breaking . . . it referred less to a class of objects than to the human ability to make and perform.”7 Definitions of shokunin are further complicated by the fact that the artisanal and merchant classes overlapped: the former often sold the products of their labor in shops that were extensions of their workplaces. Because urban artisans and merchants lived intersecting lives, often inhabiting the same neighborhoods, they were collectively known as chōnin, literally, “people of the quarter.” The Tokugawa-era designation of those involved in artisanal activity as shokunin conceals the reality that men, women, and children of all classes made things, usually within the context of formal or household-based workshops. Rice straw collected from the harvested fields was braided

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to make rope, sandals, and round mats for seating, an activity most farm households engaged in during the winter months. Farm families were also important links in the supply chain for silk, raw lacquer, paper mulberry, indigo, and other material resources. Many lower-level samurai, especially those without a government sinecure, such as the polymath Hiraga Gennai (1728–1780) and the lacquerer Ogawa Haritsu (1663–1747), were involved in artisanal activity in an entrepreneurial or managerial capacity. The wellknown painter Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716) and his brother the potter Kenzan (1663–1743) belonged to the merchant class. Feudal lords tried their hand at Raku ceramics under the guidance of professional potters, firing them in “garden kilns” (niwayaki) on the grounds of their castle estates.8 And even the Empress Tōfukumon’in (1607–1678) and the court ladies in her circle created oshie, relief pictures using scraps of fabric pasted onto paper, boxes, or other surfaces.9 Despite this diversity, the popular perception of craft makers is inextricably bound up with the portrayal of shokunin as a pictorial genre in painting and print, a development that was, in turn, bound up with the consolidation of craft professionals as a recognized social class. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, men and women of different professions had been represented as performative proxies for poets in scrolls depicting imaginary poetry competitions (shokunin utaawase) commissioned by and for an elite audience of courtiers and samurai. Although this mode of depiction did not disappear, it lost its original function as shrine offerings for the gods and took on aesthetic and entertainment value. The Shichijūichi shokunin utaawase (Poetry competition among various professions in seventy-one rounds)—thought to have been composed around 1500, though its earliest surviving hand-painted copy dates from the 1630s—is symptomatic of this shift. It retained the conventional poetic format of pairing poets and poems but was not produced for ritual needs.10 A further change is the new agency granted shokunin. Even as they impersonate poets, their own voices also can

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be heard in the cries that are inscribed adjacent to their depictions. For instance, in Shichijūichi shokunin utaawase, the female floss seller calls out, “Buy my floss! It’s from Shinobu” [Mutsu Province], and the indigo dyer says, “[This customer] asked me to dye it repeatedly until it is dark.”11 By the late sixteenth century, the portrayal of artisans had become increasingly associated with auspicious visualizations of the rebuilding of Kyoto at the end of a long period of destructive warfare that had left the imperial capital in ruins. Well-known examples of this genre of imagery are Rakuchū rakugaizu (Views inside and outside the capital), screens offering panoramic views of Kyoto and its surroundings with streets bustling with craftsmen making and selling their wares to strolling customers (figure 2.2).12 These depictions, however, were more concerned with celebrating the newly stable and vibrant life in the city than with the specifics of how craftsmen carried out their professional activities. The conflation of shops where both making and selling took place speaks to the change from a command to a consumer society, one in which city dwellers were no longer devoting all their income to basic necessities. Private commissions continued to prevail among the warrior elite, some of whom retained the services of painters, lacquerers, and armorers, but from the late sixteenth century on, most craft makers were part of a dynamic market economy. This economy was not confined to Japan but even included unseen consumers in China and Europe. Handscrolls of shokunin-as-poets featured as many as 142 professions, but Illustrated Encyclopedia of Humanity represents many more, a recognition of new subspecialties within preexisting occupations following from the introduction of new materials, technologies, and fashions.13 Artisanal activities figure in the third, fifth, and sixth volumes of Jinrin kinmō zui. Among those who make their living off the land or water (sagyo), for instance, we find potters, stonemasons, and men fashioning round straw mats and weaving coarse blinds.14 The fifth volume, devoted to saikunin, “practitioners of fine

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Figure 2.2. Detail of views inside and outside the capital (Rakuchū rakugaizu) (Funaki version, left screen); 1614–15; pair of six-fold screens, ink and color on gold ground; each screen H 162.7 × W 342.4 cm; Tokyo National Museum Image Archives.

craftmanship,” includes, among others, painters, carvers of Buddhist statues, brush makers, picture mounters, embroiderers, fan makers, specialists in mother-of-pearl, pipe makers, the makers of bags for tea ceremony utensils, doll makers, and carvers of tea scoops. The class identified under the category shoku (the character in shokunin) designates carpenters, plasterers, roofers, tatami makers, bell casters, palanquin makers, trunk makers, parasol makers, and papermakers yet, inexplicably, also those professions that demanded exacting skills such as drilling holes in Buddhist rosary beads and embroidering family crests on the backs of robes. The term saiku (formed from the characters for fine or detailed and craftsmanship) seems to be commensurate with the modern understanding of craft as an artifact fabricated with finely honed skills and technical knowhow. In Edo-period usage, the label saikunin designated artisans who carried out activities that required precision and were often small in scale. Until the Kamakura period (1185–1337), when the term shokunin first came into use, saiku was used to refer to highly regarded professions such as lacquerer, carpenter, and woodcarver.15 The designation of the Tokugawa shogunal office under which lacquerers worked as the saikudokoro (craft workshop) and of the overseer of the shogunal workshops as saiku no gashira (head craftsman), with saiku kiki (skilled craftsman) and saiku jōzu (able craftsman) working beneath him, is a legacy of this earlier usage.16 Although painters were on a continuum with lacquerers, weavers, metalworkers, and other artisanal professionals, there were hierarchies among and within these crafts. That makers of sword guards followed by painters open the saiku section and carpenters open the shoku section is likely a reflection of the importance of metal and woodworking in the hierarchy of crafts. Indeed, according to Portuguese missionary João Rodrigues’s (1561– 1634) account of Japan, prevailing views on the relative standing of these professions held that “After this [architecture] comes the art of working iron, principally for the offensive weapons which the Japanese prize so

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highly. This art competes with the previous one [i.e., architecture] as regards nobility and esteem, and there arise great disputes among them [the Japanese] whether this art or architecture in wood occupies the first place in all the mechanical arts.”17 Craftsmen in the building trades—carpenters, sawyers, stonemasons, plasterers, roof thatchers and tilers, the makers of tatami mats and of doors and shoji frames—were in high demand in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Kyoto was still recovering from a century of warfare that had left the city in ruins, the shogunal capital of Edo was being built up on the grounds of a swampy military camp, and across the archipelago, hundreds of daimyo were seeking to grow thriving towns around their castles. As defensive castle building ceased by order of the Tokugawa shogunate, attention shifted to palaces and mansions for the military and aristocratic elite, temples and shrines to ensure the long life and well-being of the cities’ inhabitants, and row houses for the multitudes of artisans and merchants who supplied their needs. Explosive population growth, not to mention the frequent fires that swept the cities, guaranteed steady work. Carpenters, daiku, were at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of those involved in building the urban infrastructure. Comprising one-third of the artisanal class, they were a large and diverse group, ranging from those with the structural knowledge and administrative skills to oversee vast building projects employing hundreds of workers, to shipbuilders, a specialty of Osaka, and those specialized in making the wooden drawlooms on which Kyoto’s famed Nishijin weavers depended. So important were they that in the late sixteenth century, fifty families of carpenters who had been invited to Kanazawa, the castle town of the Maeda domain of Kaga, were exempt from paying taxes on property.18 There was no profession of architect. Instead, a master carpenter, designated tōryō (literally “ridgepole”), a new term in the seventeenth century, oversaw the design and construction of a building.19 This included responsi-

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bility for the quality and workmanship of materials, for the completion of the project in a timely manner, and for the feeding, housing, and conduct of those under his supervision. The master carpenter also had to adapt to unexpected local conditions such as topography or the changing demands of a patron. Little is known about the vast majority of these men, but those belonging to the hereditary Heinouchi and Kōra lineages, who were officially retained by the Tokugawa shoguns, left records of their activities. Heinouchi Yoshimasa, writing in Shōmei, a family design manual of 1610, outlined the skills expected of a master carpenter: laying out building plans with a carpenter’s square; making proportional computations (kiwari); handwork including sawing, chiseling, and joinery; preparing and carving decorative designs for transoms and other spaces.20 Sawyers (kobiki) became a profession separate from carpenters as part of this growing division of specialized labor. Mortise and tenon joinery (sashimono) was common both to architecture and the making of household furnishings, but its practitioners too became a separate profession. The brief entry on the master of joinery (sashimonoshi) informs the reader: “he makes a myriad boxes using paulownia, cypress, and cedar. Trunks (nagamochi) and chests (hitsu) are made of cedar.”21 The entry does not mention chests fitted with drawers (tansu), because these were only beginning to be produced about the time of Jinrin kinmō zui’s publication.22 The importance of arms and armor to samurai identity and status, even after their actual use declined, led to growing specialization in this area as well. A reflection of this is the separate shops for swords, guards, and rayskin scabbards shown in the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Humanity.23 Growing emphasis on appearance rather than function also led to the development of new decorative techniques. The use of rayskin to cover sword hilts had a long history, but from the late sixteenth century, there was a craze for sword scabbards made from lacquer enlivened with scattered rayskin denticles, a showy new technique whose effects resembled that of sprinkled gold and

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mother-of-pearl. Over the course of the Tokugawa period, as specialists in sword scabbards developed many decorative techniques using this material, the rayskin specialist (sameshi) grew in importance.24 Rayskin, along with elephant ivory, was a highly sought-after import from Southeast Asia and an important constituent of both Chinese and Dutch trade in Nagasaki. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Humanity is more focused on inventory and classification than on detailed explanations of the techniques used to carry out a particular task. Yet making was clearly understood as involving embodied knowledge and the ability to use specialized equipment. Body language and tools are therefore emphasized in order to distinguish each profession. The carver of wooden calligraphic signboards and the maker of decorative woodwork shown side by side in the saikunin section, for instance, are in a characteristic performative pose, mallet in hand, as if about to strike the adze to carve out a portion of the wooden plaque. Chisels and other tools lying nearby and the products of their work beyond complete the image. Demographics and social stratification among artisans are also emphasized. Portrayals clearly differentiate between labor carried out indoors (ishoku) and outdoors (deshoku). Differences in attire—the signboard carver is clothed, while the woodcarver is bare-chested—also speak to the social distinctions that existed among various professions (figure 2.3). There were also status distinctions within a profession. Makie-shi, specialists in black lacquerwares decorated with auspicious, often literary, pictorial motifs formed from sprinkled gold and other costly metallic powders, are clearly distinguished from nurimono-shi, who simply applied a red or black lacquer coating to a wooden support, by classifying the former in the saiku section and the latter in the shoku section.25 Still further distinctions were made on the basis of the particular technique applied to lacquer, as in the master of Chinese-style carved lacquer (tsuimono-shi). Although all the illustrations in the encyclopedia include short explanatory texts in easy-to-read language, more space is allotted to the images,

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Figure 2.3. Carvers of signboards and decorative woodwork, from Illustrated Encyclopedia of Humanity (Jinrin kinmō zui), 1690. Woodblock-printed book. National Diet Library, Tokyo.

suggesting that they activated the reading of the text rather than the other way around. The text generally describes the activity depicted and its historic roots, but, as noted above, in some instances, information about where the represented goods could be purchased is included as well. The shop of the specialist in rayskin sword hilts, for instance, is accompanied by the names and addresses of purveyors in Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo; the text accompanying the needle maker mentions Misuyabari, a shop on Kyoto’s Sanjō Avenue still in existence today.26 Craft makers had much to gain by these visual and verbal narratives since they gave them professional visibility. Such information both shaped and reflected the growth of a reading public driven by the possibility of purchasing the kinds of articles whose manufacture was represented. The basic consumer-oriented information included in Jinrin kinmō zui parallels the development of dedicated city-by-city and regional guides to shopping.

wom e n i n t h e c r a f t s The converging forces of official class distinctions, professionalization owing to the expansion of the market economy, and Neo-Confucian ideology were critical in reconfiguring the actual role and public perception of women in craft making under the Tokugawa regime. With official networks closed to them, it was difficult for women to gain access to professional skills through formal workshop apprenticeships, but depending on the nature of the practice and familial needs, they could and did acquire craft training. For instance, the wives of several Raku potters who took Buddhist vows after the death of their husbands are known to have made the low-fire leadglazed ceramics that were a family tradition.27 Indeed, women constituted a significant part of the craft labor force despite the fact that they were not officially recognized as workshop members. They not only shared the labor of their husbands and other family members but often had specialist skills in their own right as well. Expertise

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in raising silkworms, spinning, weaving, sewing, and other textile crafts, for instance, was generally passed from mother to daughter. In a system where the entire family functioned as an economic unit, women did work that made it possible for households to function—cleaning, raising children, cooking, and sewing—and if the family business involved craft making, mastery in the requisite skills. Whether inside or outside the home, female labor was a necessity. While women practiced many crafts, from the seventeenth century they generally were relegated to secondary status as assistants in operations that were organized along patriarchal lines. Women were conspicuous in the sixteenth-century “Poetry competition among various professions in seventyone rounds,” where they represent 40 of a total of 142 occupations, but there is a more pronounced asymmetry in Jinrin kinmō zui, where they figure in only a handful.28 By the time of its publication in 1690, men dominated the weaving industry in Kyoto’s Nishijin district, and they also figured prominently in commercial embroidery, both activities previously specific to women.29 Women continued to play a role in single-color dyeing, especially indigo, but new colors and specialized multicolor resist dye techniques were developed by dye houses and purveyors of textiles run by men, such as the Kariganeya, founded by Ogata Kōrin and Kenzan’s grandfather. Neo-Confucianism held that women’s work was important economically and also morally, since it taught diligence and discipline. All women were expected to work productively: idleness was deemed morally reprehensible. As part of its Neo-Confucian rhetoric, Treasury of Greater Learning for Women first and foremost emphasizes the importance of mastery of the domestic skills of spinning, weaving, and sewing in fulfilling filial piety among all women, regardless of background. These were activities that could be practiced by warrior class women in the house, while maintaining their officially mandated sequestration from men. Aside from these activities, this publication also represents a variety of nondomestic crafts

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appropriate to women of other classes. The inclusion of such occupational models supports the contention of recent feminist scholarship that it is overly simplistic to see Neo-Confucian ideology as rigidly enforcing women’s role as wife and mother.30 In the Neo-Confucian doctrine promoted by the Tokugawa regime, needlework was not simply a practical activity but also a form of female selfcultivation intimately bound up with filial piety. This ideal, widely circulated through text and image, was important in supporting the Tokugawa regime since it was held that needlework materialized the gendered structure, order, and well-being of cosmically ordained and productive domestic life. Mastery of the needle was a common denominator among women of all classes in the early modern era. Homemade garments constituted the bulk of clothing worn at the time, and it was the responsibility of the female members of the household to cut, sew, and mend as well as to disassemble and resew them every time they were washed. Women who hoped to work in the ō-oku, women’s quarters of the shogun’s palace, for instance, “had to submit a sample kimono sleeve to show their command of needlework.”31 Unpicking, resewing, patching, and quilting worn garments for reinforcement to extend their lives, like the child’s robe in figure 2.4, were especially important in poor households in remote rural regions in the northern reaches of Honshu. Treasury of Greater Learning for Women depicts chōnin women engaged in a variety of crafts. They make multicolored silk braid (kumihimo), tie patterns in silk for dyeing (kanoko shibori), fashion decorative cord from twisted papers (mizuhiki), mold paper, and insert the ribs in folding fans.32 It is likely that the various female occupations represented reflected what was already a social reality, but in so doing, the depictions also helped to validate them. Braid making was a gender-specific craft that required coordination among eyes, hands, and feet (figure 2.5). The curious device used for this purpose consisted of a stand with a pole to which one end of the threads was tied to hold them in tension during the braiding process and, attached to

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Figure 2.4. Infant’s kimono, 19th c. Patchwork of cotton with stripes and double ikat patterns in indigo and shikon (purple gromwell); red cotton collar. Collection of Marita and David Paly. Photograph by Ben Cort, Courtesy of Portland Art Museum.

Figure 2.5. Making kumihimo, from Treasury of Greater Learning for Women (Onna daigaku takarabako; 1714); 1790 edition. Woodblock-printed book, 26 × 18.5 cm. University of British Columbia Library, Vancouver.

another support, a knife-shaped piece of wood that served, much like a beater in weaving, to push the woven threads firmly in place. The braider raised and lowered this wooden knife by pulling a string tied to her toe. Braid made in this way was used for obi ties (obijime), for holding together rolled-up handscrolls, and, especially, for armor. Kanoko shibori is a highly labor-intensive form of tie-dyeing so named because its pattern of small dots resembles the dappled effect of a fawn (kanoko). It is created by pinching small bits of cloth and then binding them off with thread to resist the dye when immersed in the dye vat. In the scene in Treasury of Greater Learning for Women, two women are binding cloth with thread while a third braces herself against the wall in order to bind a cord tautly around a piece of tied cloth fitted over a wooden core to prevent seepage during the dyeing process. The aesthetic appeal of kanoko shibori resided not only in the decorative pattern but also in that it transformed fabric from a twodimensional planar surface into a three-dimensional one by leaving traces of the binding process in the form of small tactile peaks (figure 2.6). These peaks reveal the actions of the anonymous craftswomen who bound them. Mizuhiki are paper decorations of various colors that are arranged in elaborate bow-like shapes or knots to enhance wedding and funerary gifts, offerings to Shinto shrines, and decorations made on celebratory occasions (figure 2.7). Decorative knotted paper cords were thought to have protective powers and assumed symbolic meanings depending on how they were tied.33 The illustration of the production of mizuhiki shows the cutting and stiffening of the paper and packaging of the finished articles in large bundles. The accompanying text explains the procedure in detail: “To make [mizuhiki] take any length of sugihara or hōsho paper and cut it into widths of 1 sun (3.03 cm.), twist these into 1 shaku (30 cm.) lengths, soak them for a while in starchy water, then remove and wring them out with a towel. After a day paint half of them with beni [red]. These are called red and white mizuhiki.”34 This description of the making process, like those accompanying the other illustrations,

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Figure 2.6. Detail of a furisode (outer kimono) with allover kanoko shibori (sō kanoko), ca. 1800. Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection, 56.133. Asian Art Museum, Seattle.

was probably not intended so much to guide prospective makers as to provide general knowledge deemed useful for women. That the manufacture of folding fans was dominated by women is confirmed by the frequency of its representation in many illustrated books and prints. The Saiga shokunin burui (Various classes of artisans in colored pictures; 1770) is a case in point (figure 2.8).35 Although the two elegantly attired women are depicted in a highly idealized manner, the picture accurately conveys the work and the tools involved. The woman on the right holds a fan she has just pleated. A ruler used to form the creases and two other pleated fans lie nearby. Her elongated fingers speak to the manual dexterity required to carry out this work. The large lacquer box behind her holds unpleated painted fans. The woman facing her holds a completed fan. Lying next to her and on the ground near her are the bamboo ribs that are

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Figure 2.7. Modern mizuhiki knot on a money envelope for a wedding gift. Author’s photograph.

inserted into the fan and the paste brush used to glue together the front and back papers. Papermaking was by far the most economically important of the nondomestic crafts represented here. Although carried out in workshops in Kyoto and Edo, it was more common in the provinces where the requisite natural resources were available. Kunisaki Jihei, the author of Kamisuki chōhōki (A handy guide to papermaking; 1798), confirms women’s central role in this craft, framed in a misogynistic rhetoric typical of the times: “How true the saying that an ordinary person living at his ease can be up to no good! A

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Figure 2.8. Tachibana Minkō (act. 1764–72), Fan making, from Various Classes of Artisans in Colored Pictures (Saiga shokunin burui); 1770; Woodblock- and stencil-printed book. 1979,0305,0.118. © Trustees of the British Museum.

woman with leisure is without doubt the source of all evil and indication of a degenerate country . . . . Many are the kinds of paper made to profit the nation by women with a thought to time not spent in the fields.”36 With the exception of papermaking, which required manipulating large and heavy pulp-filled screens, most of the crafts depicted in Treasury of Greater Learning for Women involved manual dexterity rather than physical strength. Yet women were by no means excluded from such activities. In large pottery workshops in Arita such as the one depicted in Sankai meisan zue (see figure 2.18), women were often beasts of burden, carrying heavy loads of clay, and were also assigned the task of kneading the clay. While they could assist with the delicate task of painting wares, they were excluded from the use of the potter’s wheel or from firing the kiln. More exceptionally, women even may have been employed as carpenters in the Imperial Palace in Kyoto. Although Ihara Saikaku’s fiction must be used with caution, the rationale given for the hiring of female carpenters lends credibility to this account from his Saikaku shokoku banashi (Saikaku’s tales from many countries): In the toolbox, there are drills, planes, an inking device, and a carpenter’s square. Take a closer look at [the carpenter’s] face and [you’ll see] it’s a woman. Her nose is flat, and her limbs are brawny. Skillful at carpentry, she does this for a living, residing in Ichijō Modoribashi. “But why,” you ask, “when the capital is so big, and there are so many male carpenters and cabinet makers, would anyone hire a woman carpenter?” [They are hired] to fashion the protective spikes over the walls, and the bamboo window lattices of the women’s quarters in the Imperial Palaces. It’s simple work, but it’s such trouble to investigate the background of male carpenters. It saves time to just hire women for the job.37

The distribution of work across gender was indispensable to economic well-being in both city and countryside. Sericulture was valued as an offseason occupation in farm households since it brought in income that could

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compensate for a poor rice harvest. This was especially true in northern regions where double cropping was not possible and warm-weather crops such as cotton could not grow. Mulberry trees were not soil specific and could be planted at the edges of fields or on other land that might otherwise be wasted. The rearing of silkworms in the home, immersing the cocoons in hot water to kill the pupae and reel off silk filaments of unlimited length, and combining multiple strands together to make yarn suitable for weaving were deemed specifically female activities. The skills and know-how for nurturing silkworms and preparing silk were passed down within families from mother to daughter. Like other craft practices, however, increasing specialization and technological advances in the nineteenth century led to fragmentation of household-based production and a devaluation of the reservoir of women’s embodied knowledge.38 Sericulture was labor intensive, and women tended their charges with as much care as they did their children. First the silkworm eggs had to be scraped off paper into a box for hatching. This was done with a feather so as not to harm them. Then the pupae had to be fed as many as eight times a day a diet of mulberry leaves cut into small, digestible pieces; during their fortyday lifespan, they could consume more than six hundred kilos of leaves (figure 2.9).39 After the cocoons had formed, they were boiled in hot water to loosen the strands for unwinding and twisting into long yarns (figure 2.10). Nothing was wasted: after this process, even the coarse outer parts of the cocoon were dried and used for the wadding in cold-weather garments.40 This was much warmer and lighter in weight than cotton wadding. Women faced considerable structural and ideological obstacles in gaining recognition for their skills since they could not become official members of workshops. While their talents might be acknowledged within the extended household, recognition in the public domain was rare and was achieved chiefly through forms of mediation dominated by men, such as prescriptive literature or woodblock prints in which they are little more than

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Figure 2.9. Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806), Feeding chopped mulberry leaves to larvae, from twelve-part series Women Engaged in Sericulture (Joshoku kaiko tewaza-gusa). 1754–1806. Woodblock print, vertical ōban. 1906,1220,0.356.3. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 2.10. Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806), Reeling silk from cocoons, from twelve-part series Women Engaged in Sericulture (Joshoku kaiko tewaza-gusa). 1754–1806. Woodblock print, vertical ōban. 1906,1220,0.356.9. © Trustees of the British Museum.

a genre of beautiful women (bijin) performing craft work. Only exceptionally, as in the case of the comb maker Oroku, to be discussed in chapter 5, are they depicted as individuals.

ru r a l c r a f t produc t ion Rural craft activity increased in the second half of the Tokugawa period as a by-product of agricultural diversification into commercial crops such as indigo, cotton, and paper mulberry. Involvement in diverse activities contributed to the rise of a new, wealthy, land-holding, and entrepreneurial class of peasants, many of whom found it profitable to engage in craft making by-employment. The expansion of commercial crops and craft making involved a more intensive use of labor on a year-round basis, a development economic historian Hayami Akira has called Japan’s “industrious revolution.”41 Economic historian Penelope Francks has further argued that the female members of farm households were the main drivers of this “industrious revolution” since they had to use their time most efficiently in order to assist in agricultural tasks alongside housework, child-rearing, and craft making.42 In their study Economic and Demographic Change in Pre-Industrial Japan 1600–1868, Susan Hanley and Kozo Yamamura cite the example of “a village of 180 households in Gōshū (Shizuoka Prefecture) . . . [that by the mid-nineteenth century] had 27 households specializing in the weaving of cotton cloth and ‘several times more’ this number engaged in part-time weaving.”43 Statistics from other regions confirm the high percentage of byemployment among farmers and the importance of the income derived from it.44 As a result of these developments, standards of living rose, and with more disposable income, the demand for locally produced commercial goods rose as well. Even small villages, previously supplied by peddlers, could support shops with household articles including ink, paper, writing brushes, pots, needles, pipes, tobacco and pouches, teapots, containers and dishes, hair ties (motoyui) and hairpins, cotton cloth, towels, tabi (socks),

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footgear, and other daily needs, with some of these goods made by local craft specialists.45 The proliferation and specialization of crafts pictured in Illustrated Encyclopedia of Humanity reflect the economic growth and commercial expansion in the three cities of Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo and in large castle towns, such as Kanazawa. Rural Japan, however, shared in the principal craft specialties found in the city, though their numbers varied widely depending on locale. A cadastral survey carried out in 1706 in the villages of Ueda domain (in present-day Nagano Prefecture), for instance, indicated that there were representatives of twenty-four craft professions, among them 340 papermakers, 84 dyers, 87 blacksmiths, and 46 roofers.46 The exceptionally large number of papermakers indicates that this was a local industry. The dyers no doubt supplied the indigo-dyed cottons that most commoners wore. Blacksmiths were prominent figures in farming communities because they made and repaired agricultural tools.47 Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, as the population of the three major cities stabilized or declined, productivity increasingly shifted away from urban to rural centers, leading to an explosion of distinctive regional crafts.48 Many factors contributed to this shift. One was the antagonism faced by newcomers to the city, who competed with members of established guilds seeking to maintain their monopoly. Another was the increasing availability of artisanal work in the countryside, closer to the sources of raw materials and free from the guild system.49 Directives from regional daimyos to develop and promote commercial crops and crafts in order to improve the domainal economy also played a part. Many successful enterprises involved collaboration between farm households and merchants in subcontracting schemes where merchants supplied makers with the raw materials and equipment to work at home in small family units rather than formal workshops and later collected and marketed the semifinished or finished goods.

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Space is a historical actor that helps to understand why certain things happen when and where they do, but in the context of early modern Japan, understanding the cultural connotations that particular places assumed is equally important. Crafts and the raw materials used in their manufacture had regional identities deriving from the locale where they originated. Association with a given locale could imbue goods with cultural and emotional significance that became inextricably bound up with their commodity value. Familiarity with famous regional products (meibutsu or meisan) was an important constituent of cultural knowledge since these often featured in poetry but also because such goods were deemed suitable for gift giving. Kefukigusa (Grasses like wind-blown fur; 1638), a guide to topics suitable for haiku composition, for instance, lists some 1,800 famous local specialties (meibutsu) province by province.50 As this suggests, crafts made outside the metropolis were generally defined by province (of which there were sixty), by town, or, if along one of the major highways, by post station. Although Japan was divided into some 260 semiautonomous fiefs, their names did not generally serve to identify the goods produced there. The second half of the eighteenth century saw the proliferation of a publication genre informed by a growing preoccupation with the acquisition of empirical knowledge about places and things. Many of these new publications brought new visibility to craft activity outside the urban setting. Two works in wide circulation devoted to famous local products help to visualize the scope and nature of this activity as represented by and for city dwellers. Nihon sankai meibutsu zue (Illustrated famous specialties of the mountains and seas of Japan) is a five-volume compendium by Hirase Tessai (act. 1754– 80) illustrated by the well-known Osaka ukiyo-e artist Hasegawa Mitsunobu (act. 1724–55), first published in 1754 and reprinted in 1829 and 1840.51 As noted in chapter 1, it opens with an entire volume devoted to mining and metallurgy and then covers topics including tea production in Uji, dried gourds in Settsu, noodles in Miwa, and seaweed in Matsumae, with a little

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less than a quarter of the entries devoted to crafts, both urban and rural. Sankai meisan zue (Illustrated famous products of mountain and sea; 1799) is also a large-format five-volume publication organized topographically, showcasing, as its title indicates, noteworthy products of mountain and sea ranging from edible delicacies to crafts. However, it is less concerned than the earlier work with the world of made things than with comestibles such as honey and tree mushrooms from the mountains of Kumano, abalone from Ise, and flounder from Wakasa. By the time of their publication, thousands of regional products had already been recognized as “famous,” and it is not clear on what basis those featured in these two books were selected. Nihon sankai meibutsu zue and Sankai meisan zue combine two popular genres: the regional inventory and classification of famous places (meisho), an ancient category, and the identification of newer categories, including famous local specialties (meibutsu) or products (meisan). The difference in the titles of the two publications is significant. The term meibutsu (literally “famous thing” or “thing with a name”) had many meanings, depending on context. Among naturalists concerned with matching Chinese terms with Japanese flora and fauna, it was used to mean the correct names of things; in the tea world, it referred to things such as teabowls having individual names; in inventories, it denoted things (such as a lacquer writing box discussed in chapter 3) renowned because of their pedigree; and in publications such as this, it was a category for famous local products. By their choice of the word meisan (literally, famous product), the authors of the later publication link their work with the newly fashionable field of bussangaku (“production studies”), which brought together those interested in sinology, natural sciences, medicine, and proto-industry. The wealthy Osaka sake brewer and collector Kimura Kenkadō (1732–1802), who penned the introduction to Sankai meisan zue and is thought to have been involved in compiling the text as well, was active in this movement.52 Its organization and selection of locales and products may reflect Kenkadō’s personal interests. This is certainly true of the

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first of its five volumes, which is devoted to sake production, the business on which his fortune was based. A sampling of entries from the third volume throws light on the disparate kinds of craft practices highlighted in Nihon sankai meibutsu zue. The opening entry, titled “Nikkō tray and bowls,” pictures a workshop where both lathe turning and lacquering are taking place. In the foreground, two men work at a lathe, one pulling a rope wound around the shaft while the other shapes a vessel with a knife attached to the rotating mechanism (figure 2.11). Behind them, a man uses a spatula to apply a coat of lacquer to a wooden vessel, while a young woman places just-finished wares in a dustfree cupboard to dry. The brief explanatory note informs the reader that Nikkō is 30 ri (a ri is roughly 4 kilometers, or 2.4 miles) from Edo and that the footed trays and lacquered bowls produced here are sturdy, serve many functions, and are widely praised. This is followed by a Chinese-style poem on the topic.53 While not recounted here, the backstory to the Nikkō woodworkers is revealing of the role of itinerants in rural craft making. Many lathe specialists (kijishi) were itinerants who roamed remote mountain regions (often illegally) in search of wood and set up temporary workshops with a manual lathe to form simple, functional utensils that were then lacquered.54 Over time, some settled in locales where the necessary resources were readily available, such as Nikkō, which was surrounded by forests under shogunal control. Nikkō grew into a sizable town because it was the site of the Tokugawa mortuary complex, and members of the shogunate and their entourage traveled there periodically for ritual events. Although it was primarily an official cultic site, it also became a tourist destination. These visitors were the likely clientele for the goods produced in shops like those depicted in Nihon sankai meibutsu zue. Unlike Nikkō’s wooden utensils, which in all likelihood entered the canon of meibutsu only in the Tokugawa period, the renown of paper from

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Figure 2.11. Nikkō lathe-turned lacquerwares, from Illustrated Famous Specialties of the Mountains and Seas of Japan (Nihon sankai meibutsu zue), 1797 edition. Woodblock-printed book. National Diet Library, Tokyo.

Echizen (in modern Fukui Prefecture) has a long history as a quality product since it was sent to the Kyoto capital as tax-in-kind as early as the Heian period (794–1185). The brief explanatory text declares: “Paper is made in many provinces (kuni), but that made in Echizen is peerless.” It then goes on to list the many varieties produced there, all of which exhibit the “true nature of paper.”55 The illustration shows only the final stages of the making process: pounding the kōzo pulp, dipping the screens into the pulpy water, and laying the finished sheets on boards to dry, as well as the shipping of the bundled goods (figure 2.12). The method for tapping lacquer is another topic taken up in the third volume (figure 2.13). The accompanying text, whose accuracy may be open to question, informs the reader: If an incision is made with a sickle in a lacquer tree, the sap that flows from it can be scraped off with a bamboo spatula. Put the lacquer sap that has been scraped in a collecting bucket with thin brewed tea, add walnut oil, and it will not spoil. After the sap has been drawn, trees may dry up and no longer produce. Some old trees also are not productive. Yoshino in Wakayama and Kumano in Kii are famous places (meisho) for lacquer. Lacquer is [also] produced in other provinces. Wax is made from the fruit of the lacquer tree.56

The brief account in Nihon sankai meibutsu zue, intended for the general public, is in sharp contrast with that in the authoritative agricultural manual Nōgyō zensho (Agricultural compendium; 1697), which was intended to provide farmers with instructions on every phase of cultivating and tapping lacquer trees, including the number of cuts to be made on each tree and the method of insuring that the cypress wood bucket would not leak.57 Driven by text rather than image, Sankai meisan zue (Illustrated famous products of mountain and sea) has scholarly pretensions absent in the earlier publication. For instance, passages from Tiangong kaiwu (The works of heaven and the inception of things), a Chinese publication on technology, presented within a cosmological framework, are quoted in the section devoted to

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porcelain production in Arita.58 This publication’s large format and use of double-page spreads make possible panoramic illustrations, throwing into relief the local topography while also drawing attention to the work as a collective effort involving multiple processes. Unlike the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Humanity, it does not individualize makers but portrays them as part of a group enterprise. While the individual identities of rural artisans may not have been of vital interest to the public, the spectacle of their collective activity likely appealed because of its unfamiliarity and economic importance. The sections devoted to bast fiber textiles (nuno) in northern Honshu and porcelains on the southern island of Kyushu dramatize the two extremes of rural craft production—on the one hand, as small-scale family activity, and on the other, as an industrial-scale operation. Nuno is the generic term for cloth made from plant fibers, including those from the seed, leaf, and bast. Before the introduction of cotton cultivation in the fifteenth century, most peasant clothing was made of bast fibers, particularly hemp and ramie, but in the Edo period, even as this practice continued in some regions, yarn made from these fibers became much sought-after for weaving lightweight summer garments worn by the elite. Sankai meisan zue introduces the subject with a geographical and etymological overview of nuno’s production. This is followed by brief comments about its cultivation, harvesting, spinning, weaving, and dyeing. Bast fiber cloth made from ramie or “China grass” (choma or karamushi; Boehmeria nivea), it tells us, had been produced near the ancient capitals of Nara and Kyoto in Yamato, Nara, and Ōmi Provinces since ancient times. However, northern Echigo (present-day Niigata Prefecture) and adjacent provinces, most notably Shinano (present-day Nagano Prefecture), were also important sources of ramie. Because of their high quality, the fine ramie cloth of Echigo (Echigo jōfu) and crepe (chijimi) were particularly famous. The harsh climate of northern Echigo Province, where as much as six feet of snow might fall in winter, keeping peasants indoors “from the

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Figure 2.12. Papermaking, from Illustrated Famous Specialties of the Mountains and Seas of Japan (Nihon sankai meibutsu zue), 1797 edition. Woodblock-printed book. National Diet Library, Tokyo.

Figure 2.13. Collecting lacquer sap, from Illustrated Famous Specialties of the Mountains and Seas of Japan (Nihon sankai meibutsu zue), 1797 edition. Woodblock-printed book. National Diet Library, Tokyo.

tenth until the third month,” provided optimum conditions for growing and processing ramie.59 Ramie is a dicotyledonous plant whose inner bast fibers are extracted, retted, separated into fine strands, and twisted or knotted together to make yarn. The fiber is stiff and susceptible to breakage, but in the damp winter climate of Echigo, it remains relatively pliant and thus easy to work.60 In his Hokuetsu seppu (Snow country tales), Suzuki Bokushi (1770–1842), a wealthy ramie wholesaler and naturalist, underscored the relationship between the climate and the production of this cloth: “yarn is washed in snow water and bleached on snow fields. There is [ramie] crepe because there is snow.” “Echigo crepe,” he asserted, “owes its fame to the combined powers of man and snow, working together.”61 The scene in Sankai meisan zue illustrating the production of Echigo textiles shows men and women bleaching the cloth in the snowy fields, making visible this relationship (figure 2.14). Men and women young and old took part in the production of Echigo cloth. The backbreaking and labor-intensive work began with harvesting the stalks in the late summer and then soaking them to loosen the outer skin. Next the woody core had to be separated from the fine inner layer of the skin and the latter hung to dry indoors, out of the sun. Yarn making began with soaking the fiber to soften it. Women further moistened it with their hands and mouths, a practice enacted by the woman with her back to the viewer in the illustration here. Next the fiber was further separated with “children beginning their training as early as age two or three, using their nails to separate the ramie fiber strands.”62 Finally, these slender, lustrous strands were twisted together or knotted end to end to form long yarns. The illustration of women preparing, twisting, and reeling thread and men weaving conflates a sequence of activities that took place over many months. The representation of a male weaver weaving on what appears to be a treadle loom is surprising since by all accounts this was primarily a female occupa-

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tion (figure 2.15).63 It is likely that the artist had no firsthand knowledge of this and many of the other rural craft practices he represented. Like many rural craft enterprises, production of Echigo cloth was a multisited cottage industry underwritten by a well-developed subcontracting system in which merchants supplied materials and looms and paid by the piece. They also purchased raw materials at a low price and resold them to artisans elsewhere for production. This system was common to many capital-intensive rural crafts because farmers did not have the means to purchase the requisite equipment themselves. Relationships with a particular merchant ensured the latter exclusive rights to the finished product. Payment depended on the quality of the product, and, although it provided a regular income, it was often meager given the amount of labor involved. One hundred days were required to produce sufficient yarn for one kimono alone.64 Echigo yarn and cloth became part of a wider economy thanks to river and overland transport networks linking western and eastern Japan. Ojiya, the market town that gave its name to the Echigo crepe called Ojiya chijimi, was on the Mikuni Kaidō, a road linking the Nakasendō and the Hokuriku Kaidō. Production of Ojiya chijimi reached the height of popularity about the time when Sankai meisan zue was published. According to village records examined by Watanabe Sansei, in 1682, 5,062 bolts of chijimi were made, but during the Tenmei era (1781–89), annual production increased dramatically to an astonishing 200,000 bolts (each roughly 28.8 centimeters wide and 10 meters long).65 Production on a much smaller scale continued into the twentieth century (figure 2.16). The pages devoted to porcelain production in Hizen (in modern Saga and Nagasaki Prefectures) are second in number and detail only to those on sake. Manufacture is thought to have begun around 1610.66 By the late eighteenth century, porcelain production in this region was carried out on an industrial scale in an agglomeration of many kilns. Sankai meisan zue lists eighteen, of

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Figure 2.14. Bleaching Echigo cloth on snow, from Illustrated Famous Products of Mountain and Sea (Sankai meisan zue), 1799. Woodblock-printed book. Courtesy of East Asian Library, Princeton University Library.

Figure 2.15. Making Echigo cloth, from Illustrated Famous Products of Mountain and Sea (Sankai meisan zue), 1799. Woodblock-printed book. Courtesy of East Asian Library, Princeton University Library.

Figure 2.16. Ojiya chijimi (crepe), detail of kimono with paulownia flowers in bloom. Taishō era (1912–26). Baur Foundation, Sugawara Keiko donation, FB,DSK.2015.6. © Fondation Baur, photo Martin Gerard.

which the Mikawachi and Hirado kilns were under the direct control of the Nabeshima family, lords of Hizen, and Matsuura, lords of Hirado, with the remainder independent commercial enterprises.67 The underglaze blue dish with decoration of three jars in colored enamels illustrated in figure 2.17 is typical of eighteenth-century Nabeshima porcelains. To create the design, the motifs were first outlined in underglaze cobalt blue; then, after firing, they were painted again in overglaze enamel, following the doucai technique developed in Ming China. Dishes were made in sets of twelve in standard sizes to conform to banqueting needs. About fifteen centimeters in diameter, this one represents the midsize of the three sizes of dishes (the others were about fourteen and twenty centimeters).

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Figure 2.17. Porcelain plate with underglaze blue and overglaze polychrome enamels (Hizen ware, Nabeshima type). 1680s-90s. H 15 ⅛ in. (4.1 cm), diam. 6 in. (15.2 cm). The Harry G. C. Packard Collection of Asian Art. Gift of Harry G. C. Packard and Purchase. Fletcher, Rogers, Harris Brisbane Dick and Louis V. Bell Funds. Joseph Pulitzer Bequest and the Annenberg Fund Inc. Gift 1975. 1975.268.563. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.

Figure 2.18. View of Arita porcelain production, from Illustrated Famous Products of Mountain and Sea (Sankai meisan zue), 1799. Woodblock-printed book. Courtesy of East Asian Library, Princeton University Library.

Until the seventeenth century, Japan had lacked the technical knowledge and equipment to make high-fire vitreous wares. It was only with the discovery of china stone (kaolin) at Izumiyama in the Hizen region and the intervention of Chinese and Korean immigrant potters that this new ceramic type developed in Japan. The text describes porcelain production in considerable detail, underscoring aspects that the general reader might not be aware of, such as the fact that the kaolin extracted from Izumiyama is not a clay but a stone that must be pulverized before use; that some wares are made in a mold, while others are wheel-thrown; the multiple firings involved; and the use of two kinds of kilns, an ordinary one built on flat ground near the potters’ houses and a climbing one (noborigama) built on a slope. The book singles out celadon glaze and Aka-e enamels for special mention, likening the effect of the latter’s five colors combined with gold and silver to Kyoto’s silk brocade (nishiki), concluding: “The overglaze enameling techniques used in this kiln are secrets that cannot be spoken of to outsiders, so they are not discussed here. However, it is said that the glaze uses glass.”68 The three accompanying views convey the scale of porcelain manufacture in Arita, as well as the high degree of specialization within it. The first shows the clay being sieved to remove impurities and men throwing pots on a wheel. Next, newly bisque-fired pots are being carried out of the kiln, examined for flaws, and brushed clean in preparation for glazing by both men and women (figure 2.18). In the final scene, the kiln workers bring wood to stoke the kiln. Like other publications discussed here, the objective of Nihon sankai meibutsu zue and Sankai meisan zue was the dissemination of practical and useful knowledge. Although they provide considerable information about craft processes, they are not how-to manuals; readers are encouraged to understand and admire making processes rather than expected to learn how to carry them out themselves. Like the agricultural manuals that became a

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prolific new literary genre about the same time, Sankai meisan zue may be regarded as “the rural literary counterpart to the popular . . . ‘ethnographic fiction’ about the exploits of the buoyant townspeople.”69 While it shares that genre’s economic realism, the information it contained was not always accurate. Such images rendered the countryside knowable but also constituted a new kind of geographical database that, at a time when countrywide travel was growing, held considerable touristic appeal as well. Together, the publications explored here tell a gendered story of occupational diversity that was bound up with wider social, political, economic, and geographic forces. They were expressions of a zeal for classification in all subjects—from people and places to flora and fauna—that drove many publications during the early modern era. Readers could make use of them in many ways. They held educational value: the general knowledge about the world that they provided represented a kind of cultural capital. Their value was also practical: they were sources of information about where to shop, whether in the city or during provincial travels. In a market economy where there was a proliferation of consumer goods, consumers wanted reliable criteria on which basis to make an informed choice. By describing the skills of individual makers, their making processes, and the locales where they worked, and by attaching the publicly validating label meibutsu or meisan to particular products, these publications both shaped and reflected a material culture of discerning craftsmanship, quality, and value.

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chapter three

Craft Organizations and Operations

It is a picture that invites you to peer. On the ground floor of a two-story house open to view from the street like a stage proscenium, four men and one woman sit on a tatami-matted floor, each intent on his or her individual task, yet working together with a shared purpose (figure 3.1). On the left, a man wearing a black hat, likely the workshop head, sprinkles metal particles on a saddle; tools and matching stirrups are laid out before him. Behind him, an assistant holds up a large makie tray with a cinnabar red interior to which he applies a coat of lacquer with a spatula. The shelf above him is well stocked with an array of the individual lacquered tables used in banquet dining. Across from him, another man, dressed in a black robe, is at work on a mirror stand. A woman, relegated to the outer edge of the workspace, polishes one of the upright supports for a lacquered clothing stand using the charcoal in a container next to her. The man kneeling in front of her with sleeves pulled up throws his body weight into cutting away the rough gold to make the small pieces for sprinkling. Two young assistants holding containers of powder stand on the veranda, where a large gold and black makie lacquer washbasin and ewer, finished products of the workshop’s collaborative efforts, are on display for the viewer’s admiration. This carefully choreographed, idealized view of a prosperous lacquer workshop painted by Kano Yoshinobu (1552–1640) around 1600 as part of a

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Figure 3.1. Kano Yoshinobu (1552–1640), View of lacquer workshop, from Pictures of Craftsmen, early 17th c. Six-panel screens, ink and color on paper, 58 × 43.7 cm. Kita’in, Kawagoe City, Saitama Prefecture.

series of depictions of craft makers at work helps to visualize the operations and range of goods in a commercial makie workshop run along familial lines. It speaks to the power relations, range of processes, and efficient and coordinated division of labor among family members working in a small space that were essential to the success of any workshop.1 Such collaborative creativity was the norm in most workshop operations, where agency did not lie in the hands of any one person but in the interaction among them. The head of the workshop might delegate assignments according to materials and level of mastery, but whatever the job, each person had to have the ability to work in synchronism with others, and to be sensitive and responsive to the temporal and spatial rhythms of the total making process. The craft makers portrayed in early modern paintings and prints represented many things to their contemporaries. They were “people of skill,” understood to be predominantly male, as defined by their particular occupations.2 They were the suppliers of an array of desirable commodities. And they were individuals who occupied critical positions in the growth of urban and rural economies. Missing from these representations, however, are the larger professional, political, economic, and social institutions that sustained them. This organizational infrastructure is the focus of this chapter, which again draws attention to the differences between the urban and rural contexts. It opens with observations about the ie, the house or household, the basic administrative unit for most craft workshops. Forming a full and integrated picture of all kinds of craft workshops is impossible, but case studies of two eighteenth-century lacquer specialists, Kōami Nagasuku (1661–1723) and Ogawa Haritsu (a.k.a. Ritsuō; 1663–1747), provide a granular picture of the operations in this profession. Although diverse in their particulars, activities in their workshops underscore the adaptability to changing circumstances, effective use of division of labor according to skill set, and the role of patronage and marketplace competition in the development of house style and individual style.3

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t h e i e a s house a n d house hol d In the early modern era, most craft specialists worked as part of collectives, usually in workshops organized along familial lines (ie) that took on apprentices to provide labor and ensure the future of the organization. The ie, house or household, was both an economic and a family entity headed by a senior male.4 In metropolitan areas, craft ie were often hierarchical, multigenerational families with membership limited to men, while in the countryside, they tended to be smaller and more informal single household units where women were acknowledged as active partners.5 The head of the ie was the supreme authority in all matters, including the choice of apprentices and the formation of branch workshops. Succession customarily passed to the eldest son, or in cases where there was no direct or suitable heir, to an adopted son. The name of the head of the ie could be passed from one generation to the next, as in the Raku lineage, whose current head is the fifteenth-generation Kichizaemon. Second sons and talented disciples with no possibility to rise within the system often left to form their own branch workshops. Official relationship to a particular house was usually marked by the conferring on the disciple of a studio name containing a character of the master’s name. Many craft houses maintained genealogical records to document such matters. In this system, succession was ascriptive—that is, a person was born into the position rather than achieving it through talent.6 This prioritization of heredity assumed that with diligence and proper training, anyone could develop proficiency in a given craft. This is not to say that there was no recognition of the different kinds of skills a practitioner might bring to the workshop. As Kōami Nagasuku wrote in the Yuishitsu-shin (Singled-minded concentration), a guide for his successors, “In this profession there are those who are talented (jōzu), those who are skilled (saiko), and those who are worldly (rakujin). Some are very good with small details, others are inventive or intuitive, and others are very knowledgeable. Beware of all of them.

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Restrain yourself and concentrate on your own work. Don’t forget the saying: ‘We all have faults.’ ”7 Intermarriage and adoption among craft families was common and could be motivated by a variety of circumstances. Rivalries were resolved through marriage. A fusion of the Kano and Tosa styles of painting is said to have followed from the marriage of Kano Motonobu (1476–1559), hereditary head of the Kano house, and the daughter of his rival Tosa Mitsunobu (1434–1525), head of the Tosa house.8 Financial difficulties led Sahei, heir to the Raku house, to marry the daughter of a lacquer maker and make her family’s home the site of his workshop.9 Sahei fathered an illegitimate son by another woman but rather than designate him as heir, he adopted Ogata Kōrin and Kenzan’s nephew Heishirō. Heishirō became Kichizaemon (a.k.a. Sō’nyū; 1664–1716), the fifth-generation head of the Raku house. At the time, the Kariganeya, the Ogata family clothing business, was thriving, and these family connections brought new prosperity to the Raku house as well.10 Kichizaemon V’s recreation of the matte finish associated with Raku founder Chōjirō on his own teabowls at a time when Rikyū and Chōjirō were being glorified by the Senke tea schools may have been part of his effort to materialize his claims to the legacy of this venerable house (figure 3.2). Hereditary vertical master-disciple relationships premised on the ie system were defined by members themselves, but some now well-known lineages were fabricated by later writers. This is true, for instance, of the group of painters and craft specialists known as the Rinpa school that included Tawaraya Sōtatsu (d. ca. 1640), Ogata Kōrin, and his brother Kenzan, whom later writers associated with the stylistic tradition of Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558– 1637). In Kōga bikō (Notes on ancient paintings; ca. 1850), written by Asaoka Okisada (1800–1856), they are characterized as a ryū (stream, current) rather than a family (fu; pedigree or genealogy).11 What is distinctive about this school, which takes its name from the rin of Kōrin, is that with the exception of Sōtatsu, who ran the Tawaraya painting workshop, its members began as

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Figure 3.2. Raku Sō’nyū V (1664–1716), teabowl, 1691–1716. Hand-built clay with black glaze. 240–1877. © Victoria and Albert Museum.

amateur craft practitioners who self-identified with the persona and/or style of the multitalented Kōetsu, Kōrin, and Kenzan. Kōetsu was a professional sword polisher and connoisseur but was also a master calligrapher who collaborated with Sōtatsu in the creation of many handscrolls. He designed lacquerwares, was involved in the publication of exquisite printed editions of literary classics and Noh plays, and was one of the first amateurs to make Raku-style teabowls.12 Kōrin and Kenzan, as the sons of the owner of a prosperous merchant house, studied calligraphy, painting, Noh, and the tea ceremony, cultural practices engaged in by many affluent members of their

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class. They took up painting and pottery in a professional capacity only after the failure of the Kariganeya. While they had some training in the arts, it was as amateur practitioners, not as part of a formal apprenticeship system. Branch lineages were also established when daimyo invited craft specialists from Kyoto to settle in their castle towns to provide local production of high quality luxury goods for personal use, gift-giving, and inter-regional trade. In 1666, Maeda Tsunanori (1643–1724) invited the tea master Sen Sōshitsu IV (1622–97) and the Raku potter Chōzaemon (1631–1712) to Kanazawa, the wealthy castle town of Kaga domain. Chōzaemon found suitable clay in the nearby village of Ōhi and set up his workshop there, producing low-fire lead-glazed wares that were in the Raku style but often featured a brighter, glossier amber finish than those produced in Kyoto. Chōzaemon had worked with Kichizaemon IV in Kyoto for a decade, but the official genealogy of the Raku house does not mention him, indicating that his workshop was not authorized by the main house in Kyoto.13 Urban craft workshops tended to be clustered together in the same districts. Sometimes their choice was determined by the availability of resources or special technological needs, such as kilns for firing ceramics. The close proximity of different workshops facilitated collaboration among makers whose products required different materials and processes. Being part of a larger occupational community was particularly convenient for those, such as carpenters, who were often hired in large groups.14 Nishijin, located northwest of the Imperial Palace, was the center of Kyoto’s silkweaving industry. Weavers had been invited to settle there by the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi as part of his effort to revive craft production in Kyoto. When they returned from the port city of Sakai, where they had fled during the long period of internecine warfare, they brought with them the manufacture and use of drawlooms (takarabata) that made possible the complex brocades (nishiki) for which they became famous. By 1703 there were thousands of weavers in the Nishijin district making brocades, damasks, silk

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crepe, and velvet (figure 3.3). They were supported by a network of spinners, dyers, embroiderers, stencil makers, and suppliers of silk wadding and thread living nearby. The potters Ninsei and Kenzan first worked on the city’s northwest periphery, but Kenzan later moved to Chōjiyamachi, closer to the bustling shopping district and, equally importantly, to the potters who managed the kilns that were concentrated in the city’s Eastern Mountains at Awataguchi, Otowa, and Kiyomizu, the area now known as Gojōzaka. In Edo, craft workshops were concentrated in spaces set apart for chōnin, especially Kyobashi, the low-lying area west of Edo Castle. Tatami and bucket makers as well as carpenters and blacksmiths were all located in Kyobashi. Kon’ya-chō, the home of a dynamic dyeing industry, was in the Kanda district. The Tsuchiya workshop, official dyers to the Tokugawa shoguns, was based there, as illustrated in Hiroshige’s print (see figure 2.1). Local trade also included yukata, cotton robes worn in summer or after the bath, and tenugui, long cotton rectangles that were used by commoners as hand towels and headbands.15 Many urban ie-based craft workshops were organized into fee-paying guilds (kumiai), membership in which was required to practice a particular trade. Guilds sustained the interests of their members by setting standards, maintaining monopolistic production, and managing trading networks, but they also constrained them to obey shogunal directives concerning salaries and other matters. After the great Edo fire of 1657, the shogunate set carpenters’ basic daily salaries at 3 momme of rice; in 1834 it added 1.20 momme, a wage schedule that, despite inflation, remained in place until 1855. (A momme was a unit of weight equivalent to 3.75 grams.) Roofers and tatami makers earned the same amount. Sawyers initially were paid only 2 momme, though their wages later matched those of others in the building trades.16 As part of the Kyōhō-era (1716–36) reforms, the shogunate obligated those associated with ninety-six crafts to form professional guilds whose responsibility it was to see that their members refrained from manufacturing and

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selling goods deemed extravagant and frivolous.17 The list includes, among others, makers of fans, various kinds of paper, pipes, bags for handkerchiefs, geta, mizuhiki, children’s toys, turned wood products, and inkstones. To maintain control over the urban economy, guilds restricted access to newcomers in their profession. Craft specialists were welcomed in Kanazawa with inducements of free land and tax exemptions in the late sixteenth century, but a century later, they had to receive official permission to settle there.18 Nishijin maintained a monopoly on the production of luxury silks until the 1730s, when a fire destroyed three thousand of the estimated seven thousand looms, prompting many weavers to migrate to the provinces.19 Some settled in Kiryū, a village some one hundred kilometers north of Edo (in present-day Gunma Province), where they soon developed fabrics of a quality and quantity matching Kyoto’s. Weavers from Kyoto had introduced silk crepe, whose distinctive crinkly texture is produced by twisting the weft threads in alternate directions. In Kyoto, this process had been carried out by hand, but in 1780, in Kiryū, a labor-saving water-powered twisting device was introduced, lowering the price of the resulting fabric. Nishijin weavers were unhappy about this encroachment on their monopoly and petitioned the Tokugawa government to order Kiryū weavers to cease production of figured silks. Despite the formation of a guild to protect their monopoly, their privileged knowledge continued to flow to other regions.20 Rural ie that engaged in craft-related activities tended to be household based, with the distribution of labor shared by the senior husband and wife and their extended family.21 Although the senior male assumed authority, the farm family (nōka) was prioritized over its individual members. The moral value of the ie and the importance of its future prosperity is clear from a farm manual that declared: “The farm family consists of the fields, wealth, and heirlooms handed down from the ancestors. This property does not belong to us, the living members of the family. We must not imagine it does, even in our dreams. It belongs to the ancestors who founded the house; we are only

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Figure 3.3. Tachibana Minkō (act. 1764–72), Weavers in Nishijin, from Various Classes of Artisans in Colored Pictures (Saiga shokunin burui), 1770. Woodblock- and stencilprinted book. 1770. 1979,0305,0.118.1. © Trustees of the British Museum.

entrusted with its care and must pass it on to our descendants . . .”22 Daughters and younger sons remained within and helped the family until marriage and the establishment of their own households. While farm households took on apprentices and temporary workers when necessary, most workshops did not assume the scale or formality of their urban counterparts. As Thomas Smith observed in an article on time management among peasants in early modern Japan, “the discipline of the small family made it possible to move labour back and forth from farming to by-employment, not only seasonally but from day to day and within the day, and also to use the off-farm earnings of individuals for the benefit of the farm and the family.”23 Entrepreneurial rural ie began to compile genealogies in the manner of merchant and craft houses only in the nineteenth century. In so doing, they sought to assert a “house style” (kafu) that included family history and occupational information, as well as standards of behavior for later generations.24 Like those of their urban counterparts, these documents promoting their authors’ intellectual and social status were intended exclusively for family reference. Suzuki Bokushi, the trader in Echigo chijimi cloth who penned Snow Country Tales, cited above, displayed pride in his lineage when he declared, “Most people worry only about the genealogy of the emperors or the shoguns, but rather than clarify those issues, it is more admirable to learn about our own ancestors.”25 Another author emphasized more practical matters: “In noting the efforts that my family exerts in cultivation, the weather conditions, the growth of the five grains, and the practice of sericulture, I hope this will increase the preparedness of future generations who practice agriculture.”26 Mutually supportive agricultural and craft activity developed in many rural regions. Karen Wigen’s study of rural Shinano draws attention to the confluence of patronage, environment, technology, and communications that contributed to the formation of such artisanal clusters. In the eighteenth century, thousands of workers were involved in papermaking and the

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related industries of umbrellas, mizuhiki, and motoyui production in the Shimoina region around Iida Castle town in Shinano Province (modern Nagano Prefecture). Papermaking had a long history in this mountainous region since there were paper mulberry trees to supply the fibers, flowing rivers to clean them, and abundant sun in the winter to dry the paper. The motoyui industry, however, developed only in the late seventeenth century under domainal patronage with the transfer of technology from Mino, one of Japan’s major papermaking regions, and mobilization of lesser retainers of samurai status to provide labor. As illustrated here, these paper ties used for both male and female hairdressing were made by twisting paper into long cords that were stretched on a frame and sold in balls from which users could cut the desired length (figure 3.4). The manufacture of umbrellas also developed nearby when a traveling maker from Gifu disclosed his techniques to local artisans. Transportation in the form of a network of packhorse traders enabled local makers to sell their goods to metropolitan markets.27

t h e l ac qu e r wor k shop s of kōa m i naga s u k u a n d o gawa h a r i t s u The particulars of workshop operations and output varied considerably depending on specialty, scale, and locale. However, rare surviving documentary and material evidence pertaining to lacquerers of the Kōami lineage and of Ogawa Haritsu’s workshop throws light on many of the forces that determined professional success. Sustaining the house over multiple generations was a critical concern for all, but conditions were not always favorable to workshop longevity. Yet even when a craft lineage died out after a generation or two, brand-name recognition could be exploited to enable others to continue production. While Tokugawa patronage ensured that the Kōami dynasty lasted throughout its rule, the Haritsu workshop, which was more dependent on popular consumer tastes, lasted only a generation beyond the life of its founder. Yet the novel lacquer style he pioneered, known after him

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Figure 3.4. Tachibana Minkō (act. 1764–72), Making motoyui, from Various Classes of Artisans in Colored Pictures (Saiga shokunin burui), 1770. Woodblock- and stencil-printed book. 1979,0305,0.118.1. © Trustees of the British Museum.

as “Haritsu- or Ritsuō-style craft” (Haritsu/Ritsuō zaiku), remained influential among Edo lacquerers until the end of the nineteenth century.28 The Kōami are representative of a small number of privileged ie that had prospered under the patronage of successive military rulers from the fifteenth century. Their main line workshop produced makie lacquer on a commission basis rather than supplying ready-mades in a shop for anonymous clientele. Makie lacquerwares were symbols of power and status because of their aesthetic allure, the intrinsic value of the lacquer and gold from which they were made, and the time and labor required. Although classed as shokunin in the Tokugawa period, the Kōami received the income and privileges of ranking samurai, including the right to audiences with the shogun. They were provided housing and received an annual stipend of 200 koku of rice, plus a supplementary stipend sufficient to support ten workers. (A koku—about 150 kilograms—was deemed sufficient to feed one person for a year.) There was also a separate budget for special commissions.29 The post of official lacquerer to the shogun was hereditary. Kōami Nagasuku (1661–1723) was head of this workshop between the 1680s and the 1720s, during which time he compiled a corpus of family records with the assistance of his son.30 Preserved in manuscript form within the family until the late nineteenth century, these were not intended for public consumption. While such documents exist for other well-established craft houses working for the shogunal or daimyo elite, they were by no means typical of all craft practitioners. The existence of such literature is evidence of the interest that craft ie had in recording their history and accomplishments. The family genealogy compiled by Nagasuku contains biographies of the first twelve generations of the family, spanning from the 1450s, when they enjoyed the patronage of the Ashikaga shoguns, to 1700, when they were Tokugawa retainers. Writing such a document (even if intended only for family readership) was a political act, a way of affirming and confirming the continuity of family authority. Like the Kano family lin-

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eage, compiled by Kano Einō, which aimed to “aggrand[ize] family history into the history of painting itself,” so too, by extending the Kōami family lineage into the distant past, Nagasuku aimed to make his family history into a history of makie lacquer.31 This family pride is made explicit in the Yuishitsu-shin, Nagasuku’s admonitions for his successors: “You must never forget that when it comes to sprinkled designs we are the best. But do not boast, not even a little. In our profession of lacquer and sprinkled designs there is no one in all Japan whom you need fear.”32 Nagasuku further bolstered his family’s prestige by compiling a list of famous (meibutsu) writing boxes and other makie articles owned by shoguns and warlords. Like the genealogy, it is a validating record. By classifying works created by members of the Kōami family as meibutsu, famous objects or masterpieces, Nagasuku gave them canonical status. In so doing, he was also asserting his role as a connoisseur: one of his responsibilities was the authentication of works made by earlier family members. The Yuishitsu-shin is a revealing guide to workshop comportment, training, managerial skills, and other practical matters. It resembles the house codes written by merchant houses in its emphasis on diligence, frugality, respect for the shogunal authorities, and reputation.33 As shogunal retainers, the behavior of the Kōami lacquerers had to conform to the social expectations of the warrior class: “When you are the head of a family your behavior is very important. Do not imitate the lowly. . . . Never forget the saying: ‘Be a townsman with the spirit of a samurai.’ ”34 Yet at the same time, they had to demonstrate managerial and administrative competence: “Do not handle money, but train your mind to remember everything. Learn to remember intuitively the sizes of lacquers and sprinkled designs; the gold that is to be applied; the type of lacquer; the number of laborers; the wages for detail work; the weight and quantity of the colors that are used; the rice, salt, bean paste, firewood, and everything else that you need.”35 The admonition not to handle money is likely rhetorical. Nonetheless, calculations do not seem to

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have been Nagasuku’s forte. As Andew Pekarik observes in his translation of this text, the total sum of 53 ryō requested was 6 ryō and 5 bu higher than the itemized cost of labor and material.36 The final section of the Yuishitsu-shin devoted to technique consists of short points to keep in mind in lacquer making, from the importance of a wooden support made from choice woods and the reinforcement of the box joints with kokuso (a compound made from lacquer and rice paste) and hemp cloth, to the application of the primary, middle, and final coatings of lacquer.37 The brevity of this section may have to do with the author’s discomfort in using explicit linguistic form to convey the material operations of the workshop’s specialized techniques. Nagasuku, like most makers, may have preferred to do and show rather than tell. Running a business on a sound financial basis, taking into account the cost of labor, materials, food, and housing, was of paramount concern for the head of a workshop. So, too, was dealing with difficult patrons. In the Yuishitsu-shin, Nagasuku stressed the difficulty of working on a commission basis, observing dryly: “Whenever you receive an order you must be particularly persevering.”38 This was a quality that he no doubt had to bring to bear in creating the replica of a writing box (suzuribako) with a plum motif in 1718, a commission so important that he recorded it in minute detail.39 The commission involved reproducing a treasure made by his ancestor Michikiyo (1432–1500) that had once belonged to Ashikaga Yoshimasa. This was not an unusual request but part of a long-standing tradition of making replicas of meibutsu. Nagasuku was given permission to take the writing box to his studio so he and his associates could examine it closely, but fear of its loss was such that he had to return it to the castle whenever there was a threat of fire anywhere in the neighborhood. After guaranteeing the box’s authenticity, Nagasuku prepared and submitted an estimate of the cost and time frame for fabricating the replica. He requested and was granted ninety days to complete the commission, emphasizing that “unless the lower layers

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and sprinkled designs are dried gradually and well, it will be hard to imitate the original.”40 His request for a payment of 53 ryō to cover the cost of labor and materials (especially the powdered and flaked gold required for the design), however, was refused, and he had to accept 49 ryō. When the ninety days were up and the box still wasn’t ready, Nagasuku was permitted a further month to complete the job. Nagasuku himself played only a minor role in the actual fabrication of this box. Although the finished product would be ascribed to him, he oversaw its design and execution but seems to have had little to do with the actual hands-on work until the final stage. This he delegated to several specialists including Jūbei, a specialist in joinery who made the wooden box, Seigorō, who drew the design, and Denbei, who applied the gold powders. Although only three specialists are named, it is likely that other assistants were assigned specific tasks. For instance, in his itemization of costs, Nagasuku mentions the special charcoal used to burnish the lacquer but says nothing of who carried out this process. Polishing was required after the application of each of the many layers of lacquer and was especially important in the final stage to produce the brilliant reflective sheen that characterizes the finest makie. As head, Nagasuku seems to have ensured operational efficiency, but he worked at a remove from the daily physical contact with the materials of his profession. Curiously, there is no reference in the Kōami records to the important architectural projects in which the house was involved. Yet it is likely that the members of the Kōami workshop consolidated their position as the leading makie specialists through their involvement in the intense building and rebuilding campaigns in and around Kyoto during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when Chōsei (1519–1603) and Chōan (1569– 1610) enjoyed the patronage of successive warlords. To meet surging demand for their skills, during that era the Kōami developed techniques and organizational strategies that challenge the assumption that their workshop was

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always conservative and unchanging. Their creative adaptation to the need for increased and accelerated production is exemplified by Kōdaiji lacquer, a style that flourished from the late sixteenth until the end of the seventeenth century.41 It gets its name from the architectural decor of the Kyoto mortuary temple dedicated to Hideyoshi now in Kyoto’s Kōdaiji temple, whose style is also used in the design of the personal effects of the warlord and his wife Kita no Mandokoro (1547–1624). Kōdaiji makie is distinguished by the use of laborsaving techniques and standardized motifs. Like the pouring vessel illustrated here, these designs often featured floral patterns in contrasting fields of black and gold separated by a bold zigzag (figure 3.5). Unlike the raised decor on the Hatsune dowry set, discussed below, the sprinkled pictures of Kōdaiji lacquer are flat rather than built up to create a three-dimensional surface. In this so-called “flat” makie or hiramakie, powdered metals are applied directly to the wet lacquer, and a thin layer of clear lacquer is applied over them. Further cutting down on time and labor, a needle is used to scratch through the wet lacquer to create the fine lines into which gold powder was sprinkled. The pictorial designs, comprised predominantly of generic floral motifs, are often arranged within diagonal bands of contrasting pattern and color, an approach also found in ceramics and textiles of the same period. The workshop continued to produce a wide range of goods after the seventeenth century, but it was especially in demand as makers of bridal trousseaux, so much so that today the Kōami are largely defined by this output. These were classified as oku dōgu, goods intended for use or display in the privacy of women’s inner chambers, and allowed little scope for innovation. They included dressing tables and accessories, cabinets for combs, mirrors and mirror stands, cosmetic boxes, garment racks, boxes containing the accessories for tooth-blackening, ewers and wash basins, shelves and storage cabinets for books, writing desks, assorted document and stationery boxes, inkstone cases, and games. Their spatial and gendered functions

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Figure 3.5. Kōdaiji-style pouring vessel. ca. 1596. Lacquered wood with sprinkled gold (makie) decoration, H 25.4 × D 17.8 × W 25.7 cm. Purchase, Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, by exchange, 1980. 1980.6. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.

required the adoption of time-honored styles and courtly decorative subject matter. They also had to conform to ideas of luxury premised on extravagant use of gold and silver for the pictorial decor as well as extra-thick layers of lacquer. The condition of many surviving sets suggests that they were intended for ceremonial display rather than daily use. Although the laborsaving techniques adopted in the Kōdaiji workshop were not applied to the production of dowry goods, the operational efficiencies achieved through the division of labor likely continued. Fabricating such lavish dowries often required several years owing to both the scale of the commission and the drying time necessary for each of the many applications of liquid lacquer. The third shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604–1651), for instance, ordered Kōami Chōjū to produce fifty-four items for his daughter’s dowry in 1634, the year she was born. For these showpieces, Chōjū used takamakie, a labor-intensive relief technique in which selected motifs are built up through a mixture of lacquer and clay dust and then sprinkled with gold and silver flakes while the lacquer is still wet (figure 3.6). The “Warbler’s First Song” (Hatsune) and “Butterfly” (Kochō) chapters of The Tale of Genji inspired the auspicious motifs chosen for the decor.42 The so-called Hatsune dowry set was delivered on time, three years later, on the occasion of Chiyohime’s official betrothal to Tokugawa Mitsutomo, daimyo of Owari domain.43 Sometimes, however, dowry goods were barely finished in time for the wedding so that the distinctive odor of lacquer that was not fully set could still be detected, as evoked in a humorous verse (senryū): “yome no heya hairu to urushi kusa nari” (upon entering the bride’s chamber, there is a stink of lacquer).44 Although members of the main line of the Kōami family were not part of the market economy, they nonetheless faced competition from other more recently founded makie workshops that did not necessarily have the same constraints on novelty. The shogun alone employed more than twenty-five lacquerers from different families including the Koma, Yamada, Kajikawa,

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Figure 3.6. Kōami Chōjū (1599–1651), Hatsune lacquer dowry set with scenes from The Tale of Genji, 1639. Tokugawa Art Museum, Nagoya. Tokugawa Art Museum Image Archives/DNP artcom.

and En’ami.45 In addition, there were upstarts such as Ogawa Haritsu, who in his later years enjoyed the patronage of Tsugaru Nobuhisa (1669–1747), a notoriously fun-loving and profligate daimyo who had a lively cultural salon in Edo. Haritsu provides an example of a craft professional whose reputation was shaped primarily horizontally, through social networking, rather than vertically through elite patronage.46 Participation in social settings that brought together men of different social backgrounds and professions who shared an interest in aesthetic pursuits such as haikai poetry, painting and calligraphy, or tea, or who frequented the Yoshiwara brothel district and Kabuki theater played an important role in channeling commissions. Documentary evidence, though sparse, together with surviving works attributed to him, throw light on the importance of Haritsu’s relationship with Takarai Kikaku

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(1661–1707), a disciple of Bashō and founder of a leading haikai circle in Edo, and with daimyo Tsugaru Nobuhisa, lord of Hirosaki domain. A third overlapping sphere of socialization was the floating world of the Yoshiwara and Kabuki theater, where Haritsu developed a close friendship with the actor Ichikawa Danjurō II (1687–1757), who was also a keen haikai poet. In 1730, to honor his father’s memory, Danjurō collaborated with friends and associates in the publication of Chichi no on (A father’s gratitude), a compendium of poetry with illustrations by Hanabusa Ippō (1691–1760) and Haritsu.47 Haritsu did not belong to an established artisanal lineage, and there are no documented examples of his lacquer work from before the period between 1723 and 1731, when Nobuhisa employed him, by which time he was already in his sixties. In fact, virtually nothing is known about his artistic training, and there is no evidence that he ever studied lacquer making. Born in Ise Province to a family of samurai background, early on he took up haikai poetry, becoming a member of the circle of Bashō (1644–1694) and later of Kikaku. It is likely that it was in this context that he met poet, painter, and book illustrator Hanabusa Itchō (1652–1724), under whom he is thought to have studied painting.48 This relationship is confirmed by Haritsu’s collaboration with Itchō’s disciple Ippō (1691–1760) in the illustration of Dokuraku tozenshū (Random collection of a spinning top), a woodblock-printed book containing an eclectic collection of Chinese- and Japanese-style poems that was published on the occasion of Nobuhisa’s retirement in 1731.49 It is likely that Haritsu came to Nobuhisa’s attention through these interwoven literary and artistic networks. By 1723, when Haritsu was sixty-one by Japanese count, he must already have achieved a considerable reputation as a lacquerer in Edo’s lively cultural circles. His warrior-class background and cultural skills, however, have led the late lacquer specialist Haino Akio and other scholars to suggest that Nobuhisa employed him primarily as an artistic advisor.50 This would have included the responsibility of overseeing the production of lacquer goods as well as providing entertainment for official banquets.

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As noted in chapter 1, the Hirosaki domain was a major producer of lacquer sap. Under Nobuhisa’s predecessors, a local workshop had begun producing lacquerware in a distinctive regional style. Known today as Tsugaru-nuri, it is distinguished by its flat, multicolored mottled background. Haritsu was probably sent to Hirosaki to improve the quality of this local ware, possibly by supplying new Chinese-style designs such as those illustrated in figure 1.5. Nobuhisa clearly attributed considerable importance to this project, hiring lacquer specialists from Kyoto and paying them very generous salaries.51 In a noteworthy example of marriage across craft specialties, Haritsu also took his wife and sons, Sōri and Eiha (dates unknown), and a disciple named Karitsu to Hirosaki, but Eiha subsequently left to marry into the family of a Kano school painter-in-attendance to the daimyo Date Yoshimura (1681–1751).52 Hirosaki domainal records provide an overview of the Haritsu workshop’s wide-ranging duties. In addition to articles for gifting, it made a writing table and matching box for the lord’s family temple in Edo, inro (containers for small objects suspended at the waist), ancestral tablets, railings, transoms, sliding doors, tables, paintings, and the decoration of sword guards (tsuba), as well as lacquer repairs. More unusually, the workshop created automata (ka rakuri saikumono) and other curiosities (misemono) for display at Nobuhisa’s social gatherings, where he seems to have spared no expense in providing entertainment for his guests.53 The Hirosaki hanchō nikki (Hirosaki domain diary) does not describe these articles, but it is possible that the replica of a Raku teabowl made of papier-mâché covered in lacquer discussed in chapter 4 was intended as a misemono, since these were often fabrications that surprised and delighted by their technical virtuosity.54 (See figure 4.6.) The karakuri saikumono that Nobuhisa commissioned may have been a novel genre of makie lacquer writing box incorporating a mechanical device, analogous to a work now in the Nezu Museum featuring a landscape with waterfall and waterwheel. The waterwheel, set into the lid and visible through a small

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transparent glass window, is fashioned from ivory. The movement of water that circulates the wheel is simulated by liquid mercury.55 Such display pieces were in keeping with a cultural milieu that set a high premium on demonstrations of visual, verbal, and material ingenuity and wit. A brief biography published some forty years after his death in Sōken kishō (1781) describes Haritsu as a master (meika) of fashionable things (fūryū naru mono) and of combining makie, Raku ceramics, carved lacquer (tsuishu), and horn.56 Another source relates that by the Tenmei era (1781–89), Haritsu lacquers were recognized as famous products of Edo.57 Surviving works confirm that combinations of unusual materials and designs that created trompe l’oeil effects were Haritsu’s stock-in-trade. A writing box in the Tokyo National Museum features on its lid an inro complete with cord, sliding bead (ojime), and netsuke rendered in high relief, set against a shimmering ground of crushed mother-of pearl (figure 3.7). The inro simulates the appearance of a worn inkstick with a motif of an owl sitting on an oak branch that Haritsu also used on a document box made for Nobuhisa.58 The bead made of agate and the round netsuke of red Chinese-style carved lacquer, the actual materials from which these were made, represent a kind of reverse trompe l’oeil. Haritsu’s “Ritsuō” and “Kan” signatures figure on the lower left of the inro, underscoring the illusion that it is a separate entity. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw the growth of authorial self-consciousness.59 Before Haritsu, lacquer craftsmen rarely signed their creations; the new prominence accorded signatures and seals on his and his followers’ work reflects the growing awareness that such branding could help to cement a product’s commercial reputation. Haritsu didn’t form a lasting lineage, but many makers, including Shibata Zeshin (1807–1891), adopted his illusionistic lacquer style until the end of the nineteenth century.60 Neither of Haritsu’s sons followed in his footsteps, but he had two disciples, Mochizuki Hanzan (1743–90?) and Kasama Kyōzan (1736–1802), who carried on his style in a commercial work-

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Figure 3.7. Ogawa Haritsu (1663–1747), makie writing box with relief inro design, 18th c. 20.5 × 19.7 × 2.0 cm. Tokyo National Museum. TNM Image Archives.

shop in Edo and in so doing helped to consolidate his reputation.61 While these followers signed some of their works in their own name, they also continued to use the signature and trademark “Kan” seal. Many Haritsu-style lacquers, especially inkstone boxes and inro, were likely made by them, by later followers, or by imitators. The problems of attribution resulting from this practice have led modern scholars to refer collectively to the large corpus of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century lacquerwares featuring enamel inlays and material deception as Haritsu- or Ritsuō-style crafts (Ha ­ ritsu/Ritsuō zaiku).62 A case in point is a writing box from the late eighteenth century with a design of seaweed and shells in the Suntory Museum, which features a creative adaptation of a Chinese inkcake motif from the Fangshi mopu, a Chinese woodblock-printed book known to have been owned

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Figure 3.8. Ogawa Haritsu (1663–1747), makie writing box with seashell pattern, 18th c. 22 × 24.5 × 5.0 cm. Photo courtesy Suntory Museum, Tokyo. http://suntory.jp/SMA/.

by Tsugaru Nobuhisa (figure 3.8).63 The maker has translated the circular black-and-white linear drawing of assorted generic seashells in the model book into a sophisticated and highly naturalistic relief composition of three bands of shells caught up in seaweed, as if washed ashore by the waves. Overglaze enamel, mother-of pearl, lead, tin, and ivory, as well as gold and silver, have been used to capture with remarkable exactitude the shapes, textures, and brilliant colors of turbo shell, sea urchin, abalone, scallop, oyster, and other shells, bringing to their salient characteristics the accuracy of a conchologist cataloguing specimens. The striking degree of naturalism speaks to popular interest in collecting and classifying flora and fauna fostered by the natural history movement during the second half of the eighteenth century.64 Because dowry goods were invested in a traditional makie style celebrating classic Kyoto court culture, Kōami lacquer production is often charac-

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terized as regressive and lacking in innovation and creativity.65 Such views do not take into account historical and cultural circumstances. While their output appears to have remained relatively unchanged after the seventeenth century, working within established parameters was a condition for the privilege of shogunal patronage. A style that spoke of cultural continuity from the courtly past was deemed appropriate for articles made for private female use. Haritsu, as an independent agent, by contrast, could create works that both mirrored and channeled consumer tastes in new directions. Many of them capitalized on the authority of Chinese material culture, associated with the public realm of men, but in ways that were often irreverent and witty. Both Nagasuku and Haritsu were both highly literate lacquer masters who achieved considerable success during their lifetimes. Work in their studios was carried out collaboratively and involved, in addition to numerous subordinates specialized in different stages of the makie process, others, such as box makers, and in Haritsu’s case, specialists in enamel and motherof-pearl inlays, carved lacquer, and mechanical devices. While Nagasaku seems to have functioned largely in a supervisory capacity in the creation of the lacquer box with plum motif, he had the training to lend a hand when necessary, as he did in the final stages of production in order to meet the new deadline. Haritsu, on the other hand, is more likely to have drawn up designs and plans for others to execute and then to have overseen their realization. To successfully carry out a project, however, he still needed to be aware of the physical properties of his materials, to provide continuous feedback to assistants, and to modify his initial concept if it proved unworkable. In this respect, his status resembled that of Kōetsu, Kōrin, and later, Hōitsu, who might be characterized as designer-makers—that is, individuals who provided the initial design concept, in the form of a preliminary drawing with annotations concerning materials and techniques, but did not carry out the actual work themselves.66 Like them also, he later came to be admired

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because his creative talents developed outside the workshop system and seemingly broke with convention. Despite their professionalization, these individuals became aligned with literati painters, who, in keeping with the Chinese literati ideal of the “amateur,” practiced outside the formal strictures of official workshops and developed highly expressive personal styles. Unlike Nagasuku, who perpetuated a time-honored house style, Haritsu developed a fresh, recognizable individual style whose adoption by others transformed his name into an established brand.

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ch a p t e r fou r

Tacit Knowledge

Most practitioners learned their craft through apprenticeships lasting from seven to ten years, during which they lived as members of their master’s household.1 This was an economic exchange in the guise of a social relationship that theoretically obliged the master to treat the apprentice as a son and the apprentice to give a year’s free labor after completing his training. Apprentices were said to have “stolen their lessons” (nusumi keiko), a reminder that knowledge is a valuable commodity. Yet even as a disciple, by his studious observation, “stole” something of his master’s power and authority, he also reinforced it by perpetuating his teachings in time and space. Value accrued to the student through a life-enhancing somatic change that carried with it an officially legitimated occupational status. The exchange could entail material things such as specialized manuals or models, but these were less important than the language, gestures, and behavioral patterns that could be transmitted only through personal experience. In early modern Japan, as in the European workshop at that time, “bodily gestures [took] the place of words in establishing authority, trust, and cooperation.”2 Formal book learning was of less importance than the development of tacit knowledge and skills based on mimesis that made actions seem instinctive rather than carefully cultivated. The instructions that Kōami Nagasuku wrote for his successors elaborate on the nondiscursive, embodied nature of craft practice: “In general, learn through practice, and other things will

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follow on their own . . . . The profession of lacquerer or sprinkled design artist is such that you must practice and train yourself all the time, sitting or lying down, twenty-four hours a day, without a break, if you are to mature and gain fame.”3 This chapter examines the tacit knowledge that was developed through extended training and practice. The seamless and seemingly instinctive flow of activity that constitutes craft making does not lend itself easily to words. Nor does the ability to perceive and understand the nature of materials that was equally critical to craft expertise. How were the bodily techniques and modes of consciousness specific to each craft transmitted from one person to another? How did practices rooted in sensations, postures, and gestures and their interrelationship with materials develop into the ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has famously called habitus?4

e m b odi e d k now l e d ge The body was the principal vehicle for knowledge transfer in early modern craft practice. Even today, the expression “karada de oboeru”—literally, to remember with the body—is a fundamental modeling principle in many forms of Japanese education.5 While the body might be called on to memorize, manage, and protect individual and collective knowledge, exactly how it functioned as an operational tool is not always easy to discern. When a master of the performing arts modeled a procedure for a student, he or she was said to be providing a kata, or pattern, a term that in this context suggests a kind of self-conscious objectification of movements and gestures. Kata codified and prescribed the rules of the body language specific to each activity, aiding the learning process by transforming its complex workings into simple prescriptions. Such a process of standardization was essential to translate movements into an idiom that could be understood and transmitted from one generation to the next. As Rupert Cox has observed, “the repeated imitation

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of standardized patterns of movement is a physical and visual substantiation of a tradition, connecting the practitioner to the aesthetic qualities, as well as to all the others, past and present, who also practice.”6 Richard Schechner, a scholar of performance theory, has usefully characterized this ritualized production of pattern using the body as “restored behavior.” He writes: “Restored behavior is living behavior treated as a film director treats a strip of film. These strips of behavior can be rearranged or reconstructed; they are independent of the causal systems (social, psychological, technological) that brought them into existence . . . . Originating as a process, used in the process of rehearsal to make a new process, a performance, the strips of behavior are not themselves process but things, items, ‘material.’”7 Although both the term kata and Schechner’s concept of restored behavior apply primarily to the performing arts, the same principles also hold true in the crafts. Learning through prolonged observation, the weaver, the potter, or the lacquer maker forms a series of mental images of movements (kata) that are imprinted on the memory through physical repetition until they become second nature. Although the practice seems to privilege visuality, it also involves multisensorial corporeal knowledge exchange through hearing, touch, and even smell. For instance, through somatic experience, the lacquerer learns that the sap of the lac tree may induce a skin rash or that even when dry to the touch, lacquer may still exude a distinctive smell that dissipates only when the polymerization process is fully complete. Corporeal modeling is a technology requiring that a process be deconstructed into its constituent units—the material of Schechner’s definition—in such a way that the student can replicate them with precision and in the right order so as to internalize their underlying principles. No manual can substitute for human modeling, which requires that instructor and student be in the same place at the same time. Nor can a printed manual substitute for the kind of physical intimacy involved in the transmission of embodied knowledge. Kata require prescriptive movements that must be adhered to but also

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sufficient elasticity that each body can make them his or her own. Even when these are fully internalized, no two people perform in exactly the same way— whether on the stage or in the potter’s workshop. Building up a memory bank experientially on the basis of kata acknowledges that change inevitably emerges from within these accepted constraints. Put differently, imitation begets innovation. The importance of learning by doing is underscored in the reminiscences of the Buddhist woodcarver Takamura Kōun (1852–1934). When the twelveyear-old Kōun sought to be taken on as an apprentice to a carver of Buddhist icons, his prospective master asked: “Have you learned to read and write?” I had learned a little from my mother, but it didn’t count for much, so I answered, “I haven’t.” Upon which he responded, “I see. It’s just as well. Writing is unnecessary for a craftsman.” To his next question, “Have you learned how to use an abacus?” I answered that I didn’t know that either. “The abacus is also unnecessary. It’s not good for a craftsman to calculate money. If you become a master sculptor, you can hire other people to write and calculate. All you have to do is work as hard as you can at carving,” he said. And with that brief oral exam, I became his apprentice.8

Despite Kōun’s claims that reading, writing, and use of the abacus were unnecessary, some level of literacy was the norm among most artisans, both male and female. Craft practitioners needed computational skills to handle economic transactions. Mathematical knowledge was also a prerequisite, more so in some professions than in others. At the most fundamental level, makers had to know how to calculate measurements using a ruler. More complex proportional calculations (kiwari) using specialized tools were required of carpenters.9 Developing hand-eye coordination and muscle memory in woodcarving, like any other craft, was achieved by tedious repetition. Kōun recalled that initially he was given a flat board into which he chiseled decorative patterns again and again “until the tools broke.”10 Only then, having developed

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a heightened sensitivity to the properties of wood and dexterity in handling the chisel, was he allowed to move on to carving three-dimensional figures. While there is a tendency in a modern world that privileges intellectual over manual activity to see such repetition as a kind of blind routine or mindless mechanical action, this kind of training was essential for artisans to develop the ability to think through materials. Through the accumulated memories of a “mindful hand,” an experienced carver learned to detect irregularities and other features in the wood that are invisible to others, and to bring this tacit knowledge to bear on his work. Sustained practice under the guidance of an expert authority was also critical to achieve proficiency in those crafts in which women specialized. Spinning, weaving, and dyeing were important female occupations during the Heian period (794–1185), but by the seventeenth century, they were no longer practiced in most elite households. Although still identified as virtuous occupations for women of the warrior class, they had largely devolved to artisanal professionals. In her account of her warrior-class mother Aoyama Chise’s life, Yamakawa Kikue (1890–1980) relates that Chise tried out the loom at her sewing teacher’s residence, “but it was difficult for one without experience to keep the movement of her hands and feet coordinated. When Chise moved her hands her feet stopped, and if she concentrated on her feet, she forgot to move her hands. As she shifted her attention from one to the other, the yarn would break.”11 Sewing, however, remained a critical skill for all. A print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861) portraying a female body in motion, with her arm gracefully extended to draw a long thread through the kimono collar she is stitching, with a tiered sewing box and tools at the ready, makes visible the needle’s role in the Neo-Confucian moral economy of body and mind (figure 4.1). Her practice is rooted in a seated posture, but the bearing of her body changes in relation to the movement of needle and thread. Through its movements, the needle becomes an extension of her arm, part of her very being.

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Figure 4.1. Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861), Wisdom (Chi), from series Mirror of Feminine Virtue for a Thousand Ages (Teisō chiyo no kagami), ca. 1843. Woodblock print, vertical ōban. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. William Sturgis Bigelow Collection, 11.22143.

Captioned “wisdom” (chi), it is part of a set of pictures titled Mirror of Eternal Feminine Virtue (Teisō chiyo kagami; 1841–43). Wisdom, together with benevolence, loyalty, decorum, and faith, was one of the five cardinal Confucian virtues. The inscription in the cartouche above reiterates the benefits that come from the tireless cultivation of this virtue. This image also serves as a reminder that the female body’s value was measured by the labor it carried out, both in the production of goods and, as the child beside her makes clear, in the production of offspring. Through their needlework, women developed shared “techniques of the body,” bodily experiences that produced habits both shaping and reflecting the gendered society in which they lived.12 Most training in the “way of the needle” began in the home under the guidance of senior members of the family. Aoyama Chise learned the basics of sewing around age ten by watching her mother and by making clothes for her doll. Formal study in a needlework school run by the wife of a low-ranking samurai commenced around age thirteen. There, her first assignment was to stitch layers of used fabric together to make cloths for cleaning; next she moved on to the heavy layered soles of cotton split-toed socks (tabi).13 Chōnin families sometimes sent their daughters to warrior households to learn manners and skills, including embroidery.14 In many farming communities, preparing a young woman for her domestic and marital responsibilities also included spending time in a young women’s lodge (musume yado) or needle lodge (ohariya), where various forms of female knowledge were shared. As the name ohariya indicates, sewing was an important part of this communal exchange.15 There, the socalled ohariko (“needle children”) learned practical skills by watching and imitating the gestures of more senior members, and in so doing were initiated into their socially mandated gender roles. Embodied knowledge was paramount, but making could also rely on guidance provided in handwritten and printed manuals of various kinds, some with professional secrets available only to workshop members and

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others widely distributed through woodblock-printed books. Before lifting needle and thread, a seamstress had to know how best to measure and cut the fabric so as to prevent waste. Japanese textiles were woven in standard size bolts (tan), roughly 28.8 centimeters in width and 10 meters in length, and making the most of each bolt required careful planning.16 In the eighteenth century, cutting layouts and measurements were included in many household manuals, and some even included tips on how to handle specific kinds of fabric.17 For instance, Onna manzai takarabunkō (Collected works on women’s treasures of a thousand years; 1784) provides the following tip for handling silk crepe (chirimen): “Chirimen stretches out of shape and is difficult to sew. Here is a secret tip: run a row of stitching along the edge of the fabric. Make sure the stitching is absolutely straight. If you then follow that line while sewing you will not sew crookedly.”18 Craft making created communities of practice that socialized their members in many ways. They taught apprentices to value collaboration, to work to exacting standards, and to adhere to given codes of behavior, and they provided officially recognized credentials. Yet by the same token, they involved exclusion as well as inclusion: the rules and restrictions they imposed acted as barriers for nonmembers and stifled competition. Over time, they inculcated not only occupational practices but also perceptions and attitudes, as well as gendered ways of being in the world. These outlooks were inextricably bound up with shared beliefs and rituals. For sculptors, the felling of trees; for carpenters, determining the building site, delineating the perimeter, and raising the ridgepole of a building; and for potters, the firing of a kiln were all occasions marked by communal prayers and offerings to Shinto and Buddhist deities. Participation in annual festivals devoted to the patron deities of the profession further enhanced professional solidarity. Shōtoku Taishi, the seventh-century prince who “built” Hōryūji, for instance, was the object of special veneration among carpenters as well as others in the building trade. Through Prince Shōtoku, even in the absence

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of a formal genealogy, carpenters could trace their roots to an illustrious progenitor.19 On the eighth day of the twelfth month, seamstresses held a ceremony (hari kuyō) in which broken needles were offered to the deity of Awashima along with prayers for success in their work.20 Some crafts practitioners were further bound by religious affiliation. In 1615 Tokugawa Ieyasu gave Hon’ami Kōetsu a parcel of land at Takagamine, northwest of Kyoto. Kōetsu settled there with some fifty households, all followers of the Nichiren sect of Buddhism, most of them involved in some form of craft activity. Members of this community included Chaya Shirōjirō, who belonged to the family that developed the chayazome dyeing technique; Ogata Sōtaku, of the Kariganeya; lacquerer Tsuchida Sōtaku; brush maker Fudeya Myōki; and papermaker Kamiya Sōji.21 The socioreligious meanings of craft making as a collective activity also extended to women, despite the fact that they did not belong to formal workshops. A passage in Treasury of Greater Learning for Women declares, “Of the many skills necessary to become a woman, sewing is the most important. Along with the inability to wield a writing brush, not being acquainted with the way of the sewing needle (nuibari no michi) is the source of great shame for a woman.”22 The character read michi or dō (righteous path or road) is a metaphor for the unity of mind and body—the quest for a higher truth and the physical activity—involved in craft mastery. Its use here is significant in that it gave legitimacy to a routine female practice comparable to that of other crafts, such as carpentry and painting, that were similarly ascribed ritual meaning by being characterized as michi or dō.23 For male practitioners, professional identity was at stake; for their female counterparts, sewing was also a gender-defining ritual. It remained so into the twentieth century. Reformist educator Ushigome Chie recalled that “in the provinces, until that time [1910–1920s], the idea remained widespread that skill in sewing determined a person’s value as a woman. I was bad at sewing and calligraphy as a child, and was scolded at home ‘You’re not a girl.’ This was not simply a

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judgment on skill in sewing, but a view of education that believed morality was nurtured through mastery of the techniques of what one might call the Way of Sewing. ”24 Despite the fact that expertise was understood to lie in embodied skills rather than in text-based knowledge, by the eighteenth century there was a large corpus of systematic craft knowledge in circulation in manuscript and print form.25 Oral traditions of practice were often handed down as family or trade secrets (kuden). These had the disadvantage of requiring person-toperson transmission, and over time, inaccuracies invariably slipped in. Manuscripts were principally intended for in-house use and were regarded as workshop capital that had to be protected, while the printed texts were intended for public diffusion. But how real was secrecy in the early modern era, when the ability to travel and pass on information by word of mouth, the circulation of handwritten manuscripts with trade secrets, and above all, the availability of printed craft manuals offered practitioners both verbal and nonverbal opportunities to expand their knowledge base? The belief that embodied craft practice constitutes a ritual act is closely bound up with the secrecy surrounding the transmission of professional expertise from one practitioner to another. In this respect, artisanal succession participated in a wider culture of secrecy prevailing in other professions including classical literary studies and Noh theater. While Buddhist suspicions about the inadequacy of language to express higher truths, and “mind to mind” transmission among monks may have contributed to the importance attributed to professional secrecy, this outlook has deeper roots in the crafts.26 In ancient times, artisans were elevated above ordinary mortals because their skill was attributed to their ability to channel the mysterious powers of the divine. Such skill could be dangerous and potentially harmful if not properly deployed. Therefore it was treated as a secret to be passed on only to initiates. By the early modern era, however, the line between keeping occupational knowledge secret because it conveyed special insights and

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keeping it secret simply because it was valuable proprietary knowledge became blurred.27 Professional expertise was exposed by the very system of transmission from one generation to another that was supposed to protect it. Further slippage occurred when specialists, such as the Nishijin weavers who migrated from Kyoto to Kiryū, carried with them previously privileged knowledge. The growing systematization of oral tradition in the form of handwritten manuscripts and printed publications further undermined the maintenance of secrecy. Some artisans even commoditized their expertise by publishing how-to books. For example, the Illustrated Compendium of Clever Machines (1796) reveals the secret springs, cogs, and other mechanical devices for making a tea-serving automaton, karakuri ningyō.28 The finished doll, dressed in silk clothes that hid the mechanism, was activated by placing a small teabowl in its outstretched hands and setting it on a flat surface, which it traversed until the teabowl was removed (figures 4.2 and 4.3). Given that verbal exegesis has little place in knowledge transmission, it is not surprising that the mechanism hidden beneath the clothed figure is conveyed pictorially with only brief instructions. These were likely to be of use only to someone already possessed of specialized training. Since the mechanisms used in automata were similar to those used in Japanese clocks, the craftsmen who made them were generally specialists in this field.29 Were such books intended for practical use or merely to induce a sense of technological wonder and voyeuristic pleasure in their beholders? Publications such as these suggest that professional secrecy in the early modern craft world was far more ambiguous than is commonly held. A further example suggesting how merely referring to secrecy may enhance the value of information can be found in the Sankai meisan zue discussion of porcelain production in Arita quoted earlier. “The overglaze enameling techniques used in this kiln are secrets that cannot be spoken of to outsiders, so they are not discussed here. However, it is said that the glaze uses glass.”30 What is noteworthy about this passage is that the author reveals a secret of

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Figure 4.2. Hosokawa Hanzō Yorinao, tea-serving automaton, from Illustrated Compendium of Clever Machines (Karakuri kinmō zui), 1796. Woodblock-printed book. 1998.2–18.055. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 4.3. Tamaya Shobei IX, tea-serving automaton doll, based on design in Karakuri zui (1796), 2005. Wood, textile, metal, H 30 cm. 2005.0702.1 © Trustees of the British Museum.

the glaze even as he emphasizes the importance of concealing it. As Paul Christopher Johnson, who coined the term “ritualized secretism,” has observed, “It is through secretism, the circulation of a secret’s inaccessibility, the words and actions that throw that absence into relief, that a secret’s power grows, quite independently of whether or not it exists.”31

m at e r i a l c ons c iousn e s s Writing in The Body of the Artisan, a study of artisanal practice in early modern Europe, Pamela Smith observes that “when artisans looked to nature, they were interested, not surprisingly, in its powers of generation and transformation, for they themselves worked with the materials of nature and struggled to manipulate and control them in order to produce objects.”32 While craft makers in early modern Japan experienced the world in disparate ways, depending on their surroundings and chosen medium, they too brought a heightened material consciousness to the making process.33 This did not follow from a love of nature but from practical considerations. A spatiotemporal awareness of materials was critical to many professions. Those who worked with wood needed to know the optimum time and place to harvest timber, how long to season it to prevent cracking, what type was best suited to the article into which it was to be formed, and its behavior when different forces were applied. In his study of Japanese carpentry, William Coaldrake cites the saying that “the carpenter does not buy a piece of wood but buys the mountain” (ki o kawazu yama o kau), a reference to the importance of knowing the original orientation of the timber to the north or the south to ensure its suitability to a particular location in a building.34 Likewise, the lacquer maker’s knowledge of his materials included the locale, time of harvest, and even the part of the tree from which the sap was drawn, since these determined its quality: the lower part of the tree, it was held, produced the best lacquer, and it flowed best in hot weather.35

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Materials are not defined solely by their objective functional properties: they may also take on symbolic values that are contingent on the local context. In a culture where the material composition of clothing and home furnishings defined class identities, craft makers had to be keenly aware of the ascriptive qualities of certain woods, fabrics, and dyes. Objective properties such as height, girth, and a straight grain were critical to the selection of structural timbers, but subjective qualities such as color, aroma, texture, imperfection, and the expression of mutability associated with the aesthetics of the tea ceremony were more important to the decorative interior. In early modern Japan, the social value ascribed to materials was often bound up with sumptuary regulations issued periodically by the Tokugawa shogunate and regional daimyo in order to reinforce social distinctions. Because it was so costly to produce and the dyed cloth so quick to fade, sumptuary laws restricted the use of the crimson dye made from the petals of the safflower (benibana) to members of the warrior class. Such regulations acted as both constraints on and catalysts for material innovation. Ordinances concerning safflower red, for instance, spurred the use of sappanwood (suō) imported from Southeast Asia as a substitute. Experiments with “fake” beni red, in turn, may have also led to the development of a “fake” purple also made with sappanwood, using iron as a mordant to fix the dye. This color became known as Edo Murasaki because of its popularity in that city.36 Craftwork of all kinds depended on close observation and repeated experimentation with materials and their interactions. Both cognitive and manual skills were inextricably entwined in this evidentiary learning process. Tim Ingold, in an eloquent challenge to mind-body dualism, has asserted that “the way of the craftsman . . . is to allow knowledge to grow from the crucible of our practical and observational engagements with the beings and things around us . . . . the conduct of thought goes along with, and continually answers to, the fluxes and flows of the materials with which we work. These materials think in us, as we think through them.”37

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Understanding the subtleties of cognitive and corporeal knowledge of materials among early modern craft makers is challenging since we cannot observe them directly. However, it is possible to gain considerable insight into the phenomenology of their practice by observing contemporary professionals. Further information may be gleaned by deconstructing finished works; as fixed traces of material thinking, they can show how ideas were shaped. Documentary evidence, though rare, can further assist in the understanding of material consciousness. For most practitioners, it was not necessary to understand precisely what caused a material to perform in a certain way or why. What mattered was that they recognized the changes in their material and acted on them. Swordsmiths recognized very fine details in their steel, fine structures that appeared in the hamon, or hardened edges, and other types of crystal structures in the finished steel blades, and these details guided them in making these blades. Yoshihara Yoshindo (b. 1943) is a celebrated contemporary swordsmith whose working methods follow those of his early modern forebears (figure 4.4). A film of him creating a sword from start to finish clearly demonstrates how makers “think through materials” using tacit knowledge that is made manifest through the agency of the body.38 To watch the film is to become immersed in the heat, noise, sensations, and actions in the smithy where Yoshihara and two assistants, using techniques that have changed little since the Edo period, transform porous lumps of carefully selected semiprocessed steel (tamahagane) into a sword that is as deadly as it is beautiful. The swordsmith’s body language captures the many seemingly instinctive decisions he makes in handling his materials. Every movement is purposeful and exact. The swordsmith’s tools are limited to a forge and assorted tongs and hammers. He uses no thermometer to gauge the temperature of the forge, but from long experience of heat felt by his body, the color of the fire, and the sounds in the forge, he knows when to adjust it using bellows. He begins by using a long handle welded to a small plate holding stacked

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Figure 4.4. Sword maker Yoshihara Yoshindo (b. 1943) forging a sword. Photo courtesy Leon Kapp.

wafer-like pieces of tamahagane and carefully places this into the forge. This material will eventually form the sword blade. Yoshihara heats it, and when it is hot enough, he removes it, works on it, and then reinserts it into the forge. He is constantly monitoring the state of the heat-softened material, ensuring that it does not overheat but at the same time that it is heated to high enough temperatures so that the forging activity is effective in shaping the blade and also in removing any elements other than iron and carbon. He detects subtle changes in the internal forces of his material visually, through color and texture, making quick decisions on the basis of an accumulation of visual memories of how steel looks at various stages of production. These may not be consciously categorized but are remembered in such a way that they can be brought to bear instantaneously as his work proceeds. The intense concentration Yoshihara brings to this and other manual operations

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is an indication that he is constantly reflecting on the evolving state of his materials. A distinctive feature of Japanese swords—and the source of their exceptional strength and flexibility—is that they are made of a hard outer skin and slightly softer inner core. Each component is fashioned by hammering and folding the steel over and over again to ensure an even composition of the two types of steel. In the early stages of the process, hammering serves chiefly to remove the impurities, distribute the carbon evenly, and lower the carbon content, which determines the quality of the steel to be used in the finished sword. During this process, the weight of the tamahagane is gradually reduced: to produce a sword weighing about 750–950 grams requires three to four times this weight in steel at the start of this process. Two apprentices assist Yoshihara in hammering out the impurities. They hammer alternately, wielding their tools with a syncopated rhythm following their master’s guidance. He communicates his instructions—to hammer harder or faster— by tapping his own hammer on the anvil. Auditory sensitivity is an important part of the swordsmith’s material awareness since he can’t touch the hot molten metal but must be guided by the percussive sound it produces. After the blade has been shaped, the swordsmith brings his knowledge of the interaction between an insulating clay coating and the steel to help him design and form the hard cutting edge, or hamon, along with its aesthetics. The boundary between the body and the hardened cutting edge of every blade features a distinctive decorative pattern created by coating the roughly finished sword in a mixture of clay, charcoal, whetstone, and other ingredients and then carefully heating it in the forge to approximately 950°C. At this critical, final stage of the operation, the swordsmith works in the dark to better detect the subtle changes in color that tell him when the sword has reached a temperature of about 800°C along the cutting edge and about 750– 760°C above the cutting edge. (The specific temperatures used can vary among different swordsmiths.) After heating and quenching the sword, it is

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roughly polished to reveal the visible hamon or pattern on the hardened edge. Yoshihara is famous for a pattern likened to a clove blossom, but this is only one of many patterns used by makers to express their technical skills and individuality. Like the forging of the sword, the shaping of the pattern on the surface of the blade reveals its maker’s material consciousness. This is also an indication that sword making involves a level of craft and aesthetic awareness that goes beyond what was needed for swords to be effective as weapons. Not shown in the film is the final polishing of the sword to refine its shape and sharpen the blade. This is carried out by a specialist in sword polishing (tōgishi). Like the swordsmith, he brings a deep tacit knowledge of his materials and their interaction. His key tools are a set of stones, each used for a different stage of the polishing. (A polisher sharpening a blade may be seen in the background of the detail of the Rakuchū rakugaizu screen in figure 2.3.) So valuable were these stones that they were sometimes offered as gifts to feudal lords. To complete the polishing of a fine sword may take as long as two weeks.39 Finished objects also have the capacity to reveal much about a maker’s relationship to materials. Makers were constantly engaged in a search for new materials and new ways of using those already available. Overglaze enamel was a surface decor that was first deployed in Japan in the early seventeenth century on porcelain in the Arita kilns. In Kyoto, Ninsei and workshops in the Eastern Hills soon extended its use to earthenwares and stonewares produced in Kyoto. (See figure 4.6.) As discussed in chapter 3, Haritsu pioneered the use of enamel inlays in lacquer. Making them was a process separate from lacquering since these colorful vitreous inlays had to be fired separately before being applied to the lacquer. Haritsu’s adaptation of overglaze enamel to lacquer is an example of the way that makers learned and responded to one another across media. Another Haritsu innovation was the practice of reproducing the shape and surface of other materials in lacquer. His simulacra of clay, metal, shell, and inksticks offer striking indications of a keen interest in and creative

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Figure 4.5. Ogawa Haritsu (1663–1747), teabowl made of papier-mâché covered in lacquer simulating Raku ware, first half 18th c. H.8.3 D.12.1 cm. Nezu Museum, Tokyo.

experimentation with materials. In some cases, this involved separating the design of the object from its original form and function—as in the translation of Chinese inksticks into inro. In other cases, the translated object could be used in much the same way as its model. This is true of a teabowl made of papier-mâché coated with lacquer imitating a Raku teabowl (figure 4.5). The bowl is comparable in size, shape, and surface to Raku ware and can, in fact, serve to prepare and drink tea. A person seeing it for the first time might be taken in by the masquerade but, upon closer inspection, would notice the brightly colored, inlaid enamel gourds not used in Raku teabowls and, upon picking it up, would also feel the difference in weight and texture.

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To convincingly translate Raku ceramics into lacquer required not only technical skill but also considerable reflection about the nature of these two very disparate substances. Haritsu had to simulate the physical properties, texture, and appearance of low-fired and glazed clay characteristic of Raku, using the skills and techniques of his own medium of lacquer.40 These materials required very different material knowledge. While Raku ware is carved or hand built from clay, a malleable material that hardens through firing in a kiln, lacquer, a viscous tree sap, is cured by polymerization, a hardening process carried out by placing the lacquer-covered object in a dust-free cupboard (as shown in figure 2.11) with an atmosphere with specific relative humidity and temperature. Lacquer, unlike clay, is a substance that cannot hold a form on its own until it has polymerized. Consequently, it is generally applied in many thin layers as a surface coating over a material support, such as wood, bamboo, or, as here, over papier-mâché, which it renders protectively resistant to water. Unlike clay, which was dipped into a colored slip or glazed before firing, the liquid lacquer had to be impregnated with an array of colorants to produce the warm red or deep black effects of Raku. In its raw, liquid state, the sap of the lac tree—which is related to poison ivy—is a skin irritant and cannot be manipulated directly with the hands, so its application requires the mediation of a spatula, brush, or other tool. While finished clay vessels register the manual gestures used to form them, the lustrous polished surface of lacquerwares leave no such traces. Here, however, Haritsu had to work counterintuitively to produce the appearance of the handmade, an effect most clearly manifested in the ridged base and spiral carved into the foot ring that is a hallmark of Raku ware. As noted above, materials have many properties, some intrinsic and others culturally ascribed. In carrying out his material translation, Haritsu was no doubt aware of the relative social significance of lacquer and clay and its implications for user reception. Both were culturally charged substances with recognized places within the tea world, but in the early eighteenth

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century, the viscous substance was primarily used to make containers to hold powdered tea and incense, not vessels for drinking tea. Unlike lacquer, the social and cultural distinction of Raku ware did not follow from the costliness of the material or the amount of time and labor involved in its manufacture, but rather from its association with the personal taste (konomi) of Sen no Rikyū (1522–91) and of its principal makers, official potters to the three tea schools founded by Rikyū’s heirs. By demonstrating his capacity to make a parodic transformation (mitate), Haritsu playfully threatened the authority of both the medium and the style of the hereditary line of craftsmen who had long held a monopoly on patronage ties to the three Senke schools of tea. Although Haritsu’s teabowl could serve to drink tea, it is more likely, given the accounts of his work in the Hirosaki domainal records discussed in chapter 3, that it was intended as a display piece, a kind of curiosity or misemono. By presenting a Raku teabowl in an unexpected way, Haritsu capitalized simultaneously on the appreciation of novelty and of the pleasurable recognition of something already familiar. By arousing amusement and curiosity, Haritsu’s lacquer creations also opened up to serious consideration the material world in which his consumers lived. Tōkō hitsuyō (Essentials for the potter; 1737), a manual of technical secrets for potters, offers a third lens through which to evaluate craft makers’ consciousness of materials. This handwritten manual was compiled by the potter Nonomura Ninsei (act. 1646–94). Kenzan received it from Ninsei’s son Seiemon, under whom he studied for a short time. Kenzan expanded the repertory of shapes and developed a distinctive painterly approach to decorating stonewares using underglaze and overglaze enamels. His workshops, first at Narutaki in the northwest hills of Kyoto and later at Chōjiyamachi, along Nijō, one of its main thoroughfares, produced ceramics in a repertory of shapes using a variety of techniques: teabowls were wheel-thrown; flower-shaped bowls were fashioned by drape-molding (pressing a slab of

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Figure 4.6. Workshop of Ogata Kenzan (1663–1743), set of five camellia-shaped side dishes (mukōzuke) with camellia patterns, first half 18th c. Stoneware with white slip and overglaze enamels, diam. (each) 10.5 cm. Gift of Florence and Herbert Irving; 2019. 2019.193.56a-e. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.

clay over a wood or bisque-fired clay mold) and then shaping the edges by hand (figure 4.6); lidded boxes were carefully assembled using slabs of clay; and square trays were made by press-molding.41 Kenzan did not make these forms himself; he had his assistants make them or purchased blanks in quantity from other potters.42 However, he transformed these standardized wares with imaginative pictorial decor using a variety of designs and colorful glazes. Applying this decor, like the fabrication of the vessels themselves, was often left to his assistants. The Tōkō hitsuyō testifies to Kenzan’s deep engagement in the study of the composition of clays and glazes.43 Because craft making in Japan was largely a nonverbal process based on tacit knowledge of materials and how they

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could be worked, the scientific significance of thinking through making has not been widely acknowledged by modern scholars. And yet, reading Tōkō hitsuyo, one may argue that Kenzan engaged in what historian of science Pamela Smith has called, in another context, the “vernacular science of matter.”44 More than a simple recipe book, Tōkō hitsuyō records Kenzan’s experiments and investigative practices with clays and materials for glazes. It is commonly assumed that the impulse behind such written manuals was practical—the preservation of successful procedures—but one may argue that Kenzan’s experimentation was not simply a means to an end but an expression of his creation of knowledge by thinking through materials. The entry on the use of white slip, “the greatest secret of the Kenzan kiln,” offers a case in point. The recipe that Kenzan received from Ninsei for “benizara style with white painting” stated: “dissolve the finest white clay from Kurodani, and use it to paint designs on the raw ware. Since the glaze is transparent with bluish-black mottling, the painting will show up white.”45 Kenzan’s own annotations critique this approach: The technique for white slip is the greatest secret of the Kenzan kiln, so I will pass it on orally rather than writing it down. I have seen pieces using the above recipe, but the white does not really emerge as a pure white. Even when it is made of the finest Kurodani white clay, the color is slightly gray. Because I thought it impossible to achieve a good white with this mixture, I attempted to use white clay from Yagi Mountain in Bizen and white clay from Satsuma. In particular, I used material from Akaiwa village in Kuzu district, Bungo, which is dug by villagers and used to whiten paper; using this clay I conceived an original way of painting in white.46

As these comments indicate, Kenzan sought to improve on Ninsei’s recipe through experimentation. Despite his claim that he would pass on the secret of his slip orally, in another section of the manual he reveals that he bisque-fired and then pulverized the white clay before making the slip, with good results.47 Yoshihara, Haritsu, and Kenzan were all keenly aware of the

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properties of their materials and the changes that could be brought about through their manipulation, but Kenzan was the only one concerned with systematically articulating why and how they worked. Craft training for both men and women inculcated socially constructed bodily dispositions, sensibilities, and skills, so that they acquired a subconscious force. It was through repetition that mundane craft processes and practices also became invested with ritual meaning. Making involved learning and knowing with and through materials. Tools, human touch, and body worked together with mind, acting as channels for transferring intent into material reality. The ability to work creatively with both the potentialities and the limitations of their chosen materials underwrote the cultural authority of makers and the quality of their crafts.

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chapter five

Technology, Innovation, and Craft Mastery

Craft making is a dynamic, collaborative activity requiring materials as well as tools and technologies that extend human capabilities. Together these elements constitute a complex web of relationships that enables some practices while constraining others. Material factors significantly determine what’s possible. The malleability of clay lends itself to applications that stone does not. Stone has to be worked by cutting away and shaping with force, but clay can be molded into myriad shapes by hand or on a potter’s wheel and further transformed through the use of heat technology. To create articles from clay, stone, or other materials therefore requires intimate knowledge of their intrinsic properties and of the most suitable equipment to work with them. To be effective, these tools also must work in concert with the eye, the hand, the body, cognitive processes, and the environment. Manipulating them to transform materials into things further requires skills perfected through extended observation, iteration, and experimentation, usually in the context of apprenticeship. Once makers develop the procedures necessary for their specific needs, they may use them over a long period of time, even while remaining open to adaptations and different solutions should changing environmental or social conditions such as cost, shortage of materials, or changing fashions demand them. The ability

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to recognize and act on both existing and new possibilities in materials, tools, and technologies is a critical constituent of craft mastery. Technology and innovation are not commonly associated with early modern crafts in the eyes of many people since crafts are assumed to be “handmade” and their makers bound to “tradition.” Moreover, while academic historians have pointed out how craft making practices generated new knowledge, this is not widely acknowledged in popular writings. Yet technology as the ensemble of knowledge, skills, techniques, and thought processes brought to bear in the design and execution of a particular project was integral to most craft practice. In this broad sense of the term, the early modern workshop may be characterized as a technology—a way of organizing skilled personnel and providing them with the requisite material resources and equipment to carry out a given endeavor efficiently. Likewise, the breeding of silkworms to produce improved strains with the qualities most desirable for silk production may also be considered a technology.1 Innovation was equally critical to successful craft practice. While there is no denying that many practices were passed down over the generations, this was not simply because they were “time-honored,” as is commonly assumed, but because they were effective at that particular time and in that particular place. Many factors came into play in the decision to maintain the status quo. Risk and uncertainty inevitably accompanied efforts to bring change to established craft practices. Innovation had the potential to revitalize craft production, but it could also cause internal workshop dissent as well as wider social disruptions, as illustrated by the tensions between Kyoto and Kiryū weavers when the latter developed more efficient technology that challenged Kyoto’s supremacy in the field. Nonetheless, when new materials, tools, and technologies became available, they were generally tested, adapted, and, over time, adopted. The significance of their adoption may be overlooked, however, because they brought about incremental rather than radical changes. This chapter considers some of the technologies introduced

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to and diffused in Japan over the course of the early modern era, the cultural contingencies that conditioned their adoption, and the changes that they helped to bring about.

t e c h nol o gic a l t r a nsf e r f rom c on t i n e n ta l a si a a n d be yon d Technologies, like things, have social lives involving processes of domestication, legitimation, and meaning through which they become integrated into or replace other artisanal practices. Many innovations in early modern crafts practices followed from technological transfers from continental Asia and their subsequent diffusion from one region to another within Japan. Transfers across such long distances between disparate cultures were exceedingly complex processes involving natural resources, tools, equipment, and skills, as well as mediation by merchants and translators. Like the climbing kiln, discussed below, diffusion was often centripetal, from the periphery to metropolitan centers. The southern island of Kyushu, especially the port city of Nagasaki, with its cosmopolitan population of Chinese, Koreans, and Dutch, was the gateway for the introduction of many technologies, but their subsequent paths of transmission are often difficult to trace. Knowledge flows from China and Korea came chiefly in the form of human migration and equipment and, less often, woodblock-printed books. Korean potters arrived in Japan as captives in the wake of Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea; the origins of many late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century kilns in Kyushu are linked to Korean potters. Migration from China was spurred by political unrest there and by the welcome given educated immigrants by various daimyo. Monks of the Obaku (in Chinese, Huangbo) sect who fled after the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 are thought to have brought with them specialists in various crafts. Their temples in Nagasaki; in Uji, near Kyoto; and even in northern Hirosaki, the castle town of the Tsugaru daimyo, were influential centers for the dissemination of Chinese

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culture.2 Apocryphal stories about Chinese and Korean immigrants who “invented” a particular technology abound, but these culture heroes should be understood as proxies for innovations that were successfully implemented only after experimentation on the part of several generations of craft specialists. The drawloom and the climbing kiln illustrate the synergy of human, material, and technical resources required for successful technological transfer. The ascendancy of Kyoto’s Nishijin weavers followed from their adoption of a drawloom with a pattern tower known as a figure harness (sorahikibata or, in recognition of its Chinese origin, karahikibata). Japanese weavers who had fled Kyoto for Sakai during the Warring States era acquired the technology and requisite skills from Chinese weavers in that port city. The drawloom was operated by two people, one doing the weaving and another sitting on the tower, manually drawing the warp threads to create the figured designs according to the calls by the master weaver. (See figure 3.3.) Their operation required a great deal of skill, time, and expertise, as well as coordination between master and assistant. Unlike the backstrap loom (izaribata) and treadle loom (takabata) that had been in use earlier, the drawloom made it possible to produce complex patterned silk brocades of the type imported from Ming China.3 The multichambered climbing kiln (noborigama), introduced from the Korean peninsula, was first used in Karatsu in Kyushu, an early center of stoneware production, and, sometime between 1600 and 1630, in the Mino region of modern-day Gifu Prefecture. Later the climbing kiln was adopted in other regions as well (figure 5.1). This kiln was an improvement over the so-called “great kiln” or ōgama, a large single-chambered kiln built into a slope and supported by pillars, with a side opening for loading and unloading, which had been in use since around 1500. The noborigama, built on a slope with multiple small chambers stoked individually and connected by vents, allowed potters to fire at higher temperatures and more efficiently by

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Figure 5.1. Sixteen-chamber climbing kiln (noborigama) in use from 1832 until 1965, Nagatani-en, Mie Prefecture. Photo courtesy Nagatani-en.

taking advantage of the updraft that drew the flames from one chamber to the next. The earliest one outside of Kyushu, at Motoyashiki in Mino, with thirteen chambers and measuring more than twenty-five meters in length, speaks to the large quantities of vessels that could be fired simultaneously.4 The implementation of both these technologies was made possible by an extensive network of material and immaterial forces. This included raw materials and the means to transport them; those who knew how to build the looms and kilns; those with the specialized skills to operate them and a cadre of apprentices to assist them; a suitable environment in which to set up operations; one or more individuals to manage operations; funds to build the kilns and looms; institutions to protect the privileged knowledge they embodied; the mediation of merchants and commercial strategies to get the finished goods from workshop to market; and, of course, consumers willing

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to exchange resources for the goods. The operations of the domainal porcelain kilns in Arita well illustrate this nexus. As Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere has detailed in her study of the birth of Japanese porcelain, there was a clear division of labor and strict hierarchy in these official kilns. Different officials were responsible for supervising the mining of the porcelain stone at Izumiyama and for the actual mining operations. Hired miners extracted the stone. The man who supervised the firing was at the top of the hierarchy in the making process, with vessel formers, designated saikunin, painters, and apprentices working beneath him. All these positions required a license. Protection of resources and of trade secrets was also critical to the continuing success of the operation.5 In the process of diffusion, imported technologies were often reinterpreted in response to local materials and existing practices. Papermaking was likely introduced from China in the seventh century, but at some point makers in Japan discovered that adding neri, a binder made from the root of tororo-ai, a species of hibiscus, to the macerated kōzo pulp and water gave it a smooth consistency, much as an egg yolk does when added to vinegar and oil. This viscous substance helped to make for more even distribution of the pulp during the couching process.6 The use of neri distinguishes Japanese paper from its Chinese counterpart. This innovation did not come about as the result of a “eureka moment” but rather from recognition of a shortcoming in the existing method and the devising of a solution, probably over time. Such innovations speak to the curiosity, ingenuity, and tacit knowledge that rural papermakers brought to their practice. Not all new technologies emerged from functional needs. Some arose from a desire to replace imported luxuries with domestic ones and, because of the expense involved, were initially carried out under the auspices of feudal lords. Import substitution often required reverse engineering—deducing the method of manufacture from finished works—and resulted in processes and products that were creative imitations of their models. The decor on dishes made in the

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Nabeshima domainal kilns may have drawn on the doucai technique of combining underglaze blue with overglaze enamels, but they were transformed by acts of imaginative recreation on the part of their Japanese makers. (See figure 2.17.) Likewise, late Ming and Qing lacquers with inlays made of a variety of precious materials may have provided a source of inspiration for Haritsu’s innovative techniques, as scholar Tahira Namiko and others have proposed, but these wares bear only a faint resemblance to their Chinese counterparts.7 Experiments with new technologies developed to replicate luxury imports whose original materials and methods of manufacture were unknown were not always successful. Although import substitutes could lower the cost of desirable goods, sometimes these were of inferior quality. This was true initially of domestically produced sarasa, made in imitation of the much sought-after Indian and Southeast Asian cotton chintzes with colorful printed patterns that were first introduced by Portuguese and Spanish traders in the sixteenth century.8 Imported sarasa was so precious that it was used chiefly for making pouches for tea ceremony utensils, tobacco, and other small articles (figure 5.2). Domestic production of sarasa (often referred to as wa sarasa to distinguish it from imports) is thought to have started in Kyushu under the auspices of the Nabeshima, but by the mid-seventeenth century it had spread to Kyoto and Osaka.9 Jinrin kinmō zui (1690) mentions sarasa among the many forms of dyeing practiced at the time.10 Wakan sansai zue (Illustrated Sino-Japanese encyclopedia; 1712), compiled by Terashima Ryōan shortly thereafter, criticizes these local products, claiming that the floral motifs on domestically produced sarasa easily fade when washed. The problem was apparently the inability to fix the red madder (akane) dye. By the end of the century, however, persimmon tannin was found to be an effective mordant. This technical information was later made public in Sarasa benran (Compendium of sarasa designs), published in 1778.11 While direct transmission through migration both from the continent and within the archipelago was the more powerful driver of technological

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Figure 5.2. Pouch of printed cotton cloth, probably imported from India, known in Japan as sarasa, first half of 19th c. H. O. Havemeyer Collection Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. 29.100.812. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.

innovation, printed books also played some role. The circulation of Song Yingxing’s well-illustrated Tiangong kaiwu (The works of heaven and the inception of things; 1637), especially after a Japanese edition was published in 1770, is evidence of widespread interest in craft technology in the eighteenth century.12 It covers topics such as agriculture, sericulture and textile production, porcelain, metallurgy, papermaking, ink making, and jade polishing. It was not a manual written by a craftsman for other craftsmen but was the creation of a scholarly observer who set out his view that “allocat[ing] a crucial role to issues that we identify as ‘technological’ and ‘scientific’ was critical to world order.”13 Curiously, this encyclopedic text was largely forgotten in China. The Japanese edition, Tenkō kaibutsu, was based on a copy of the original owned by Kimura Kenkadō.14 The illustrations were important components of its success in Japan because they helped to convey ideas that might not be understood from the text alone. While Tenkō kaibutsu provided a general overview of various technologies, to carry out most of the procedures described required the manufacture of specialized equipment and someone to teach its use (figure 5.3). The text accompanying the illustration from the lengthy section on ceramics reproduced here, for instance, tells the reader that “small-mouthed jars [like large-mouthed ones] are also made in two sections; in piecing them together, however, wooden pegs cannot be used [on the interior], but instead a ringshaped circular tile, which has been prefired in another kiln, is placed inside [where the seam is]. The joint is then reinforced on the outside of the jar with wooden pegs.”15 Transforming these words and the accompanying illustrations into practical reality was challenging. Despite the technical detail provided, only a highly skilled professional who already knew how to throw large pots and then assemble the two parts as directed could carry out the procedures. With its aim of “revealing the nature of things” within a Neo-Confucian framework, Tenkō kaibutsu helped to validate artisanal knowledge and the

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Figure 5.3. Making large pots, from Exploitation of the Works of Nature (Tenkō kaibutsu; 1637), Japanese edition 1771. Woodblock-printed book. National Diet Library, Tokyo.

tacit skills that followed from firsthand engagement with the material world among the ruling elite. It also fostered increasing codification of specialized knowledge in print, giving rise to a plethora of works on material production. Its influence is apparent, as noted in chapter 2, in the emphasis on tools and technologies in publications about famous products such as Sankai meisan zue (Illustrated famous products of mountain and sea; 1799). While it may have been a source of inspiration for Japanese publications devoted to technology, it is difficult to assess its influence on actual craft practice. Tao shuo (Discussions on ceramics), by scholar-bureaucrat Zhu Yan, is another Chinese text that gained circulation through a Japanese translation. It provides a comprehensive history of ceramics in China, including a great deal of technical information about porcelains made in the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen. Published in China in 1794, it was first issued in a Japanese translation, Tōsetsu, in 1807. Earlier, the potter Aoki Mokubei (1767–1833) had begun translating it, but he was still making revisions in 1807, and his version was published only posthumously in 1835. Underscoring the importance of social networks in the circulation of knowledge, Mokubei’s translation was based on a copy of the original owned by Kimura Kenkadō, whose salon he frequented. Mokubei was of a scholarly disposition, knowledgeable in Chinese and skilled as a painter and a calligrapher, but also had some practical knowledge of ceramics since he studied with the Kyoto potter Okuda Eisen (1753–1811).16 Translations by craft practitioners such as Mokubei are rare because few possessed the requisite linguistic skills. Because of its more specialized subject matter, Tōsetsu did not achieve the wide readership of Tenkō kaibutsu. During the early modern era, some European technologies were also successfully acculturated through local manufacture. Exotic manufactured goods—Indian printed cotton, Chinese porcelain, and European glass, to name only a few—were prestige symbols that found their way into the lives of ordinary people largely through import substitutes. Japanese glass was

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first manufactured in Nagasaki, but the techniques subsequently spread to Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo. By the late eighteenth century, glass had become part of everyday life primarily through spectacles, visual aids that are worn by many craftsmen portrayed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources. (See figures 2.11 and 2.18.) That this craft elicited much public curiosity is suggested by the inclusion of a glassblower and his assistant at work at his furnace in Saiga shokunin burui. The assistant is using a tube to draw molten glass from a metal container atop the furnace while his master blows a bottle shape at the end of his tube. Both hold pincers for cutting the bottle from the holder. Under the heading biidoro, the Portuguese-derived word for glass, the accompanying text informs the reader that “glass is not a native product. It was brought from abroad. The Dutch introduced its manufacture” (figure 5.4). Flasks, beakers, and bottles like those shown here were still too costly to be available beyond the elite, but women’s hair ornaments made of glass were very fashionable.17 A haiku by the poet-painter Yosa Buson (1716– 1783) likening glassblowing to the autumn wind is a further indication of the way that this technology became part of the eighteenth-century cultural imaginary.18 Technologies introduced from Europe also had an impact in rural areas, most notably in sericulture. One of early modern Japan’s most important industries, sericulture benefited from financial and technical support from many domainal authorities. Tsugaru Nobumasa, who fostered the development of lacquer plantations, also advocated planting mulberry trees, brought in silk specialists from Kyoto to advise local farmers, and sponsored the publication of the first sericulture manual.19 However, not all improvements in this labor-intensive field, where good hygiene, ventilation, feeding, and temperature control were critical, came about from the top down. Members of farm households who had spent a lifetime living in close proximity to silkworms also led innovations that fulfilled unaddressed needs or solved problems. In the early nineteenth century, a silk farmer named Nakamura

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Zen’emon, drawing on long personal experience, recognized the potential of thermometers introduced to Japan by the Dutch to regulate the temperature in silkworm cultivation. Experimenting until he had developed a thermometer expressly for this purpose, he determined that the best results followed from maintaining the eggs at a higher temperature and then lowering it once the pupae had emerged. In 1849 he published his findings in a practical manual for other silkworm farmers.20 Knowledge flows alone are not sufficient to bring about technological change, of course. For new knowledge to be implemented requires creative, entrepreneurial individuals or groups to recognize the value of that knowledge and act upon it. Technology is context dependent, with local conditions informing such choices and actions. A new technology will be adopted or displace an existing one only if it presents a clear advantage. Hiraga Gennai’s efforts to raise sheep for wool failed because the climate and the environment were ill-suited to sheep farming, and woolen cloth, though a prestige material, did not lend itself as well as cotton and silk to indigenous attire. Likewise, the use of European and Korean printing presses, with movable metal and wooden type, respectively, did not catch on because they were neither cost effective nor suited to the needs of a culture that ascribed great importance to reproducing the individual calligraphic hand. Woodblock printing could accomplish this more efficiently, cheaply, and successfully. As a result of these circumstances, Japan’s printing revolution looked very different from that of Europe.

s ta n da r di z at ion a n d di f f e r e n t i at ion Many historians once held that “technologies perform the same work more or less efficiently in every society” and that, “broadly speaking, the same technologies are significant in every society.”21 In this view, the technologies that retrospectively seem most significant to us today are those that have contributed to modern industrial capitalism. Most scholars of China and

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Figure 5.4. Tachibana Minkō (act. 1764–72), Glassblower, from Various Classes of Artisans in Colored Pictures (Saiga shokunin burui). Woodblock- and stencil-printed illustrated book. 1770. 1979,0305,0.118.1. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Japan, however, now argue that the history of technology must be investigated in the context of local culture. One of the great insights of Francesca Bray, a historian of Chinese science and technology, is to show that attitudes toward what she calls “ritual technologies” are not the result of irrational superstition but are founded on a cosmology that ensured order in the social world. The Chinese beliefs and practices commonly known as feng shui (“wind and water”), for instance, include principles of understanding energy flows and topography that have a bearing on the proper siting and configuration of a house. Carpenters of necessity had to be familiar with these principles since even the use of the carpenter’s rule, which was marked with lucky and unlucky units, involved cosmological computations. If a house was to bring health, wealth, and happiness to its inhabitants, its design and siting required the use of such ritual technology.22 Feng shui technologies were as important in architectural and urban planning in Japan as in China, where the rituals held on the occasion of ground breaking, ridge raising, and completion of a building all embraced elements of geomantic thinking. Historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki has emphasized the political, economic, and environmental conditions that led technological innovations in early modern Japan in directions that were distinctly different from but in no way inferior to those in Europe.

Labour-saving innovation, in the eighteenth-century [European] context, meant standardization, economies of scale and the introduction of more productive machinery. These strategies, however, made little sense in a country where restrictions on overseas trade and a stable population size limited the growth of markets, and where a complex status system fragmented the domestic market into a mosaic of small niches. Rather than attempting large-scale production of standardized goods, it was more profitable to pursue what would now be called product differentiation: creating distinctive local specialties, often using a particular local raw material, and aimed at a specific segment of the social order.23

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Her observations require some qualification. While standardization and economies of scale did not develop on the order of those in Europe, such practices were by no means unknown in Japan. The design of Kōdaiji lacquerware and of the dowry set made for Chiyohime discussed in chapter 3 was based on standardized patterns arranged in various ways. Codification and standardization were conspicuous features of early modern building practices. Modular timber-frame construction comprised of components assembled with mortise and tenon joints was the norm for residential and religious architecture across the archipelago. The ken, the bay or space between two pillars, was the standard unit of measurement for determining the proportions of such buildings. A ken was six shaku, a unit of length roughly equivalent to thirty centimeters that, with further subdivisions into sun and bu, was common to most craft practices. Proportionality in buildings was established according to principles known as kiwari that were codified in the seventeenth century. The use of tatami mats whose dimensions governed the horizontal proportions of rooms further contributed to spatial modularity. Tatami were made in standard sizes, with the length twice the width, although the actual dimensions differed slightly in the Kyoto and Edo regions. (The former was .955 by 1.91 meters, while the latter was .88 by 1.76 meters.) The tatami determined room area as well as the dimensions of furnishings, such as tansu. This modular design system based on kiwari proportions and tatami helped to achieve savings by reducing design costs as well as by making it possible to prefabricate components of a structure in a workshop and then transport and assemble them at a chosen building site. Both assembling and disassembling them was quite straightforward since the structural timbers could be fitted together using mortise and tenon members. Even as these efficiencies were common practice in all major building projects, new tools and techniques were introduced over the course of the early modern era that intensified labor and required increasingly specialized knowledge and skills. For instance, saws, adzes, hammers, chisels, and

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Figure 5.5. Full-scale model of interlocking wood bracketing complex in Engakuji Relic Hall (Shariden). Original late 16th c. Model, 20th c. Photo © Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum, Kobe.

planes of various kinds are common to most woodworking cultures, but in Japan, carpenters’ tools underwent a process of increasing specialization involving many incremental changes, with the result that today they number around 180 items, far more than the 60 or so typical of other parts of the world.24 The introduction of new tools had an impact on the proliferation of highly specialized joinery techniques as well (figure 5.5). A study by master carpenter Seike Kiyoshi describes forty-eight, but during the early modern era several hundred joinery techniques were in use.25 These developments were driven not by the desire to save time and labor but by the prioritization of technical mastery for its own sake. Tour-de-force displays of technique simultaneously signaled the talents of makers and the status, discerning taste, and wealth of their patrons.

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Architecture was a site where the dynamics of political power played out most dramatically, but other highly visible forms of material culture also served as potent tools for social engineering. Indeed, what modern economists call “product differentiation” became integral to production through sumptuary laws that dictated consumption practices to ensure that those of lower status would remain visually distinct from those of higher orders. Class determined the location, size, style, materials, techniques, and decor of housing. Even the forms of gateways of warrior residences were subject to regulation.26 An order of 1719 prohibits commoners from wearing wool capes, having household articles with gold lacquer decoration, using gold and silver leaf in their houses, and building three-story houses, among other things.27 While sumptuary laws may have constrained creativity in some crafts, in others they were catalysts for innovation. Enterprising textile dyers became particularly adept at circumventing their restrictions. As already noted in chapter 4, when the use of beni, the red dye made from safflower, was banned among commoners, dyers experimented with sappanwood and in the process developed a fashionable new purple known as Edo Murasaki. Some scholars believe that the 1682 and 1683 edicts forbidding commoners from wearing silk robes with allover kanoko shibori designs may have stimulated the adoption of stenciled imitation tie-dye (kata kanoko) to produce these fashionable fawn-spotted patterns (figure 5.6). Others argue that this development arose as a way of meeting commoner demand for this type of pattern more cheaply and swiftly.28 Imitation of kanoko shibori involved applying resist paste through a stencil and then dip-dyeing the fabric. When the dye was dry, the paste was removed, leaving the pattern of white dots characteristic of kanoko shibori. As can be seen in the design of the hollyhocks on the outer robe illustrated here, stenciling produces a more regular pattern lacking in the three-dimensionality and blurring of its hand-tied counterpart.

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Figure 5.6. Stencil-printed imitation tie-dyed (kata kanoko shibori) and embroidered outer kimono (furisode), detail, of silk with hollyhock, flowers, and cloud pattern; early 19th c. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Costume Council Fund (ACC 1999.177.2).

While sumptuary laws, though often flouted, played a considerable role, market forces were far more powerful drivers of product differentiation. Increased and accelerated capacity to make ceramics and the concomitant desire to display the difference between one-off and mass-produced articles created a heightened awareness of facture. Kenzan’s ceramics, though produced serially using molds, had the appearance of singular works, suggesting the way that product standardization and differentiation could go hand in hand. Molds made possible fast and uniform production of dishes and bowls. Each piece was made unique, however, by the surface design, color, and glaze even though the motifs were sometimes created with the aid of stencils. Kenzan’s spirited designs further lifted the distinction of ceramics through their appropriation of the aura of painting, poetry, and calligraphy. In Narutaki, he collaborated with his brother Kōrin in the decoration of standardized square trays with designs painted using iron oxide that evoked the motifs and effects of monochrome ink painting. Another trademark product of his kilns was sets of square earthenware trays with low rims, each painted in underglaze enamels on one side with bird and flower motifs associated with the twelve months and, on the other, the corresponding thirty-one-syllable waka poem by classical poet Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241) (figure 5.7). Unlike the largely anonymous production in other locales, Kenzan ceramics capitalized on the cachet of their celebrated designer-maker. They were among the first commercial ceramics to be branded with the name of the creative individual who made them. In reality, however, the Kenzan signature, which continued to figure conspicuously on works made by his successors and imitators, was a mark of a house style that merely evoked the hand of this designer-maker.29 Recognized throughout the country as famous products of Kyoto (meibutsu or meisan), Kenzan-yaki became highly desirable souvenirs and gifts from the imperial capital. The interplay of local materials and evolving technologies was also a factor in the ongoing success of many famous products (meibutsu). Displays of

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Figure 5.7. Ogata Kenzan (1663–1743), plates of the twelve lunar months, early 18th c. Earthenware with underglaze enamels. 1.27 × 20.32 × 17.78 cm (½ × 8 × 7 in.). Purchased with funds provided by the Japan Business Association and the Far Eastern Council (M. 84.64.1–12). Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

technical virtuosity achieved through the introduction of increasingly complex and ingenious weaving and dyeing techniques became a key marketing strategy in the highly competitive field of regional textile design. Unlike Kyoto, which specialized in shibori-dyed silk, the towns of Arimatsu and, later, nearby Narumi (in modern Aichi Prefecture), taking advantage of the cultivation, spinning, and weaving of cotton in the region, developed a niche market by specializing in cotton shibori. Like so many other local industries, Arimatsu shibori developed under the sponsorship of the local daimyo, the Owari branch of the Tokugawa. The local specialty, hand towels (tenugui) and cotton robes for the bath (yukata) dyed in indigo blue, became popular among travelers who traveled along the Tōkaidō Road. A print of the Narumi post station by Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1865), in his series FiftyThree Pairings for the Tōkaidō Road, depicts a woman at work, tying the little bundles of fabric in preparation for dyeing, with samples of finished textiles on view behind her (figure 5.8). By 1845, when this print was published, however, the binding technique shown here had been augmented by a host of technical innovations that made possible a striking range of novel decorative effects. Unusually, the identity and gender of one of the individuals who introduced them have been recorded. The wife of a doctor named Miura Genchū who settled in Arimatsu in 1650 is said to have introduced a looped binding technique using a metal hook that held the fabric taut during binding and made it possible to shape it into even pleats. This simple tool accelerated the binding process and also made it possible to create intricate, very closely bound patterns. Later, Suzuki Kanezō (b. 1837–?), in a striking departure from conventional practice, devised an ingenious method of creating diagonal patterns by wrapping cloth around a long pole, pushing it into tight folds, and then immersing it in the dye vat. The pattern created in this way was called “storm,” or arashi shibori, because of the diagonal lines’ resemblance to wind-driven rain. Although fashionable already in the late years of Tokugawa rule, arashi shibori enjoyed great popularity in the Meiji era.30

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Figure 5.8. Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1865), “Narumi: Woman Doing Arimatsu Shibori Tie-Dyeing,” from series Fifty-Three Pairings for the Tōkaidō Road (Tōkaidō gojūsan tsui); 1845–46; woodblock print; vertical oban. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, William Sturgis Bigelow Collection, 11.30436.

Print media, of course, also played a considerable role in the promotion of many innovations, both urban and rural. Woodblock prints and illustrated books such as those discussed in chapter 2 drew attention to the locale where crafts were produced, the use of resources specific to that region, the techniques used in their manufacture, and the identity of their makers in ways that identified them as different from others of the same type. A meibutsu’s status as an authentic cultural object also depended on a web of local historical or literary associations and resonances. Whatever connotations the meibutsu evoked, the label served as a niche marketing tool that gave the product a reputation allowing it to be sold at a premium price compared to similar products. A rare portrayal by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) of a named female craft maker in a series of fan prints titled A Compendium of Famous Artisans (Meiyo shokunin zukushi no uchi; 1843–47) illustrates the role of such diverse factors in the reputation of Roku combs (figure 5.9).31 The print’s subject is a young woman named Roku (also known by the honorific Oroku) who is shown carving a wooden comb with a handsaw. According to the caption, Roku, the devoted daughter of poverty-stricken parents, prayed to the god of Suwa for assistance. Her prayers were answered when the deity recommended that she carve combs from minebari—Asian alder, a wood in plentiful supply in the mountain passes near the village where she lived— and sell them to travelers on the Kisokaidō Road. According to other versions of the origin story, combing her hair repeatedly with these combs alleviated the chronic headaches from which Oroku suffered. Combs distinguished by their exceptionally fine teeth carved from Asian alder had been sold at the mountainous Narai post station on the Kiso Road since the Kyōhō era (1716–36). Their nationwide celebrity, however, dates to the first decade of the nineteenth century, when the prolific writer and influential cultural luminary Ota Nanpō mentioned them in his 1802 travelogue and shortly thereafter his associate Santo Kyōden (1761–1816) wrote a

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Figure 5.9. Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), “Kiso no Oroku Combs,” from series Compendium of Famous Artisans (Meiyo shokunin zukushi no uchi), 1843–47. Fan-shaped woodblock print. Leicester Harnsworth Gift. E.2918–1913. © Victoria and Albert Museum.

play called Orokugushi Kiso no Adauchi (Oroku combs and revenge in Kiso; 1807) in which they figure. The story of Oroku was further elaborated in an 1812 novel by a third literary star, Kyokutei Bakin, that was turned into the kabuki play Aoto zōshi (Book of Aoto) in 1846. Narratives like these made generic products part of the popular social and cultural fabric through a process of singularization. Buyers, faced with a range of choices among geographically distinct products, welcomed fashionable goods that were publicly certified in this way. Even as fine crafts resulted from the appropriation,

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adaptation, and adoption of new techniques, they were also dependent on prints, popular literature, and theater to publicize and legitimize their value. Craft practitioners were not embodiments of tenacious traditions. They were flesh and blood problem solvers who used available materials, technical know-how, and ingenuity to adapt to changing environmental, social, economic, and political circumstances. While Japan was the beneficiary of many technologies introduced from continental Asia, their adoption was never guaranteed or a matter of simple imitation, but rather of creative adaptation. Innovation is often framed as a disruption to the old order, but most inventions did not burst onto the scene, sweeping away older skills; rather, they were small-scale, incremental adaptations of existing practices. Nor were they all successful. New techniques often coexisted and mingled with older ones. Potters continued to make unglazed earthenware vessels even after high-fired porcelain had been developed, each for a different market. Time-honored techniques were often put to new purposes, as in the case of stencil printing, an ancient technique of replication used on textiles and paper that was adapted to create repeat patterns on ceramics as well as lacquer. Sumptuary regulations and market conditions were drivers of such changes, generating innovations with both quantitative and qualitative aspects. In order to reach a growing commoner consumer base, new materials, tools, and techniques were introduced with an eye toward labor, cost efficiency, and profit. However, for some master carpenters or for Kenzan, the desire to improve methods of production quantitatively that resulted in codification and standardization coexisted with the use of quality materials, virtuosic techniques, or processes of individuation that set the resulting crafts apart from their generic counterparts. These mutually constitutive processes were markers of early modern craft mastery.

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Conclusion

A focus on the material, sociological, physiological, and technical aspects of making practices adds to our understanding of early modern Japanese crafts by helping to see patterns of thought and action within the wider culture of the times. This approach offers a coherent framework for appreciating the vitality of crafts in relation to a constellation of disparate but interconnected factors. It underscores that crafts emerge from cooperative and, inevitably, competitive expressive environments involving human but also nonhuman forces. There is enormous diversity in early modern crafts, but this holistic approach also helps us to see cross-modal commonalities that transcend distinctions between urban and rural, known and unknown craftspeople. Scholarly writings about early modern Japan privilege its culture of visuality. The many publications depicting craft professionals at work are examples of the era’s preoccupation with creating order and knowledge of the visible world through its pictorialization. Yet this emphasis on learning by looking fails to acknowledge the degree to which the circulation of knowledge also took the form of and unfolded from material things. The hand was as important as the eye in the perceptual and mental operations carried out in the process of craft making. As sumptuary laws with minute regulations concerning materials, texture, and methods of manufacture testify, the haptic was equally so in crafts consumption.

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It is important to be alive to the role of the dialogic relationships between humans and the raw materials with which they work. To give form to the myriad varieties of crafts that flourished during the early modern era, makers joined forces and worked with nature. Just as makers made demands of materials, so too materials made demands of them. The resulting porcelains, textiles, or lacquers were both products and producers of changing relationships with the shared natural environment. Early modern craft makers understood the consequences of their actions in and on the natural world, because they had to work with the resources available to them and readjust their practice when circumstances changed. They were sensitive to the transformative and generative powers of their chosen materials and how to put these to best use with suitable tools and technologies. Craft making is as much a social process as one involving the transformation of materials, one requiring not only individuals with highly developed skills but also cooperation, shared values, and mutual trust, even when conditions of inequality prevailed. The ie system shaped and reflected this need, regulating human interactions and guiding individuals through training and professional life beyond. It was through training in a household or a formal workshop that makers developed the tacit knowledge and the manual dexterity, as well as a sense of the collective self, that were required in early modern craft practice. Women, who were indispensable to many forms of craft, also developed skills and community identity through this social system. Historical records and signed works may privilege the importance of individuals such Ogawa Haritsu or Ogata Kenzan, but early modern crafts were, for the most part, products of collaborative creativity. Repetition until bodily movements become so deeply ingrained as to be unconscious is integral to craft practice. Through extended training, early modern makers brought to their practice dexterous, rhythmic movements and a highly developed sensitivity to the potentialities of materials. This reservoir of embodied knowledge did not lend itself readily to verbal

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translation. Practitioners learned by feeling their way with and through wood, clay, cotton, and silk. Making, whatever its specificities, was thus a sensate experience involving both mind and body. Early modern craft professionals were resourceful pragmatists filled with ambition and curiosity. They engaged with vast amounts of new information about materials, processes, and practices, both domestic and foreign. While print culture played a role in its dissemination, for the most part information was transmitted in embodied form. Craft professionals took an empirical approach to applying new information, deriving knowledge through experimentation, observation, and experience. Systematic records of experiments like Kenzan’s are exceptional, but all craft practitioners mentally catalogued the changes that occurred in the process of making an object, whether a ceramic pot, a lacquer writing box, or a sword. Aware that—as Haritsu demonstrated—sight alone can deceive, they relied equally on the senses of touch, sound, and smell to gain insight into the properties of materials and the nature of their transformation. While personalities such as Hiraga Gennai are often cited as important innovators, technological change was not necessarily from the top down or sweeping in scale. Makers at all levels of the craft hierarchy adapted to changing expressive and economic circumstances. Craft making is fundamentally about problem-solving in particular geographic spaces at particular times. Makers deploy materials, tools, and techniques in the ways that best suit local needs and purposes. Whatever their origins, and even as they sometimes disrupted existing power structures, technologies that improved efficiency, quality, and singularity were tested and embraced in the early modern era. Balancing standardization with innovation, cost, and, above all, quality was paramount. Taking into account these multifaceted considerations makes us more aware of the remarkable resourcefulness, resiliency, skill, ingenuity, and creativity of early modern craft makers.

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notes

i n t roduc t ion 1.  On the evolution of the word craft, see Paul Greenhalgh, “The History of  Craft,” in The Culture of Crafts, ed. Peter Dormer (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1997), 20–52. 2.  David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 9. 3.  Glenn Adamson, Thinking through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 14. 4.  There are instances of the use of the cognate kōgei in early modern sources,  such as the opening passage of Kano Einō’s 1691 Honcho gashi (Painting in our  land), but they are rare, and the exact connotations of the usage are not clear. I  thank Melissa McCormick for drawing this to my attention. 5.  On this movement, see Daisuke Murata, “The Kogei Tragedy,” Journal of Modern Craft 8, no. 1 (March 2015): 22–23. For contemporary practitioners, distinguishing kōgei from their own varying styles of craft and, especially, distancing  dentō kōgei, traditional crafts, has been a particular preoccupation. In their eyes,  traditional craft implies an approach that limits individual expressiveness and  originality. This attitude has given rise to the term bijutsu kōgei, art crafts, a designation  intended  to  give  contemporary  creations  fabricated  from  textiles  or  ceramics  and  other  nongraphic  materials  something  of  the  cachet  associated  with the fine arts, which in Japan today, as in Europe and America, occupy a 

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much higher status than crafts. On this development, see Takuya Kida, “Traditional Art Crafts (dentō kōgei) in Japan: From Reproductions to Original Works,” Journal of Modern Craft 3, no. 1 (March 2010): 19–36. 6. On mingei theory, see Yuko Kikuchi, Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory: Cultural Nationalism and Oriental Orientalism (London: Routledge/Curzon, 2004). 7. This is the predicament faced by the potters of Onta Valley in Kyushu. See Brian Moeran, “Materials, Skills, and Cultural Resources: Onta Folk Pottery Revisited,” Journal of Modern Craft 1, no. 1 (March 2008), especially pp. 39–42. 8. For a good discussion of the rationale for using “early modern” in the context of Japan, see Karen Wigen, “Japanese Perspectives on the Time/Space of ‘Early Modernity,’ ” XIX International Conference of Historical Sciences, Oslo, Norway (August 7, 2000), 1–18. 9. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 172. 10. Typifying this approach to painting are the essays in Copying the Master and Stealing His Secrets: Talent and Training in Japanese Painting, ed. Brenda G. Jordan and Victoria Weston (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003). 11. Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford K. Winter (New York: Zone, 1999), 455–77. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 1962). 12. Lissa L. Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear, eds., The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007); Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 13. Noteworthy among them are Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Tanaka Yūko, Edo wa nettowaku (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1993); and, especially pertinent to this study, Nakamura Shinichirō, Kimura Kenkadō no saron (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2000). 14. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 15. I borrow this term from Sennett, chap. 4 in Craftsman.

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c h a p t e r on e . nat u r a l r e s ou rc e s 1. Miyazaki Yasusada, Nōgyō zensho, in Nihon nōsho zenshū , ed. Yamada Tatsuo, vols. 12–13 (Tokyo: Nōsan-gyoson bunka kyōkai, 1978), 13:107–8. 2. Koizumi Kazuko, Dōgu to kurashi no Edo jidai (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1999), 2. 3. Cited in Kazuko Koizumi, Traditional Japanese Chests: A Definitive Guide (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2010), 106. 4. See Donald H. Shively, “Sumptuary Regulation and Status in Early Tokugawa Japan,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 25 (1964–65): 129, 135, 148. 5. Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697, translated by W. G. Aston, 2 vols. (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972), 1:58. 6. Between 1633 and 1663 alone, over 450,000 rayskins were imported from Siam. These were shipped together with other semiprocessed luxury materials including silk, buffalo horn, deerskin, raw lacquer, and sappanwood. George Vinal Smith, The Dutch in Seventeenth-Century Thailand, Center for Southeast Asian Studies Special Report 16 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1977), 80. 7. Kate Wildman Nakai, Shogunal Politics: Arai Hakuseki and the Premises of Tokugawa Rule, Harvard East Asian Monograph 134 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 111. 8. Lust, Commerce, and Corruption: An Account of What I Have Heard and Seen, by an Edo Samurai, trans. Mark Teeuwen, Kate Wildman Nakai, Miyazaki Fumiko, Ann Walthall, and John Breen, ed. with an introduction by Mark Teeuwen and Kate Wildman Nakai (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 372–76. 9. Regine Mathias, “Picture Scrolls as Historical Sources on Japanese Mining,” in Mining, Monies, and Culture in Early Modern Societies: East Asian and Global Perspectives, ed. Nanny Kim and Keiko Nagase-Reimer (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 292. 10. Nagahara Keiji and Kozo Yamamura, “Shaping the Process of Unification: Technological Progress in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 14, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 79–80. 11. Other versions of the Sado gold mining scrolls are discussed in Mathias, “Picture Scrolls,” and Todd Hamish, “The British Library’s Sado Mining Scrolls,” British Library Journal 24, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 130–43. 12. Kobata A., “The Production and Uses of Gold and Silver in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Japan,” Economic History Review 18, no. 2 (1965): 248.

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13.  Kobata, 248. 14.  See Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13,  no. 2 (2002), especially pp. 393–99. 15.  Flynn and Giraldez, 397. 16.  It is reproduced in Hase Akihisa, ed., Nihon meisho fūzoku zue 16 (Tokyo:  Kadokawa shoten, 1982), 204–53. 17.  For a discussion of the history of such environmental damage, see Brett  Walker, chap. 3 in Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (Seattle:  University of Washington Press, 2010). 18.  Nagahara and Yamamura, “Shaping the Process of Unification,” 82–83. 19.  Hirase Tessai, Nihon sankai meibutsu zue, in Nihon meisho fūzoku zue, ed.  Hase Akihisa, (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1982), 16:215. 20.  Conrad  Totman,  Japan: An Environmental History  (London:  I. B.  Tauris,  2014), 103. 21.  Conrad  Totman,  The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Pre-industrial Japan  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 56–57. 22.  Totman, Green Archipelago, 19, 68. 23.  Totman, Green Archipelago, 89. 24.  Totman, Green Archipelago, 113. 25.  Totman, Green Archipelago, 83–115. 26.  William H. Coaldrake, The Way of the Carpenter: Tools and Japanese Architecture (New York: Weatherhill, 1990), 62, 141–45. 27.  Totman, Green Archipelago, 183. 28.  Yotsuyanagi  Kasho,  Urushi no bunka-shi  (Tokyo:  Iwanami  shoten,  2009), 156. 29.  Hasegawa Seiichi, Hirosaki-han, Nihon rekishi sōsho (Tokyo: Yoshikawa  kobunkan, 2004), 205. 30.  Tsugaru-nuri is a modern category first coined to designate works displayed  at  the  1873  Vienna  International  Exposition.  Hasegawa,  Hirosaki-han,  204–5. 31.  This work, attributed to Haritsu, is discussed in Barbra Teri Okada, Symbol and Substance in Japanese Lacquer: Lacquer Boxes from the Collection of Elaine Ehrenkranz (New York: Weatherhill, 1995), 98–101.

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32.  On Wajima wares, see Yotsuyanagi, Urushi no bunka-shi, 161–80. 33.  Mark Ravina, Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 81. 34.  Fuyuki Isao, Shitsugei no tabi (Tokyo: Unsōdō, 1986), 14. For a detailed,  illustrated account of tapping procedures, see Sawaguchi Goichi, Nihon shikkō no kenkyū (Tokyo: Bijutsu shuppansha, 1966), 133–39. 35.  See Andrew M. Watsky, Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); and Anton Schweizer, Ōsaki Hachiman: Architecture, Materiality, and Samurai Power (Berlin: Reimer, 2016). 36.  Kitano Nobuhiko et al., “Momoyama bunkaki ni okeru rinyū urushinuriryo  no ryūtsū to riyō ni kansuru chōsa,” Hōzon rigaku 47 (2008): 37–52. 37.  Arlen Heginbotham and Michael Schilling, “New Evidence for the Use of  Southeast Asian Raw Materials in Seventeenth-Century Japanese Export Lacquer,”  in East Asian Lacquer: Material, Culture, Science, and Conservation, ed. Shayne Rivers,  Rupert Faulkner, and Boris Pretzel (London: Archetype Publications, 2011), 99. 38.  Heginbotham and Schilling, 99. 39.  Miyazaki, Nōgyō zensho, 13:13–14. 40.  Miyazaki, 12:47–48. 41.  Kunisaki Jihei, Kamisuki Chōhōki: A Handy Guide to Papermaking, trans.  Charles E. Hamilton (Berkeley, CA: Book Arts Club, 1948), 2. This is a facsimile of  the original with translations on facing pages. For a printed transcription of the  Japanese text, see Kamisuki taigai, Kamisuki chōhōki, Shifu, in Edo kagaku koten sōsho, ed. Kume Yasuo (Tokyo: Kōwa shuppan, 1976), 5:21–31. 42.  Jugaku Bunshō, Nihon no kami, Nihon rekishi sōsho 14 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa  kōbunkan, 1967), 282–83. 43.  For  an  overview  of  papermaking,  with  samples,  see  Sukey  Hughes,  Washi: The World of Japanese Paper (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1978). See also  Jugaku, Nihon no kami. 44.  Ishiyama Hiroshi and Higuchi Hideo, eds., Shichijūichiban shokunin utaawase, Shokunin zukushie, Saiga shokunin burui, in Edo kagaku koten sōsho (Tokyo:  Kōwa shuppan, 1977), 213. 45.  Kazuko Hioki, “Investigation of Historical Japanese Paper: An Experiment  to Recreate Recycled Paper from 18th–19th Century Japan,” Book and Paper Group Annual 33 (2014): 46, accessed June 20, 2019, resources.conservation-us.org.

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46.  Hioki, 44–45. 47.  William Hauser, Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 118–20. Kinai comprised the provinces  (kuni)  of  Izumi,  Kawachi,  Settsu,  Yamashiro,  and  Yamato  and  included  Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara. 48.  Thomas  C.  Smith,  The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan  (Stanford,  CA:  Stanford University Press, 1959), 80. 49.  William  B.  Hauser,  “The  Diffusion  of  Cotton  Processing  and  Trade  in   the Kinai Region in Tokugawa Japan,” Journal of Asiatic Studies 4, no. 33 (August  1974): 638. 50.  Cited in Ian James McMullen, “Kumazawa Banzan and Jitsugaku,” in Principle and Practicality: Essays in Neo-Confucian and Practical Learning, ed. William Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 357. 51.  The  lion  motif  may  have  been  inspired  by  a  painting  (popularized  in  printed form) by the Chinese émigré artist Sō Shiseki (in Chinese, Shen Nanpin;  1682–1765), who had lived in Nagasaki between 1731 and 1733. Gotoh Bijutsukan,  comp., Gennai-yaki: Hiraga Gennai no manazashi (Tokyo: Gotoh Bijutsukan, 2003),  94–96. 52.  Cited in Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Concepts of Nature and Technology in  Pre-industrial Japan,” East Asian History 1 (June 1991): 92. For the original text, see  Gennai-yaki: Hiraga Gennai no manazashi, 156–57. 53.  Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, Vessels of Influence: China and the Birth of Porcelain in Medieval and Early Modern Japan (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2012), 140. 54.  Louise Allison Cort, Seto and Mino Ceramics: Japanese Collections in the Freer Gallery of Art (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 1992), 175. 55.  On Ekken and jitsugaku, see Okada Takehiro, “Practical Learning in the  Chu Hsi School: Yamazaki Anzai and Kaibara Ekken,” in Principle and Practicality,  ed. William Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University  Press, 1979), 231–305. 56.  Federico Marcon, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 140–52. 57.  On this issue, see Luke S. Roberts, Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in 18th-Century Tosa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–12.

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58.  Louise Allison Cort, “A Tosa Potter in Edo,” in The Artist as Professional in Japan,  ed.  Melinda  Takeuchi  (Stanford,  CA:  Stanford  University  Press,  2004),  103–12. 59.  On his collection, see Shimonaka Hiroshi, ed., Saishiki Edo hakubutsugaku shūsei  (Tokyo:  Heibonsha,  1994),  121–33;  and  Marcon,  Knowledge of Nature,  184–96. 60.  Nature, shizen in modern Japanese, is a problematic term in the context  of early modern Japan. For discussion of this issue as well as challenges to the  idea of Japanese love of nature, see Pamela J. Asquith and Arne Kalland, eds.,  Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1997); and  Morris-Suzuki, “Concepts of Nature and Technology,” 81–97. 61.  Totman, Green Archipelago, 174. 62.  Totman, 179. 63.  Totman, 179. 64.  For an excellent discussion of the complex issue of trees in the premodern cultural imagination, see Fabio Rambelli, Buddhist Materiality: A Cultural History of Objects in Japanese Buddhism  (Stanford,  CA:  Stanford  University  Press,  2007), 129–71. 65.  Hirase, Nihon sankai meibutsu zue, 210. 66.  For  a  photograph,  see  Jenny  Balfour-Paul, Indigo: Egyptian Mummies to Blue Jeans (London: British Museum Press, 2011), 106. 67.  Literary historian Haruo Shirane calls this “secondary nature.” See his  Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons (New York: Columbia University Press,  2012), 1–9. 68.  On the characterization of lacquer as “material of the sacred,” see Watsky, Chikubushima, 143–96.

c h a p t e r  t wo.  pic t u r i ng   t h e  e a r ly    mode r n  c r a f t s c a pe 1.  Mary Elizabeth Berry, Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 15. 2.  The identity of its author is unknown, but a printed inscription at the end of  the third of the seven volumes reading “Maki-eshi Saburō hitsu” (written/painted  by  the  master  lacquerer  Saburō)  identifies  its  illustrator.  Stylistic  differences  

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suggest that he was most likely responsible only for those illustrations in the first three volumes. Asakura Haruhiko, ed., Jinrin kinmō zui, Tōyō bunko 519 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1990), 321–24. All page references are to the Heibonsha edition. 3. It is reproduced in Ishikawa Matsutarō, ed., Onna daigaku shū , Toyo bunko 302 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1977), 29–59. The illustrations and transcriptions of the accompanying texts discussed here are reproduced in Emori Ichirō, ed., Edo jidai josei seikatsu ezu daijiten, vols. 3 and 4 (Tokyo: Ozorosha, 1993). All references are to this publication. Most writings focus only on the nineteen behavioral precepts and ignore the pictorial material and commentaries. Marcia Yonemoto’s The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016) is a rare exception. I am much indebted to her work. 4. It has traditionally been attributed to the naturalist and educator Kaibara Ekken (1630–1714), a strong advocate of women’s and children’s education, but modern scholarship dismisses this attribution. Martha C. Tocco, “Women’s Education in Tokugawa Japan,” in Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, ed. Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan Piggott (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 199–200. 5. These two publications are reproduced in Hase, Nihon meisho fūzoku zue 16:204–53 and 16:257–328. Although Sankai meisan zue is sometimes referred to as Nihon sankai meisan zue, the word Nihon does not appear on the cover. All page references are to this publication. 6. There is a large literature on shokunin, but the following are especially helpful: Endō Motoo, Nihon shokunin shi no kenkyū , 6 vols. (Tokyo: Yūzankaku, 1985), and Ishida Hisatoyo, Shokunin zukushi-e, Nihon no bijutsu 132 (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1977). For a good overview of the artist/craftsperson issue, see also Melinda Takeuchi, introduction to The Artist as a Professional in Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 1–16. 7. Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 19. 8. On niwayaki, see Cort, Seto and Mino Ceramics, 143–47, and Morgan Pitelka, Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons, and Tea Practitioners in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 140–47. 9. On these oshie, see Patricia Fister, “Merōfu Kannon and Her Veneration in Zen and Imperial Circles in Seventeenth-Century Japan,” Japanese Journal of Reli-

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gious Studies 34, no. 2 (2007): 417–44, and Elizabeth Lillehoj, Art and Palace Politics in Early Modern Japan 1580s–1680s (Leiden: Brill 2011), 150–51. 10. For a reproduction and discussion of this scroll and its printed versions, see Ishiyama and Higuchi, Shichijūichiban shokunin utaawase, Shokunin zukushie, Saiga shokunin burui, in Edo kagaku koten sōsho (Tokyo: Kōwa shuppan, 1977), vol. 6, and Iwasaki Kae et al., eds., Shichijūichiban shokunin utaawase, Shinsen kyōkashū, Kokon kyokushū, in Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vol. 61 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993). 11. Cited in Yasuko Tabata, “Women’s Work and Status in the Changing Medieval Economy,” in Women and Class in Japanese History, ed. Hitomi Tonomura, Anne Walthall, and Wakita Haruko (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1999), 104, 106. 12. On these screens, see Matthew Philip McKelway, Capitalscapes: Folding Screens and Political Imagination in Late Medieval Kyoto (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006). 13. For a breakdown of these subspecialties, see Endō, Nihon shokunin shi josetsu, Nihon shokunin shi no kenkyū 1, 163–65. 14. Asakura, Jinrin kinmō zui, 114–17. 15. Iwasaki, Shichijūichiban shokunin utaawase, 16. 16. William Harry Samonides, “The Kōami Family of Maki-e Lacquerers” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1991), 53. 17. Michael Cooper, ed., This Island of Japon: João Rodrigues’ Account of 16thCentury Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1973), 308. 18. James L. McClain, Kanazawa: A Seventeenth-Century Japanese Castle Town (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 52. 19. Coaldrake, Way of the Carpenter, 14–15. 20. Lee Butler, citing Ōta Hirotarō and Itō Yōtarō, eds., Shōmei (Tokyo: Kajima shuppan, 1984), 308–9, in “Patronage and the Building Arts in Tokugawa Japan,” Early Modern Japan (Fall–Winter 2004): 42. 21. Asakura, Jinrin kinmō zui, 203. 22. Koizumi, Traditional Japanese Chests, 103. 23. Asakura, Jinrin kinmō zui, 147–48. 24. Asakura, 147. For a more detailed discussion of this technique, see Christine M. E. Guth, “The Aesthetics of Rayskin: Materials, Making and Meaning,” Impressions 37 (2016): 89–105.

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25.  Asakura, Jinrin kinmō zui, 174, 210. 26.  Asakura, 147, 175. 27.  Pitelka, Handmade Culture, 126–27. 28.  Asakura, Jinrin kinmō zui, shows a woman fan maker (173), a doll maker  (185), a papermaker (208), dyers (222–24), a weaver (291), and a braider (243). 29.  Asakura, 172. 30.  This is the argument, for instance, of Yonemoto’s Problem of Women. 31.  Yonemoto, 90. 32.  For  reproductions,  see  Emori,  Edo jidai josei seikatsu ezu daijiten,  3:260–75. 33.  Hiroko Kurokawa, “Traditional Japanese Forms and Patterns,” in Encyclopedia of East Asian Design, ed. Haruhiko Fujita and Christine Guth (London:  Bloomsbury, 2020), 212–13. 34.  Emori, Edo jidai josei seikatsu ezu daijiten, 3:266. 35.  It is reproduced, transcribed, and discussed in Ishiyama and Higuchi,  Shichijūichiban shokunin utaawase. 36.  Kunisaki, Kamisuki Chōhōki: A Handy Guide to Papermaking, 2. For a printed  transcription of the Japanese text, see Kamisuki taigai, Kamisuki chōhōki, Shifu, in  Edo kagaku koten sōsho, ed. Kume Yasuo (Tokyo: Kōwa shuppan, 1976), 5:21–31. 37.  Translated in Gary P. Leupp, Servants, Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 138. For the  original text, see Ihara Saikaku, Saikaku shokoku banashi (Tokyo: Miyai shoten,  2009), 9–11. 38.  See Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Sericulture and the Origins of Japanese Industrialization,” Technology and Culture 33, no. 1 (January 1992), especially pp. 107, 114. 39.  Morris-Suzuki, 111. 40.  Jinrin kinmō zui identifies watatsumi, preparing the cotton wadding, as a  separate profession, noting that it was usually carried out by women and that  even old women could work at it in their homes. Asakura, Jinrin kinmō zui, 240. 41.  Hayami Akira, “Industrial Revolution versus Industrious Revolution,” in  Population, Family and Society in Pre-modern Japan: Collected Papers of Hayami Akira  (Folkestone, UK: Global Oriental, 2009), 64–72. 42.  Penelope  Francks,  Rural Economic Development in Japan: From the Nineteenth Century to the Pacific War (London: Routledge, 2006), 69.

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43.  Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Pre-industrial Japan  1600–1868  (Princeton,  NJ:  Princeton  University  Press,  1977), 83. 44.  See Thomas C. Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750– 1922 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 71–102. 45.  Susan B. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 17. 46.  Murai Masuo, “Kinsei shoki shokunin no zaikata,” in Kinsei fūzoku zufu  12: Shokunin,  ed.  Amino  Yoshihiko  and  Ishida  Hisatoyo  (Tokyo:  Shogakkan,  1983), 126–27, 129. 47.  Endō, Kinsei shokunin no sekai, Nihon shokunin-shi no kenkyū 3:134–37. 48.  Between 1750 and 1850, there was a 10 percent decline in the population  of the major cities of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Francks, Rural Economic Development in Japan, 38. 49.  Totman,  Japan: An Environmental History,  164;  Francks,  Rural Economic Development in Japan, 35–45. 50.  See Matsue Shigeyori, Kefukigusa, ed. Takeuchi Waka (Tokyo: Iwanami  shoten, 1972), 157–87. 51.  On its authorship, see Hase, Nihon meisho fūzoku zue, 423–24. 52.  Hase, 425. 53.  Hase, 225. 54.  Kijishi were also known as hikimonoshi (turners), and their lathes were  referred  to  as  rokuro,  the  same  term  used  for  a  potter’s  wheel.  Endō,  Nihon shokunin-shi josetsu, Nihon shokunin-shi no kenkyū 1:296–97. 55.  Hase, Nihon meisho fūzoku zue, 227. 56.  Hase, 131. 57.  Miyazaki, Nōgyo zensho, 13:107–8. 58.  Hase, Nihon meisho fūzoku zue, 320. It is noteworthy that Kenkadō owned  a copy of this Chinese publication. For further discussion, see chapter 5. 59.  Hase, Nihon meisho fūzoku zue, 321. 60.  For good introductions to Japan’s bast fiber textiles, see Louise Allison  Cort, “The Changing Fortunes of Three Archaic Japanese Textiles,” in Cloth and Human Experience, ed. Annette B. Weiner and June Schneider (Washington, DC:  Smithsonian  Institution  Press,  1989),  377–414,  and  Sharon  Sadako  Takeda, 

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“Offertory Banners from Rural Japan: Echigo Chuimi [sic] Weaving and Worship,” Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings (1996), 38–47, accessed August 21, 2017, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/861. 61. Adapted from Suzuki Bokushi, Snow Country Tales: Life in the Other Japan, trans. Jeffrey Hunter with Rose Lesser (New York: Weatherhill, 1966), 66. For the original text, see Hokuetsu seppu (Sanjō: Nijima shuppan, 1971), 64. 62. Hase, Nihon meisho fūzoku zue, 322. 63. See Suzuki, Snow Country Tales, 66. 64. Takeda, “Offertory Banners from Rural Japan,” 43. 65. Takeda, 40. 66. Rousmaniere, Vessels of Influence, 135. 67. Hase, Nihon meisho fūzoku zue, 317. 68. Hase, 320. 69. Jennifer Robertson, “Japanese Farm Manuals: A Literature of Discovery,” Peasant Studies 11, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 183.

c h a p t e r t h r e e . c r a f t orga n i z at ion s a n d ope r at ion s 1. For another perspective on workshop management, see Yoshiaki Shimizu, “Workshop Management of the Early Kano Painters, ca. 1530–1600,” Archives of Asian Art 34 (1981): 32–47. 2. This is Mary Elizabeth Berry’s rendering of the term shokunin. See Berry, The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 174–79. 3. For an excellent case study of this system in the context of the Raku production world, see Pitelka, chap. 4 in Handmade Culture. 4. For an in-depth study of the history of ie, see Kozo Yamamura and Murakami Yasusuke, “Ie Society as a Pattern of Civilization,” Journal of Japanese Studies 10, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 279–363. 5. For an excellent discussion of the considerable role of women in rural ie, see Anne Walthall, “The Family Ideology of Rural Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth Century Japan,” Journal of Social History 23, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 471–78. 6. Christine R. Yano, in “The Iemoto System: Convergence of Achievement and Ascription,” in Transactions of the International Conference of Orientalists in Japan (Tohō gakkai) 37 (1993): 72–83.

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7.  Andrew J. Pekarik, Japanese Lacquer, 1600–1900: Selections from the Charles Greenfield Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980), 96; Kōami  Iyo,  “Mume  ga  e  suzuribako  nikki,  Yuishitsu-shin,”  Bijutsu kenkyū  99  (1940):  105. This statement might be contrasted to the more famous one about the relative  value  of  innate  talent  (shitsuga)  versus  training  (gakuga)  recorded  in  the  Secrets of the Way of Painting  (Gadō yōketsu;  1680),  written  by  Kano  Yasunobu  (1614–1685). For the passage in question, see Karen Gerhart, “Issues of Talent and  Training in the Seventeenth-Century Kano Workshop,” Ars Orientalis 31 (2001):  115–16. 8.  Shimizu, “Workshop Management of the Early Kano Painters,” 37. 9.  Pitelka, Handmade Culture, 73–74. 10.  Kichizaemon opened a new workshop on land owned by the Ogata on  Aburanokōji  Street;  it  is  still  the  Raku  headquarters  today.  Pitelka,  Handmade Culture, 76–77. 11.  Kono  Motoaki,  “The  Organization  of  the  Kanō  School  of  Painting,”  in  Fenway Court (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1993), 23. 12.  On  Kōetsu,  see  Felice  Fischer,  ed.,  The Arts of Hon’ami Kōetsu: Japanese Renaissance Master (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000). 13.  Pitelka, Handmade Culture, 74. 14.  McClain, Kanazawa, 40. 15.  Henry D. Smith and Amy G. Poster, Hiroshige: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (New York: George Braziller/Brooklyn Museum, 1986), entry no. 75. 16.  Endō, Kenchiku, kinkō shokunin shiwa, 5:141–44. 17.  Tsuji Tatsuya, Kyōhō kaikaku no kenkyū (Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1963), 257–58. 18.  McClain, Kanazawa, 40, 126. 19.  Nakai Nobuhiko and James L. McClain, “Commercial Change and Urban  Growth in Early Modern Japan,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, ed. John W. Hall  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 4:556. 20.  Masayuki Tanimoto, “Introduction and Diffusion: How Useful and Reliable  Knowledge  Created  the  Industrial  Development  in  Early  Modern  Japan,”  Technology and Culture (forthcoming). 21.  See Kathleen S. Uno, “The Household Division of Labor,” in  Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 17–41.

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22.  Thomas C. Smith, “Peasant Time and Factory Time in Japan,” Past and Present 111 (May 1986): 170. 23.  Smith, 178. 24.  Walthall, “Family Ideology of Rural Entrepreneurs,” 463. 25.  Walthall, 465. 26.  Walthall, 465. 27.  Karen  Wigen,  The Making of a Japanese Periphery,  1750–1920  (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1995), 86–88. 28.  See Ritsuō zaiku: Ogawa Haritsu (Kyoto: Kyoto Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan,  1991) and Tahira Namiko, “Shibata Zeshin ni okeru Haritsu-zaiku no eikyō: Sono  engen to shite no chugoku shikki o nentō ni,” Nezu Bijutsukan Shikun 7 (2016): 41–52. 29.  Samonides, “Kōami Family of Maki-e Lacquerers,” 52–53. 30.  For a discussion of these documents, see Samonides, 30–50. 31.  Yukio  Lippit,  Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in Seventeenth-Century Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 157. 32.  The Yuishitsu shin (Single-minded concentration) is partially translated  by Andrew J. Pekarik, in Japanese Lacquer, 96–97. For the original text, see Kōami,  “Mume ga e suzuribako nikki, Yuishitsu-shin,” 101–6. 33.  J. Mark Ramseyer, “Thrift and Diligence: House Codes of Tokugawa Merchant Families,” Monumenta Nipponica 34, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 210. 34.  Pekarik, Japanese Lacquer, 96. For the original text, see Kōami, “Mume ga  e suzuribako nikki, Yuishitsu-shin,” 105. 35.  Pekarik, 96; Kōami, 105. 36.  Pekarik, 123. 37.  This section is not translated by Pekarik. Kōami, 106. 38.  Pekarik, 97; Kōami, 105. 39.  Mume ga e suzuribako nikki (Diary of making a writing box with a plum  blossom design) is translated in Pekarik, Japanese Lacquer, 120–23. For the original text, see Kōami, “Mume ga e suzuribako nikki, Yuishitsu-shin,” 101–4. 40.  Pekarik, 121; Kōami, 101. 41.  Komatsu  Taishū  has  argued  that  Kōdaiji-style  lacquers  went  through  three phases, first during Hideyoshi’s lifetime through 1598, then for twentyfive  years  following  his  death  till  1624,  and  lastly  through  the  Genroku  era  (1688–1704). See his “Kōdaiji maki-e no hennen ni kansuru ichi shiron: Maki-e 

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dentō yōshiki tono kankei chūshin ni,” Kokka, no. 1285 (2002): 7–17. See also Haino Akio, “The Momoyama Flowering: Kōdaiji and Namban Lacquer,” in East Asian Lacquer: The Florence and Herbert Irving Collection, ed. James C. Y. Watt and Barbara Brennan Ford (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), 163–73. 42. Koike Tomio, “Hatsune no chōdo ni tsuite,” in Hatsune no Chōdo, ed. Tokugawa Bijutsukan (Nagoya: Tokugawa Bijutsukan, 2005), 108–9. 43. Koike, 110. 44. This senryū , from the collection Yanagidaru (1765), is cited in Sugama Sachiko, “Edo jidai buraido-kō,” in Konrei no iro to katachi: Kinsei kōgei no hana, ed. Sugama Sachiko and Kogō Shoji (Kyoto: Kyoto Bunka Hakubutsukan, 1997), 19. My thanks to Tomoko Kikkawa-Sanchez for bringing this poem to my attention. 45. Samonides, “Kōami Family of Maki-e Lacquerers,” 46–47. 46. The makie lacquerer Hara Yōyūsai (1769–1845) is another example. Although the social networks to which he belonged have not been studied systematically, tantalizing hints of his ties with Danjurō VII and Sakai Hōitsu are provided in Hara Yōyūsai: Edo Rinpa no makieshi, comp. Gotoh Bijutsukan (Tokyo: Gotoh Bijutsukan, 1999). 47. Haino Akio, Ogawa Haritsu: Edo kōgei no iki, Nihon no bijutsu 10 (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1998), 53–54. 48. On Itchō, see Miriam Wattles, The Life and Afterlives of Hanabusa Itchō, Artist Rebel of Edo (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 49. On this work, see Kobayashi Yūko, “Ogawa Haritsu to Dokuraku tozenshū (kenkyū noto),” Kokka 1256 (1999): 29–34. 50. Haino, Ogawa Haritsu, 33. 51. Haino, 23. 52. Kobayashi Yūko, “Ogawa Haritsu to Hirosaki hanchō nikki,” Kokka 1259 (1999): 27. 53. Kobayashi, “Ogawa Haritsu to Hirosaki hanchō nikki,” 27. 54. On the range of exhibits in public misemono, see Andrew L. Markus, “Carnival of Edo: Misemono Spectacles from Contemporary Accounts,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 45, no. 2 (December 1985): 499–541. 55. See Komatsu Taishū, “Gi to shajitsu no seikai: Edo goki no kōgei,” in Nihon bijutsu zenshū , vol. 20, Ukiyoe Edo kaiga IV, kōgei II, ed. Kobayashi Chu et al. (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1991), fig. 101 and text on p. 228.

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56.  Haino, Ogawa Haritsu, 38. 57.  Pekarik,  Japanese Lacquer,  87,  citing  Saitō  Gesshin,  Bukō nenpyō,  Tōyo  bunko  116  (Tokyo:  Heibonsha,  1968),  1:221.  The  1720s  date  in  Pekarik’s  text  is  erroneous. 58.  For a reproduction, see Haino, Ogawa Haritsu, fig. 3. 59.  As observed by Wattles, chap. 6 in Life and Afterlives of Hanabusa Itchō. 60.  See Tahira, “Shibata Zeshin ni okeru Haritsu-zaiku no eikyō,” 41–52. 61.  Haino, Ogawa Haritsu, 73. 62.  The term Ritsuō zaiku was used already in Haritsu’s lifetime in connection  with a commission from Danjurō II. See Haino, Ogawa Haritsu, 54. 63.  It is part of a set that includes a document box. For a reproduction of the  Chinese model, see Haino, Ogawa Haritsu, 48. 64.  Utamaro’s Gifts of the Ebb Tide (Shiohi no tsuto) of 1789 features many of  the same shells depicted with a similar degree of naturalism. For reproduction of  this book, see www.Fitzwilliam.cam.ac.uk. 65.  See, for instance, Pekarik, Japanese Lacquer, 98. 66.  Recent scholarship has increasingly endorsed the view that these Rinpa  artists  designed  rather  than  made  the  many  lacquers  attributed  to  them.  On  Kōetsu, see Yamazaki Tsuyoshi, “The Kōetsu Style in Lacquerware,” in The Arts of Hon’ami Kōetsu: Japanese Renaissance Master,  ed.  Felice  Fischer  (Philadelphia:  Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000), 109. On Hōitsu, see McKelway, Silver Wind: The Arts of Sakai Hōitsu (1761–1828) (New York: Japan Society, 2012), 103–4. See  also Richard L. Wilson, The Art of Ogata Kenzan: Persona and Production in Japanese Ceramics (New York: Weatherhill, 1991), 23–32.

c h a p t e r  f ou r .  tac i t  k now l e d ge 1.  On apprenticeship in the crafts, see Endō, Nihon shokunin shi josetsu, 131– 50. For training in painting, see Jordan and Weston, Copying the Master and Stealing His Secrets. See also Thomas P. Rohlen and Gerald K. LeTendre, eds., Teaching and Learning in Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and John  Singleton,  ed.,  Learning in Unlikely Places: Varieties of Apprenticeships in Japan  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 2.  Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation  (London: Penguin Books, 2012), 205.

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3.  Translated by Pekarik in Japanese Lacquer, 97; Kōami, “Mume ga e suzuribako nikki, Yuishitsu-shin,” Bijutsu kenkyū 99, 105. 4.  See Bourdieu, Logic of Practice. 5.  This section is based on my article “Models, Modeling, and Knowledge  Exchange in Early Modern Japan,” Res Anthropology and Aesthetics 71/72 (Spring/ Autumn  2019):  253–64.  ©  2019  by  the  President  and  Fellows  of  Harvard   College. 6.  Rupert Cox, The Zen Arts: An Anthropological Study of the Culture of Aesthetic Form in Japan (London: Routledge/Curzon, 2003), 23. 7.  Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 35. 8.  Takamura Kōun, Bakumatsu isshin kaikodan (Tokyo: Iwanami bunko, 1995),  33. For more on Kōun, see Christine M. E. Guth, “Takamura Kōun and Takamura  Kōtarō: On Being a Sculptor,” in The Artist as Professional in Japan, ed. Melinda  Takeuchi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 152–79. 9.  Coaldrake, Way of the Carpenter, 24–25. 10.  Takamura, Bakumatsu isshin kaikodan, 34. 11.  Yamakawa Kikue, Women of Mito Domain: Recollections of Samurai Family Life, trans. with an introduction by Kate Wildman Nakai (Stanford, CA: Stanford  University Press, 2001), 35. 12.  The term is from Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” 455–77. 13.  Yamakawa, Women of Mito Domain, 31–32. 14.  On the importance of cultivating skills for marriage and upward mobility, see Yonemoto, Problem of Women, 81–82. 15.  Anne Walthall, “The Life Cycle of Farm Women in Tokugawa Japan,” in  Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 45–46, and Shiga Tadashi, Josei kyōiku shi (Tokyo:  Fukumura shuppan, 1968), 276–82. 16.  The  length  and  width  of  a  tan  varied  depending  on  region  and  time  period. These are modern dimensions. 17.  For layouts, see Emori, Edo jidai josei seikatsu ezu daijiten, 4:109–15. 18.  Cited in Yonemoto, Problem of Women, 67–68. Emori, Edo jidai josei seikatsu ezu daijiten, 4:112. 19.  Kanaji Isamu, Shōtoku Taishi shinkō (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1979), 208–9.

213

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20.  Yamakawa, Women of Mito Domain, 36. On the hari kuyō, see Christine  M. E. Guth, “Theorizing the hari kuyō: The Ritual Disposal of Needles in Early  Modern  Japan,”  in  Encountering Things: Design and Theories of Things,  ed.  Leslie  Atzmon and Prasad Boradkar (London: Bloomsbury, 2017): 65–80. 21.  See Fumiko Cranston, “Takagamine Colony: Kōetsu at Takagamine,” in  The Arts of Hon’ami Kōetsu: Japanese Renaissance Master, ed. Felice Fischer (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000), 120–37. 22.  Adapted from Yonemoto, Problem of Women, 67. For the original text, see  Emori, Edo jidai josei seikatsu ezu daijiten, 4:102. 23.  See Coaldrake, Way of the Carpenter, 3–8, and Lippit, Painting of the Realm,  159–60. 24.  Cited  in  Andrew  Gordon,  Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 80. 25.  For a discussion of this development in the context of Raku ceramics, see  Pitelka, chap. 5 in Handmade Culture. 26.  Scholars  disagree  on  the  role  of  Esoteric  Buddhism  in  the  fostering   of  secrecy  in  the  arts.  See  Maki  Isaka  Morinaga,  Secrecy in Japanese Arts: “Secret Transmission” as a Mode of Knowledge (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005),  3–4. 27.  Mark Teeuwen, “Introduction: Japan’s Culture of Secrecy from a Comparative Perspective,” in The Culture of Secrecy in Japanese Religion, ed. Bernard  Scheid and Mark Teeuwen (London: Routledge, 2006), 1–2. 28.  Hosokawa Hanzō Yorinao, Karakuri kinmō zui (Edo, 1796). 29.  On this subject, see Karakuri Ningyō: An Exhibition of Ancient Festival Robots from Japan (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1985) and Timon Screech, The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan: The Lens within the Heart  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 65–93. 30.  Hase, Nihon meisho fūzoku zue, 16:320. 31.  Cited in Teeuwen, “Introduction: Japan’s Culture of Secrecy,” 8. 32.  Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 16. 33.  For another take on “material consciousness,” see Sennett, Craftsman,  119–46. 34.  Paraphrased from Coaldrake, Way of the Carpenter, 25–26.

214

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35.  J. J.  Rein,  The Industries of Japan  (1889;  reprint,  London:  Curzon  Press,  1995), 344. 36.  Monica Bethe, “Reflections on Beni: Red as a Key to Edo-Period Fashion,” in  When Art Became Fashion: Kosode in Edo-Period Japan, ed. Dale Carolyn Gluckman and  Sharon Takeda (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1992), 136–39. 37.  Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), 6. 38.  The Secret World of the Japanese Swordsmith (1997), accessed June 7, 2019,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igDDKX9mXbw. For a detailed description  of the process, see Colin M. Roach, Japanese Swords, Cultural Icons of a Nation: The History, Metallurgy, and Iconography of the Samurai Sword  (Tokyo:  Tuttle,  2010),  31–47. On Yoshihara, see Leon and Hiroko Kapp and Yoshindo Yoshihara, Modern Japanese Swords and Swordsmiths from 1868 to the Present (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2002), 105–8. 39.  Roach, Japanese Swords, 38. 40.  This  bowl  is  discussed  briefly  in  Haino,  Ogawa Haritsu,  49–52,  and  Pitelka, Handmade Culture, 128–31. 41.  On these techniques, see Richard L. Wilson,  Inside Japanese Ceramics: A Primer of Materials, Techniques, and Traditions (New York: Weatherhill, 2005), 64–71. 42.  Wilson, Art of Ogata Kenzan, 116. 43.  Wilson, Art of Ogata Kenzan, 75–77. 44.  Pamela H. Smith, “Ways of Making and Knowing: Craft as Natural Philosophy,” in Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge, ed. Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 2014), 18. 45.  Wilson, Art of Ogata Kenzan, 291. 46.  Wilson, 220. 47.  Wilson, 226–27.

c h a p t e r  f i v e . t e c h nol o gy,  i n novat ion,   a n d    c r a f t  m a s t e ry 1.  Walker, Toxic Archipelago, 29. 2.  On Nobuhisa’s ties to the Manpukuji temple in Hirosaki, opened in 1679,  see Kobayashi, “Ogawa Haritsu to Hirosaki hanchō nikki,” 26.

215

Notes

3.  On this and other early modern technologies, see Kikuchi Toshiyori, ed.,  Zufu Edo jidai no gijutsu, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Kōwa shuppan, 1988). 4.  Cort, Seto and Mino Ceramics, 100. 5.  Rousmaniere, Vessels of Influence, 140–41. 6.  Kunisaki describes the varieties of the tororo plant, when to uproot it, its  cost, and how much to add to each vat. See Kunisaki, Kamisuki chōhōki: A Handy Guide to Papermaking, 44–46. 7.  Tahira, “Shibata Zeshin ni okeru Haritsu-zaiku no eikyō.” 8.  See John Guy, Woven Cargoes: Indian Textiles in the East (New York: Thames  & Hudson, 1998). 9.  Fujita Kayoko, “Japan Indianized: The Material Culture of Imported Textiles in Japan 1550–1850,” in The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles  1200–1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi, Pasold Studies in  Textile History 16 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 197. 10.  Asakura, Jinrin kinmō zui, 222. 11.  Fujita, “Japan Indianized,” 197. 12.  Sung  Ying-Hsing,  T’ien-k’ung K’ai-wu: Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century, trans. E-tu Zen Sun (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966). 13.  Dagmar Schäfer, The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3. 14.  Song  Yingxing,  Tenkō kaibutsu,  Tōyō  bunko  130  (Tokyo:  Heibonsha,  1981), 375. 15.  Sung, T’ien-k’ung K’ai-wu, 145. 16.  Patricia J. Graham, Tea of the Sages: The Art of Sencha (Honolulu: University  of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), 124–32; Nakamura, Kimura Kenkadō no saron, 532–34; Oka  Yoshiko,  Kinsei kyoyaki no kenkyū  (Kyoto:  Shibunkaku,  2011),  359–61;  for  an  English translation of the Tao shuo, see Stephen Bushell, Description of Chinese Pottery and Porcelain; Being a Translation of the T’ao shuo (Oxford: Clarendon Press,  1910). 17.  On glass bottles, see Martha Chaiklin, Cultural Commerce and Dutch Commercial Cultures: The Influence of European Material Culture on Japan,  1700–1850  (Leiden: Research School CNWS, 2003), 126–31. 18.  Chaiklin, Cultural Commerce and Dutch Commercial Cultures, 145.

216

Notes

19.  Morris-Suzuki, “Sericulture and the Origins of Japanese Industrialization,” 105. 20.  Morris-Suzuki, 114–15. 21.  Francesca  Bray,  “Technics  and  Civilization  in  Late  Imperial  China:  An  Essay in the Cultural History of Technology,” Osiris, 2nd series, vol. 13, Beyond Joseph Needham: Science, Technology and Medicine in East and Southeast Asia (1998): 13. 22.  Bray, “Technics and Civilization in Late Imperial China,” 28. 23.  Tessa  Morris-Suzuki,  The Technological Transformation of Japan from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  1994), 35. 24.  Mark Mulligan and Yukio Lippit, The Thinking Hand: Tools and Traditions of the Japanese Carpenter (Cambridge, MA: Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies,  Harvard University, 2014), 30. 25.  Kiyoshi Seike, The Art of Japanese Joinery (New York: Weatherhill, 1977), 9. 26.  See  William  H.  Coaldrake,  Architecture and Authority in Japan  (London:  Routledge, 1996), 193–207. 27.  Shively, “Sumptuary Regulations and Status,” 129. 28.  Amanda  Mayer  Stinchecum,  “Kosode  Techniques  and  Designs,”  in  Kosode: 16th–19th Century Textiles from the Nomura Collection (New York: Japan Society and Kodansha International, 1984), 31–32. 29.  Richard L. Wilson, The Potter’s Brush: The Kenzan Style in Japanese Ceramics  (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2001), 81. 30.  For descriptions and photographs of the many techniques, see Arimatsu Narumi shibori, Nihon no tewaza 3 (Tokyo: Genryūsha, 2006). See also Yoshiko  Iwamoto Wada, Shibori: The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing: Tradition, Techniques, Innovation (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1983), 28–34. 31.  On this series, see Rupert Faulkner, Hiroshige Fan Prints (London: V&A  Publications,  2001),  132–33.  The  only  other  known  print  represents  a  woman  painter trained in the Kano school known as Onna Yukinobu. For other prints  featuring Oroku combs, see Sebastian Izzard, Hiroshige/Eisen: The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaidō  (New  York:  George  Braziller,  2007),  84–85,  and  Sarah  E.  Thompson, Utagawa Kuniyoshi: The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaidō Road (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts; San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2009), 86–87.

217

Notes

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il lust r at ions

1.1. Tapper preparing to draw sap from a lacquer tree 22 1.2. Sado gold mines 28–29 1.3. Mining tools, from Illustrated Famous Specialties of the Mountains and Seas of Japan (Nihon sankai meibutsu zue) 32–33 1.4. Katsushika Hokusai, “In the Mountains of Tōtōmi Province” (Tōtōmi sanchū), from series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei) 36–37 1.5. Oval Tsugaru-nuri inkstone box with Chinese recluse Lin Bu greeting a crane 39 1.6. Spouted red lacquer Wajima ware bowl 40 1.7. Kunisaki Jihei, Cutting kōzo, from A Handy Guide to Papermaking (Kamisuki chōhōki) 44 1.8. Fragment of cloth of plain silk and cotton weave with stripes 46 1.9. Indigo vats at Higeta Indigo House, Mashiko, Tochigi Prefecture 47 1.10. Square plate; stoneware with overglaze enamels (Sanuki ware, Gennai type) 50 2.1. Utagawa Hiroshige I, “Dyers’ Quarter, Kanda (Kanda Kon’ya-chō),” from series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei) 58

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2.2. Detail of views inside and outside the capital (Rakuchū rakugaizu) 64 2.3. Carvers of signboards and decorative woodwork, from Illustrated Encyclopedia of Humanity (Jinrin kinmō zui) 69 2.4. Infant’s patchwork kimono 73 2.5. Making kumihimo, from Treasury of Greater Learning for Women (Onna daigaku takarabako) 74 2.6. Detail of a furisode (outer kimono) with allover kanoko shibori (sō kanoko) 76 2.7. Modern mizuhiki knot on a money envelope for a wedding gift 77 2.8. Tachibana Minkō, Fan making, from Various Classes of Artisans in Colored Pictures (Saiga shokunin burui) 78–79 2.9. Kitagawa Utamaro, Feeding chopped mulberry leaves to larvae, from twelve-part series Women Engaged in Sericulture (Joshoku kaiko tewaza-gusa) 82 2.10. Kitagawa Utamaro, Reeling silk from cocoons, from twelve-part series Women Engaged in Sericulture (Joshoku kaiko tewaza-gusa) 83 2.11. Nikkō lathe-turned lacquerwares, from Illustrated Famous Specialties of the Mountains and Seas of Japan (Nihon sankai meibutsu zue) 89 2.12. Papermaking, from Illustrated Famous Specialties of the Mountains and Seas of Japan (Nihon sankai meibutsu zue) 92–93 2.13. Collecting lacquer sap, from Illustrated Famous Specialties of the Mountains and Seas of Japan (Nihon sankai meibutsu zue) 94–95 2.14. Bleaching Echigo cloth on snow, from Illustrated Famous Products of Mountain and Sea (Sankai meisan zue) 98–99 2.15. Making Echigo cloth, from Illustrated Famous Products of Mountain and Sea (Sankai meisan zue) 100–101 2.16. Ojiya chijimi (crepe), detail of kimono with paulownia flowers in bloom 102 2.17. Nabeshima porcelain plate with underglaze blue and overglaze polychrome enamels 103 2.18. View of Arita porcelain production, from Illustrated Famous Products of Mountain and Sea (Sankai meisan zue) 104–105

234

Illustrations

3.1. Kano Yoshinobu, View of lacquer workshop, from Pictures of Craftsmen 110 3.2. Raku Sō’nyū V, Raku teabowl 114 3.3. Tachibana Minkō, Weavers in Nishijin, from Various Classes of Artisans in Colored Pictures (Saiga shokunin burui) 118–119 3.4. Tachibana Minkō, Making motoyui, from Various Classes of Artisans in Colored Pictures (Saiga shokunin burui) 122–123 3.5. Kōdaiji-style lacquer pouring vessel 129 3.6. Kōami Chōjū, Hatsune lacquer dowry set 131 3.7. Ogawa Haritsu, makie writing box with relief inro design 135 3.8. Ogawa Haritsu, makie writing box with seashell pattern 136 4.1. Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Wisdom (Chi), from series Mirror of Feminine Virtue for a Thousand Ages (Teisō chiyo no kagami) 144 4.2. Hosokawa Hanzō Yorinao, Tea-serving automaton, from Illustrated Compendium of Clever Machines (Karakuri kinmō zui) 150–151 4.3. Tamaya Shobei IX, tea-serving automaton doll 152 4.4. Sword maker Yoshihara Yoshindo forging a sword 156 4.5. Ogawa Haritsu, lacquer teabowl 159 4.6. Workshop of Ogata Kenzan, set of five camellia-shaped side dishes (mukōzuke) with camellia patterns 162 5.1. Sixteen-chamber climbing kiln (noborigama) 169 5.2. Pouch of sarasa printed cotton cloth 172 5.3. Making large pots, from Exploitation of the Works of Nature (Tenkō kaibutsu) 174 5.4. Tachibana Minkō, Glassblower, from Various Classes of Artisans in Colored Pictures (Saiga shokunin burui) 178–179 5.5. Model of interlocking wood bracketing complex in Engakuji Relic Hall (Shariden) 182 5.6. Detail of stencil-printed imitation tie-dyed (kata kanoko shibori) and embroidered outer kimono (furisode) 184

235

Illustrations

5.7. Ogata Kenzan, plates of the twelve lunar months 186–187 5.8. Utagawa Kunisada, “Narumi: Woman Doing Arimatsu Shibori Tie-Dyeing,” from series Fifty-Three Pairings for the Tōkaidō Road (Tōkaidō gojūsan tsui) 189 5.9. Utagawa Hiroshige, “Kiso no Oroku Combs,” from series Compendium of Famous Artisans (Meiyo shokunin zukushi no uchi) 191

236

Illustrations

In dex

actor-network theory (Latour), 16 Adamson, Glenn, 10 adoption, 113 aesthetics, 9, 10, 12, 18, 141; of lacquerware, 124; of nature, 54; of textiles, 3, 75; of swords, 157–58; tea ceremony, 154 agriculture: commercial crops, 84; management, 42; manuals, 106; tools, 25, 31; new crops, 52. See also cotton; farmers; indigo amateur ideal, 138 Aoki Mokubei, 175 Aoto zōshi (Book of Aoto), 191 Aoyama Chise, 143, 145 apprenticeship: as economic relationship, 139; and embodied practice, 13–14; gender and, 70, 146; and the ie system, 112; and manipulation of tools, 165; as socialization, 146; tacit knowledge in, 139–40; of wood carver Takamura Kōun, 142–43 Arai Hakuseki, 26 arashi shibori (storm) pattern, 188

237

architectural projects, 180, 181, 183. See also building trades; carpenters Arimatsu textiles, 188 Arita porcelain, 51, 91, 104–5fig., 106, 149–53, 158, 170 arms and armor, 67, 75. See also swords artisans (shokunin): assumed to be male, 12, 17, 111; body movements of, 68, 140, 194; class of, 11, 61, 65, 124; concentrated in cities, 57; contrasted with saiku, 65; dissemination of information about, 59; divine origins of skills, 148; festivals and rituals, 146–47; hierarchies of, 11, 61, 65–66, 68; in Japan and other parts of the world, 13; as “people of skill,” 208n2; as pictorial genre, 62–63; publications on, 59–60; range of professions, 60–61, 63–65; specialization of, 67–68 asa (ramie and hemp), 24, 38, 45 Asaoka Okisada, Kōga bikō (Notes on ancient paintings), 113 Ashikaga shoguns, 124; Ashikaga Yoshimasa, 126

Asian alder, 190–91 authorial self-consciousness, 134 automata (karakuri saikumono), 133–34, 149; tea-serving automaton, 149, 150–51fig., 152fig. Awa Province, 47 Awashima, deity of, 147 Azuchi Castle, 31 bamboo, 25–26 Bashō, 132 bedding, 23 bentwood, 5 Berry, Mary Elizabeth, 59, 208n2 bijin (beautiful women), performing craft work, 84 bijutsu (fine art), 11 bijutsu kōgei (art crafts), 197–98n5 blacksmiths, 85, 116 body: and material consciousness, 155, 194; mind and, 14, 147, 195; movements, 68, 140, 155–56, 194; “techniques of,” in needlework, 143–45; as vehicle for knowledge transfer, 13, 140–41 botanical studies, 51–52 Bourdieu, Pierre, 14, 140 braid making, 72–75, 74fig., 206n28 Bray, Francesca, “ritual technologies,” 180 brush makers, 147 bucket makers, 116 Buddhism, 25, 146, 147, 148, 214n26 Buddhist icons, carvers of, 142 buffalo horn, 199n6 building trades, 66–67. See also architectural projects; carpenters; sawyers bussangaku (production studies), 87 Buyō Inshi, 26 calligraphy, 114, 147 camphor trees (kusu), 25

238

capitalism, 14, 24–25, 177 carpenters (daiku): female, 80; knowledge of feng shui, 180; master (tōryō), 66–67, 182, 192; material consciousness of, 153; rituals of, 146–47; as saiku and shokunin, 65; salaries set by shogunate, 116; standardization of building practices, 181, 192; tools of, 142, 181–82; in urban occupational districts, 115, 116. See also lathe specialists; sawyers; woodcarvers castle building, 31, 66 cedar (sugi), 25, 31, 34, 67 celebrity craft makers, 12. See also Hon’ami Kōetsu; Ogata Kenzan; Ogata Kōrin ceramics: Chinese, 49; and Chinese and Korean immigrants, 106, 167; dishes, 23, 102, 171, 185; Gennai-yaki, 49–51, 50fig.; Odo ware, 52–53; potters in hierarchy of artisans, 11; product differentiation, 185; publications on, 175; samurai potters, 62; for tea ceremony, 50–51; in Tenkō kaibutsu, 173, 174fig.; of Tosa domain, 52–53; using molds, 185; women in, 70, 80; workshops, 80, 116, 161. See also porcelain; Raku ware; stoneware Chaya Shirōjirō, 147 chayazome dyeing technique, 147 Chigusa, 5 chijimi (ramie crepe): Echigo, 91, 96; Ojiya, 97, 102fig. Chikubushima Shrine, 41 children: as makers, 61; and textile work, 96, 145 China, trade with, 52 Chinese and Korean immigrants, 106, 167–68 Chinese culture, 167–68

Index

chirimen (silk crepe), 115–16, 117, 146 Chiyohime, 130, 181 Chōjiyamachi, 116, 161 chōnin (people of the quarter), 61, 72, 116, 145 Chōzaemon, 115 Chronicles of Japan (Nihonshoki), 25 classification, 52, 68, 87, 107 clay: carrying and kneading by women, 80; kaolin, 26, 106; Kenzan’s investigation of, 162–63; manual gestures used on, 114fig., 160; roof tiles, 31; sources of, 26, 45, 51, 52–53, 115, 163; white slip, 163 clocks, 149 clothing: cold-weather garments, 81, 206n40; of commoners, 24, 45, 46, 85, 91, 183; cotton, 23–24, 45, 73fig., 85, 116, 188; and fashion, 24; made by women, 72; made from bast fibers, 25, 42, 91; for New Year, 24; silk, 183; and social class, 12, 23–24, 154, 183; summer garments, 24, 91. See also textiles combs, 84, 190–91, 191fig. commercial networks, 15, 48 commoners: clothing of, 24, 45, 46, 85, 91, 183; as consumers, 23, 192 connoisseurship, 114, 125 consumer-oriented information, 70, 107 copies of celebrated works, 6, 126–27 copper, 25, 26, 27, 29 cosmology, 90, 180 cotton: for clothing, 23–24, 85; cloth patterns, 45, 46fig.; cultivation of, 24, 26, 41, 45, 91; dyeing of, 46–48, 85; household weaving of, 45, 84; Indian and Southeast Asian chintzes, 49, 171, 172fig., 175; infant’s kimono,

239

73fig.; processing of, 45; shibori, 188; wadding, 23, 206n40; yukata and tenugui, 116, 188 Cox, Rupert, 140–41 craft: culture, 7, 9, 11, 15; definitions of, 9–10, 11, 197nn4–5; handmade and made with tools, 10; kōgei and mingei, 11, 12, 15, 197nn4–5; lineages, 5; national heritage system, 12; in Renaissance Europe, 10–11; as techne, 61. See also artisans craft houses. See ie craft organizations. See guild system craft workshops. See workshops crepe: ramie (chijimi), 91, 96, 97, 102fig.; silk (chirimen), 115–16, 117, 146 curiosities (misemono), 133, 161. See also automata cypress wood (hinoki), 5, 25, 31, 34, 67 daimyo, 53, 66, 133, 154; and craft industries, 35–38, 115, 124; Edo, 34; Owari, 51, 130, 188. See also Tokugawa shogunate; Tsugaru Nobuhisa Date Yoshimura, 133 deerskins, 26, 199n6 deforestation, 31. See also forests designer-makers, 137, 185. See also Ogawa Hōritsu; Ogata Kenzan drawlooms (takarabata), 115, 168 dyeing techniques, 71, 75, 147, 183, 184fig., 188 dyers: indigo, 55, 63, 71, 85; rural, 85; women, 71 dyes: “fake,” 154; indigo, 55, 71, 85; plants for, 26, 41; red and purple, 41, 154, 171, 183. See also indigo dye shops, 46, 71, 116

Index

early modern Japan, 13, 14–15 Echigo: bleaching Echigo cloth on snow, 96, 98–99fig.; crepe (chijimi), 96, 97, 120; ramie of, 91–96; weaving of cloth, 96–97, 100–101fig. Echizen, paper of, 88–90 ecological damage, 24, 30, 38, 54 Edo, 66, 85, 116, 206n48 Edo Castle: burning of, 34; medicinal garden, 52 Edo Murasaki dye, 154, 183 embodied knowledge, 13, 140–41, 145, 148, 155, 194–95. See also tacit knowledge embroidery, 2–3, 71, 145, 184fig. See also needlework Engakuji, model of wood bracketing in Relic Hall, 182fig. etiquette books (ōraimono), 59 European glass, 175, 176 evidentiary learning, 51, 154. See also investigating things; practical studies expositions, 11, 12, 53, 200n30 Fangshi mopu, 135–36 fans, 72, 76–77, 78–79fig., 117 farmers: clothing of, 24; craft making by-employment, 84, 120; goods in households of, 23; off-season sericulture, 80–81; use of rice straw to make things, 61–62 farm families (nōka), 117–20 feng shui, 180 fertilizer, 34, 41, 45, 54 filial piety, 71 fine arts, 10–11, 197–98n5 fires, 34, 66, 116, 117, 126 Five Highways, 48 five metals (gokin), 25, 30

240

flora and fauna, 49, 52, 87, 107, 136 folk crafts, 12, 15 forests, 26, 31, 34, 35, 54. See also timber Francks, Penelope, 84 Freer Gallery of Art, 5 fresh-water containers (mizusashi), 4–5 Fudeya Myōki, 147 Fuji, Mount, 31, 35; Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views, 34–35, 36–37fig. Fujiwara no Teika, 185 Fukui, Mr. (tatami maker), 1–2 furniture, 23, 25; dimensions of, 181 ganpi (Wikstoemia canescens), 42–43 gateways (of warrior residences), 183 gender. See women in crafts; women’s work genealogies, 112, 113, 115, 120, 124–25 Gennai-yaki, 49–51, 50fig. See also Hiraga Gennai glass, 175, 176 glassblowing, 176, 178–79fig. gold: enamels, 106; mining, 27, 28fig., 30; sprinkled, in makie lacquer, 67, 68, 109, 124, 125, 127, 128–30, 129fig., 136; sumptuary laws concerning, 183 grasses, 41 guild system, 1–2, 17, 85, 116–17 haikai poetry, 131–32 haiku, 86 Haino Akio, 132 hair ornaments, glass, 176 hair ties (motoyui), 42, 84, 121; making of, by Tachibana Minkō, 122–23fig. Hanabusa Ippō, 132 Hanabusa Itchō, Dokuraku tozenshū (Random collection of a spinning top), 132 Hanley, Susan, 84

Index

Hara Yōyūsai, 211n46 Haritsu/Ritsuō–style craft, 124, 135, 158, 212n62. See also Ogawa Haritsu Hasegawa Mitsunobu, 86 Hatsune dowry set, 128, 130, 131fig., 181 Hayami Akira, 84 Heinouchi lineage, 67 Heinouchi Yoshimasa, 67 hemp, 24, 38, 41, 91, 126 Hermès, 4 Hideyoshi, 31, 115, 128, 167 Higeta Indigo House (Mashiko), 47–48, 47fig. highway system, 48, 86, 188, 190 Hiraga Gennai, 49–51, 53, 62, 177, 195; Gennai-yaki, 49, 50fig. Hirase Tessai. See Nihon sankai meibutsu zue Hirosaki domain, 132, 133, 161, 167; temples, 168, 215n2. See also Tsugaru daimyo Hirosaki hanchō nikki (Hirosaki domain diary), 133 Hizen porcelain, 59, 97–102, 103fig., 106 hobbyists, teaching of, 3, 6 Hōkōji temple (Kyoto), 31, 35 Hokuriku Kaidō, 97 Hokusai, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, 34–35, 36–37fig. Hon’ami Kōetsu, 12, 113–14, 147 Hōryūji, 146 Hosokawa Hanzō Yorinao, tea-serving automaton, 150–51fig. household goods, 23, 40, 45, 84. See also ceramics; screens; tansu; tatami mats house style (kafu), 120, 185; and individual style, 111, 138 Ichikawa Danjurō II, 132, 212n62; Chichi no on (A father’s gratitude), 132

241

Ichikawa Danjurō VII, 211n46 Ichise Kohee, 4–5 ie (house/household): as administrative unit for craft workshops, 111, 112; branch lineages, 115; guilds and, 116; house style, 120; impact on craft practitioners, 17; master-disciple relationships, 113; patronage of, 124, 125; records and genealogies, 120, 124; rural, 117–20; as social system, 194; succession in, 112; urban, 2, 115–16; women’s role in, 194, 208n5. See also workshops Ihara Saikaku, Saikaku shokoku banashi (Saikaku’s tales from many countries), 80 Iida castle town, 121 Ikuno silver mines, 27 Illustrated Compendium of Clever Machines, tea-serving automaton, 149, 150–51fig. Illustrated Encyclopedia of Humanity. See Jinrin kinmō zui Illustrated Famous Products of Mountains and Seas. See Sankai meisan zue Illustrated Famous Specialties of the Mountains and Seas of Japan. See Nihon sankai meibutsu zue Important Intangible Cultural Property, 12 import substitution, 49, 170, 171 India, cotton from, 49, 171, 172fig., 175 indigo: commercial cultivation of, 26, 42, 46–48; dyers, 55, 63, 71, 85; gods of, 55; Japanese variety, 46; transported as cakes, 48; used for dyeing cotton, 46–48, 188; vats of, 47, 47fig. Ingold, Tim, 154 inksticks, 134, 158–59 innovation: and creative adaptation, 192, 195; European, 180; failures, 177;

Index

innovation (continued) immigrants and, 168; in materials, 154; of Ogawa Haritsu, 158, 171; in papermaking, 170; in porcelain techniques, 170–71; promoted in print media, 190; in sericulture, 176–77; technological, 166, 169–71, 180; in textile dyeing and weaving, 183, 188. See also technological transfer inro, 133, 134, 135fig., 159 international trade, 27–28, 49, 52, 171, 180 “In the Mountains of Tōtōmi Province” (Katsushika Hokusai), 34–35, 36–37fig. investigating things (kaibutsu), 25, 48, 53, 173. See also practical studies iron, 25, 30, 65, 156; oxide, 185 itinerants, 88 ivory, 26, 68 Iwami silver mines, 27–28 Iwate Prefecture, 6, 21, 23, 30 Izumiyama, 106, 170 Japanese craft exceptionalism, 12–13 Jean-Louis Scherrer, 4 Jingdezhen, 175 Jinrin kinmō zui (Illustrated encyclopedia of humanity): concern with urban areas, 60, 85; consumer-oriented information in, 70; contrasted with Sankai meisan zue, 91; images, 68–70, 69fig. 203–4n2; occupational inventory, 59, 63–68, 171; women in crafts, 71, 206n28 jitsugaku. See practical studies Johnson, Paul Christopher, “ritualized secretism,” 153 Jōhōji plantation (Iwate Prefecture), 6 joinery, 4–5, 67, 127, 182, 182fig.

242

Kabuki theater, 131–32, 191 Kaibara Ekken, 51–52, 204n4; Yamato honzō (Medicinal herbs of Japan), 52 Kamisuki-chōhōki (A handy guide to papermaking; Kunisaki Jihei), 42–43, 44fig. 77–80 Kamiya Sōji, 147 Kanazawa, 85, 115, 117 Kanda district (Edo), 57, 58fig., 116 Kano Einō: family lineage compiled by, 124–25; Honcho gashi (Painting in our land), 197n4 Kano Motonobu, 113 kanoko shibori, 72, 75, 183; outer kimono with, 76fig., 184fig. Kano school painting, 113, 217n31 Kano Yasunobu, Secrets of the Way of Painting (Gadō yōketsu), 209n7 Kano Yoshinobu, view of lacquer workshop from Pictures of Craftsmen, 109–11, 110fig. kaolin, 26, 106 karada de oboeru (remember with the body), 140 kara-nuri lacquerware, 38 Kariganeya, 71, 113, 115, 147 Karitsu (disciple of Ogawa Haritsu), 133 Kasama Kyōzan, 134–35 kata (patterns), 140, 141–42 kata kanoko patterns, 183, 184fig. Katsushika Hokusai. See Hokusai Kefukigusa (Grasses like wind-blown fur), 86 Kenzan-yaki, 185. See also Ogata Kenzan Kichizaemon. See Raku house; Raku Sō’nyū V (Kichizaemon) kilns: climbing, 167, 168–69, 169fig.; garden, 62; “great” (ōgama), 167; of Hizen and Hirado, 97–102; Matsuura,

Index

102; Nabeshima, 51, 52–53, 102, 171; for porcelain, 106 kimono: embroidered, 3; furisode with allover kanoko shibori, 76fig.; furisode with tie-dyed imitation, 184fig.; infant’s, 73fig.; production of yarn for, 97 Kimura Kenkadō, 53, 87, 173, 175, 207n58 Kinai region, 45, 202n47 Kiryū weavers, 117, 149, 166 Kisokaidō Road, 48, 190 Kitagawa Utamaro: Gifts of the Ebb Tide (Shiohi no tsuto), 212n64; Women Engaged in Sericulture, 82fig., 83fig. Kita no Mandokoro, 128 kiwari proportions, 67, 142, 181 Kōami (lineage of lacquerers): architectural projects, 127; bridal dowry goods, 128–30, 136; characterized as lacking in innovation, 136–37; Chōan, 127; Chōsei, 127; commission to reproduce writing box, 126–27; family records, 17, 121, 124–25, 127; house style, 138; Kōdaiji makie, 128; laborsaving techniques, 127–28, 130; meibutsu writing boxes and other makie articles, 125, 126; shogunal patronage, 121, 124, 125. See also Kōami Chōjū; Kōami Nagasuku Kōami Chōjū, Hatsune dowry set, 128, 130, 131fig., 181 Kōami Michikiyo, 126 Kōami Nagasuku: as case study of workshop operations, 17, 111; and the commission to reproduce writing box, 126–27, 137; compilation of family records, 124–25; as head of family workshop, 124, 137; instructions for successors, 112–13, 139–40; Mume ga e suzuribako nikki (Diary of making a

243

writing box with a plum blossom design), 126, 210n39; Yuishitsu-shin (Singled-minded concentration), 112–13, 125–26, 209n7, 210n32 Kōchi wares, 50–51 Kōdaiji lacquerware, 128, 181, 210n41; pouring vessel, 129fig. Kōdaiji temple (Kyoto), 128 kōgei (craft), 11–13, 197nn4–5; mingei (folk crafts), 12, 15 Koizumi Kazuko, 22–23 kokueki (prosperity of the country), 52 Komatsu Taishū, 210n41 Komazawa, 5 Kon’ya-chō (Kanda district, Edo), 116 Kōra lineage, 67 Korea, potters from, 106, 167 kosode, 45 kōzo (Broussonetia papyrifera), 25, 41–43, 45, 90; cutting kōzo by Kunisaki Jihei, 44fig. Kumazawa Banzan, 49 kumihimo. See braid making Kunisaki Jihei, Kamisuki-chōhōki (A handy guide to papermaking), 42–43, 44fig., 77–80 Kyobashi (Edo), 116 Kyōhō-era reforms, 116 Kyokutei Bakin, 191 Kyoto: ceramics, 158; craft districts, 115–16; decline in population after 1750, 85, 206n48; economic growth, 85; famous products, 185; rebuilding of, 63, 66; textiles, 106, 188; workshops, 4, 161. See also Nishijin weavers Kyushu: ceramics and kilns, 59, 91, 167, 168, 198n7; forests of, 26; sarasa, 171; technological transfers through, 167. See also Arita porcelain; Hizen porcelain; Nabeshima domainal kilns

Index

lacquer: extraction of, 21, 22fig., 38, 40; importation of, 41, 199n6; inadequacy of term, 5–6; as luxury resource, 22, 23, 40, 41; as “material of the sacred,” 55; polymerization of, 141, 160; scent of, 141; sources of, 6, 90; taxation of, 38; thitsi and urushi, 5–6, 41; as theme, 15; uses of, 21, 40–41; wood container for, 6–7; workshops, 17, 38, 41, 88, 109–11, 110fig., 113. See also lacquerers; lacquerware; lac trees lacquerers: Kano Yoshinobu’s view from Pictures of Craftsmen, 109–11, 110fig.; knowledge of materials, 6, 153; Living National Treasure Murose Kazumi, 5–6; makie-shi, nurimonoshi, and tsuimono-shi, 5, 68; Master Lacquerer Saburō, 203–4n2; physical movements, 141; of Takagamine, 147; techniques, 126; training and practice, 140; use of term saiku for, 65. See also Kōami (lineage); Kōami Nagasuku; Ogawa Haritsu lacquerware: Chinese-style, 38, 68, 171; Haritsu/Ritsuō–style, 124, 135, 158, 212n62; Kōdaiji style, 128, 129fig., 181, 210n41; regional styles, 38; Rinpa school, 113, 212n66; Tsugaru-nuri, 38, 39fig., 133, 200n30; Wajima ware, 38, 40fig. See also makie lacquer lac trees: cultivation of, 6, 21, 35–40; extraction of lacquer, 21, 22fig., 38, 40; of Hirosaki domain, 133; knowledge of, 153; as natural resource, 25; sap of, 141; tapping of, 90, 93–94fig. lathe specialists (kijishi), 88, 89fig., 207n54 Latour, Bruno, actor-network theory, 16 Li Shizhen, materia medica publication, 51

244

literacy, 142 literati painters, 138 Living National Treasures, 5, 12 local products, 49, 86, 87, 171, 180. See also meibutsu; regional crafts; rural craft production looms, 66, 115, 168 madder (akane) dye, 41, 171 maebiki oga (one-man ripsaws), 35 Maeda domain, 66 Maeda Tsunanori, 115 makie lacquer: defined, 23; “flat” (hiramakie), 128; historically important pieces, 6, 125, 126–27; Kano Yoshinobu’s view from Pictures of Craftsmen, 109–11, 110fig.; Kōami lineage, 124–27, 136–37; Kōdaiji style, 128, 129fig., 210n41; as symbol of status, 11, 23, 124; takamakie technique, 130; workshops, 125, 130–31. See also Hara Yōyūsai; Kōami (lineage); Kōami Nagasuku; Murose Kazumi; Ogawa Haritsu market economy, 48, 63, 70, 107, 130 marketing, 15, 18, 51, 121, 188, 190 marriage, between rival houses, 113 materials: consciousness of, 18, 153–57, 161, 163–64, 194–95, 214n33; portable and nonportable, 44–45; and resource depletion 24; subjective properties of, 154. See also natural resources materia medica, 51 mathematical knowledge, 142 Matsuura, 52–53; kilns of, 102 Mauss, Marcel, 14 measurements, 142, 146, 181, 146, 213n16 medicinal gardens, 52 meibutsu (famous products), 86–87, 107, 185–86; Kenzan ceramics, 185; Kōami

Index

makie lacquers, 125; marketing and publicity, 190–92; Nikkō wooden utensils, 88, 89fig. meisan (famous products), 86, 87, 107. See also meibutsu meisho (famous places), 87 merchants: class of, 61–62; networks, 15, 48; paper, 42; overlap with artisans, 61; role in supply chain, 24, 45, 48; sake, 53; subcontracting with farm households, 85, 97 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 14 metals: five metals (gokin), 25, 30; used as currency, 27. See also copper; gold and silver; mines and mining metalworking, 11, 27, 31, 57, 65 michi (way), of sewing, 147–48 Mikuni Kaidō, 97 Mindful Hand, The (ed. Roberts, Schaffer, Dear), 14 mines and mining: convict labor, 27; iron deposits, 30; pollution, 30; Sado mines, 27, 28–29fig.; shrines at mine entrance, 54; silver and gold, 27–30; stone for porcelain, 106, 170; survey mining technique, 27; tools, 30, 32–33fig. mingei (folk crafts), 12, 15 Mino, 121, 168, 169 Mirror of Eternal Feminine Virtue (Teisō chiyo kagami; Utagawa Kuniyoshi), 143–45, 144fig. misemono (curiosities), 133, 161 Misuyabari, 70 mitate (parodic transformations), 161 mitsumata (Edgeworthia papyrifera), 42–43 Miura Genchū, wife of, 188 Miyazaki Yasuda: manual for tapping lacquer, 21; Nōgyō zensho (Complete compendium of agriculture), 41, 52

245

mizuhiki (twisted papers), 72, 75–76, 117, 121; knot on money envelope (modern), 77fig. Mochizuki Hanzan, 134–35 modular design system, 181 morality: of the ruler, 49; women’s, 143, 148 Morita Kyūemon, 52–53 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, 180 Motoyashiki (Mino), 169 motoyui (paper hair ties), 42, 84, 121; making of, by Tachibana Minkō, 122–23fig. mulberry trees, 25, 41, 81, 176; feeding chopped mulberry leaves to larvae, 82fig.; paper, 43, 62, 84, 121 Murose Kazumi, 5–6 mushrooms, 34, 87 musume yado (young women’s lodge), 145 Nabeshima domainal kilns, 51, 52–53, 102, 171 Nagakusa Embroidery Workshop, 2–4 Nagakusa Sumie, 2–3 Nagasaki, 49, 68, 167, 176, 202n51. See also Hizen Nakamura Zen’emon, 176–77 Nakasendō, 48, 97 Narumi textiles, 188; print by Utagawa Kunisada, 189fig. Narutaki, 161, 185 natural history movement, 48, 136 natural resources, 25–26; collection and display, 53; craft makers and, 194; imported, 26; management, 26–27, 34, 35–39, 48, 54; surveys, 49, 52; transport, 48; See also forests; mines and mining natural sciences (honzōgaku), 49, 87 nature (shizen), 54, 55, 203n60

Index

needles: embroidery, 2–3; as gendered technology, 2; makers of, 70; in Neo-Confucian moral economy, 143; offered to deity of Awashima, 147; shape of eye, 2–3; used by tatami makers, 1–2 needlework, 15, 72, 143–45, 144fig. See also embroidery; sewing Neo-Confucianism: behavior of women, 59–60; practical studies and investigating things, 16, 48–49, 173; and women’s work, 70–72, 143–45 netsuke, 26, 134 networks, 15–16, 48, 131–32, 175, 211n46; transport, 97, 121 Nezu Museum, 133 niche markets, 18, 188, 190 Nihon sankai meibutsu zue (Illustrated famous specialties of the mountains and seas of Japan; Hirase Tessai): coverage of rural and urban areas, 60, 86–87; dissemination of useful knowledge, 106–7; on lacquer tapping, 90, 93–94fig.; on mining, 29–30, 54, 86; Nikkō tray and bowls, 88, 89fig. Nihonshoki (Chronicles of Japan), 25 Nikkō woodworkers, 88, 89fig. Ninsei. See Nonomura Ninsei Nishijin district (Kyoto), 71, 115–16, 117; Nagakusa Embroidery Workshop, 2 Nishijin weavers: adoption of drawloom with pattern tower, 168; migration from Kyoto to Kiryū, 117, 149, 166; monopoly on luxury silks, 117; in print by Tachibana Minkō, 118–19fig. niwaki (garden kilns), 62 noborigama (climbing kiln), 167, 168–69; sixteen-chamber, 169fig. Nōgyō zensho (Agricultural compendium), 90

246

Noh theater, 148 Nonomura Ninsei, 116, 161, 163 Nonomura Seiemon, 161 nuno (bast fiber textiles), 91. See also hemp; ramie Obaku (Huangbo) sect, 167 obi ties (obijime), 75 occupational diversity, 5, 17, 50–60, 107 Oda Nobunaga, Azuchi Castle of, 31 Ogata family: clothing house Kariganeya, 71, 113, 115, 147; Raku house, 112, 113, 115, 209n10 Ogata Kenzan: belonged to merchant class, 62; as celebrity designermaker, 12, 185; earthenware trays with twelve lunar months, 185, 186–87fig.; experimentation and innovation, 162–64, 195; painterly approach to decoration, 161–62, 185; and Rinpa school, 113–15; signature of, 185; standardization and differentiation in ceramics of, 185, 192; and Tōkō hitsuyō, 161, 162–63; workshop of, 116, 161–62, 162fig. Ogata Kōrin, 12, 62, 71, 113–15, 185 Ogata Sōtaku, 147 Ogawa Eiha, 133 Ogawa Haritsu (Ritsuō): attribution of works, 135–36; automata and curiosities, 133–34, 137; background and biography, 62, 132, 134; case study of, 17, 111; as designer-maker, 137–38; disciples of, 134–35; illustrations for Chichi no on (A father’s gratitude), 132; illustrations for Dokuraku tozenshū (Random collection of a spinning top), 132; innovations of, 158–61; lacquer style, 121–24, 135, 158, 212n62; makie writing box with relief inro design,

Index

134, 135fig.; makie writing box with seashell pattern, 135–36, 136fig., 212n63; material consciousness of, 163–64, 195; patronage of Tsugaru Nobuhisa, 38, 131, 132–33; signatures of, 134, 135; teabowl made of papier-mâché covered in lacquer, 15, 133, 159–61, 159fig.; workshop of, 121, 133 Ogawa Sōri, 133 ohariya (needle lodge), 145 Ojiya chijimi (crepe), 97; detail of kimono with paulownia flowers, 102fig. Okuda Eisen, 175 oku dōgu (goods for display in women’s chambers), 128–30 One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei), 58fig. Onna daigaku takarabako (Treasury of greater learning for women), 59–60, 71–75, 74fig., 80, 147, 204nn3–4 Onna manzai takarabunkō (Collected works on women’s treasures of a thousand years), 146 Onna Yukinobu, 217n31 Onta Valley potters, 198n7 Oroku combs, 84, 190–91, 191fig. Osaka, 45, 85, 206n48 Ōsaki Hachiman Shrine, 41 oshie (relief pictures), 62 Ota Nanpō, 190 overglaze enamel, 102, 103fig., 106, 136, 149, 158, 161, 162fig., 171 Owari domain, 51, 130, 188 paper merchants, 42 paper recycling, 43–44 papermaking: Echizen, 88–90; from Illustrated Famous Specialties, 92–93fig.; imported materials, 6; innovation in 170; introduction of,

247

170; Kamisuki-chōhōki (A handy guide to papermaking), 42–43, 44fig., 77–80; by Nichiren Buddhists, 147; process of, 43, 90, 170; related industries, 120–21; in Shinano Province, 120–21; in Ueda domain, 85; urban workshops, 43, 45; varieties of paper, 42–43; women in, 12, 43, 77–79. See also kōzo; mizuhiki; motoyui papier-mâché, 159–60; teabowl covered in lacquer, 15, 133, 159–61, 159fig. patronage, 111, 120, 121, 124, 125, 131–32, 137 Pekarik, Andrew, 126 performing arts, 140–41. See also Kabuki theater poetry competitions, 62–63, 71 polishing stones, 158 pollution, 30 porcelain: Arita, 51, 91, 104–5fig., 106, 149–53, 158, 170; banquet dishes, 102; from China, 27, 175; glaze and enamels, 102, 106, 149–53, 158, 171; innovation in, 170–71; kilns, 106; luxury, 53; from Nabeshima kilns, 51, 52–53, 102, 103fig.,171; production in Hizen, 59, 97–102, 103fig., 106; publications on, 90–91; in Sankai meisan zue, 97–102, 106; sources of, 26, 51, 53, 106, 170 practical studies (jitsugaku), 16, 25, 48, 51–52, 53–54 print media: printing press, 177; texts and manuals on crafts, 59, 148–49, 173–75, 190–92, 195; woodblock printing, 17, 59, 167, 177 product differentiation, 18, 180, 183–85 professionalization and specialization, 67–68, 70, 138

Index

professional secrecy, 148–53, 161, 163, 170 Pye, David, 10 Rakuchū rakugaizu (Views inside and outside the capital), 63, 158; detail, 64fig. Raku house, 112, 113, 115, 208n3, 209n10; Raku Sō’nyū V (Kichizaemon), 113, 114fig., 209n10 Raku potters. See Ogata family; Ogata Kenzan Raku ware: by amateurs, 62, 70, 114; of Chōzaemon, 115; Ogawa Haritsu’s lacquered teabowl simulating, 15, 133, 159–61, 159fig.; social and cultural distinction of, 161; teabowls with matte finish, 113, 114fig.; text-based knowledge, 214n25 ramie (Boehmeria nivea), 41, 91–96; asa, 24, 38, 45 Ravina, Mark, 38–39 rayskin, 26, 67–68, 70, 199n6 regional crafts, 38, 85–86, 91, 97, 120–21, 133, 190; Arita porcelain, 51, 91, 104–5fig., 106, 149–53, 158, 170; textiles, 117, 188. See also rural craft production regional inventories, 87 regional products. See meibutsu residential architecture, 31 resource depletion, 24, 26, 51 “restored behavior” (Schechner), 141 rice cultivation, 31, 54, 57 rice straw, 61–62 Rinpa school, 113–15, 212n66 rituals and festivals, 54–55, 88, 146–47; ritual technologies (Bray), 180 Roberts, Lissa, 14 Rodrigues, João, 65–66 Roku (Oroku) combs, 84, 190–91, 191fig. roofers, 65, 85, 116

248

Rousmaniere, Nicole Coolidge, 170 rural craft production: blacksmiths, 85; as by-employment, 84; collaboration with merchants, 85; Echigo cloth, 91–97, 98–99fig.; itinerants and, 88; lacquer tapping, 93–94fig.; papermaking, 85; publications, 87, 107; small-scale and industrial-scale, 91; Ueda domain, 85; weaving, 45, 84. See also regional crafts rural economies, 14, 57–59, 84 Saburō (master lacquerer) 203–4n2 Sado mines, 27; gold mining scrolls, 28–29fig., 199n11 Sahei (Raku heir), 113 Saiga shokunin burui (Various classes of artisans in colored pictures), 76, 176, 178–79fig.; fan making, 78–79fig. saiku/saikunin (practitioners of fine craftmanship), 11, 63–65, 68 Sakai (city), 115, 168 Sakai Hōitsu, 211n46 sake production, 87–88, 97 sameshi (rayskin speciality), 68. See also rayskin samurai status, 67; artisans of, 49, 62, 121, 124, 132, 145 Sankai meisan zue (Illustrated famous products of mountain and sea): on Arita porcelain production in Hizen, 80, 97–102, 104–5fig., 106, 149–53; contribution of Kimura Kenkadō, 87–88; compared with Nihon sankai meibutsu zue, 87, 90–91; on crafts and comestibles, 60, 87; Echigo cloth, 96, 98–99fig., 100–101fig.; emphasis on tools and technologies, 175; Nikkō tray and bowls, 88; published to disseminate useful knowledge, 106–7; title of, 87, 204n5

Index

sankin kōtai system, 48 Santo Kyōden, Orokugushi Kiso no Adauchi (Oroku combs and revenge in Kiso), 190–91 Sanuki ware, Gennai type, 50–51, 50fig. sappanwood, 26, 154, 183, 199n6 sarasa, 171; pouch, 172fig. Sarasa benran (Compendium of sarasa designs), 171 saws, 13, 35, 181 sawyers (kobiki), 67, 116 Schechner, Richard, “restored behavior,” 141 screens, 23, 60, 63, 64fig., 110fig., 158 Seike Kiyoshi, 182 Senke tea schools, 113, 161 Sennett, Richard, The Craftsman, 13 Sen no Rikyū, 5, 161 Sen Sōshitsu IV, 115 senryū (humorous verse), 130, 211n44 sericulture: innovations in, 176–77; as off-season occupation, 80–81; support from domainal authorities, 38, 176; women in, 81, 82fig., 83fig. See also silk sewing, 143; “way” of, 147–48. See also needlework sheep farming, 177 shells, 135–36, 212n64 Shibata Zeshin, 134 shiboku sansō (four trees and three grasses), 41 Shichijūichi shokunin utaawase (Poetry competition among various professions in seventy-one rounds), 62–63, 71 Shinano Province, 91, 120–21 Shiner, Larry, The Invention of Art, 61 Shinto, 54, 75, 146 shipbuilders, 66 Shirane, Haruo, 203n67

249

Shobutsu ruisan, 52 shogun’s palace, women’s quarters workers, 72 shokunin (artisan class), 11, 61, 65, 124. See also artisans shokunin utaawase (poetry competitions among various professions), 62–63, 71 Shōmei, 67 Shōtoku Taishi, 146–47 signatures and seals, 134, 135, 185, 194 signboard carvers, 68, 69fig. silk: brocade, 106, 115; from China, 27, 168; and cotton weave with stripes, 46fig.; crepe, 117, 146; domestic, 25; embodied knowledge of, 195; as fabric of the elite, 23; imported from Siam, 199n6; Nishijin, 115–16, 117; robes, 183; shibori-dyed, 188. See also sericulture silkworms, 166, 177. See also sericulture silver: enamels, 106; exports to China, 28; global price of, 28–29; in makie lacquer, 130, 136; mining, 27–28, 30; sumptuary laws, 183 slip, 160, 162fig., 163 smelting, 30–31, 44 Smith, Pamela, 14 153, 163 Smith, Thomas, 45, 120 Sō Shiseki (Shen Nanpin), 202n51 social networking, 131–32, 175, 211n46 soft power, crafts and, 5 Sōken kishō, 134 Song Yingxing, Tenkō kaibutsu (The works of heaven and the inception of things), 173–75, 174fig. Southeast Asia, resources imported from, 26, 154, 199n6 specialization and professionalization, 67–68, 70, 138, 182 spectacles, 176 standardization, 180–81, 192, 195

Index

status distinctions, 11, 23, 68, 180, 182–83. See also sumptuary laws steel, 30–31, 155–57 stencil printing, 192 stoneware: camellia-shaped side dishes with camellia patterns, 162fig.; decoration of, 161; in Kyushu, 168; Shidoyaki and Gennai-yaki, 49–51; square plate with overglaze enamels, 50fig., 202n51. See also ceramics; porcelain subcontracting, 85, 97 sumptuary laws, 23, 154, 183, 192, 193 Suntory Museum, 135 Susanoo no Mikoto, 25 Suzuki Bokushi, Hokuetsu seppu (Snow country tales), 96, 120 Suzuki Kanezō, 188 sword guards (tsuba), 65, 133 swords: cutting edge, 157–58; hammering of steel for, 157; hilts of, 26, 67, 70; metals for, 25; polishing of, 158; scabbards, 67–68; specialization in, 67–68 swordsmiths, 31, 155–58, 156fig. Tachibana Minkō: fan making, 78–79fig.; glassblower, 178–79fig.; making motoyui, 122–23fig.; weavers in Nishijin, 118–19fig. tacit knowledge, 139–40, 143, 155, 162. See also embodied knowledge Tahira Namiko, 171 Takagamine, 147 Takamura Kōun, apprenticeship of, 142–43 Takarai Kikaku, 131–32 talent, 14, 112, 209n7 Tale of Genji, 130; scenes on Hatsune dowry set, 130, 131fig.

250

Tamaya Shobei IX, tea-serving automaton doll, 152fig. tansu (wooden chests), 23, 67, 181 tatami makers, 1–2, 6, 66, 116 Tatami Makers’ Guild, 1–2 tatami mats, 1, 23, 31, 181 Tawaraya painting workshop, 113 Tawaraya Sōtatsu, 113–14 taxation, 38–39, 66, 90, 117 teabowls: papier-mâché covered in lacquer, 15, 133, 159–61, 159fig.; wheel-thrown, 161 tea ceremony: aesthetics of, 154; Kōchi ware, 50; names of things, 87; Raku ware, 113, 114fig.; schools, 5, 113, 161; vessels for, 4, 5, 15, 161 tea trees, 41 techne, 61 “techniques of the body” (Mauss), 145 technological transfer, 18, 167–68, 173, 175–77, 192. See also innovation technologies, 166–67, 177–80, 182 temples, wood for, 31–32, 54 ten crafts (jūshoku), 5 Terashima Ryōan, Wakan sansai zue (Illustrated Sino-Japanese encyclopedia), 171 textiles: aesthetics of, 3, 75; Arimatsu, 188; crepe, 91, 96, 97, 102fig., 115–16, 117, 146; Kiryū, 117, 149, 166; innovation as marketing strategy in, 188; measurement and cutting, 146; Narumi, 188, 189fig.; Nishijin, 117, 118–19fig, 168; nuno (bast fiber), 91; patterns, 75, 183, 188; stencil printing, 184fig., 192; women and children involved in, 12, 96, 145. See also clothing; cotton; Echigo; ramie; silk; weaving thitsi lacquer, 41

Index

Tiangong kaiwu (The works of heaven and the inception of things), 90–91, 207n58 tie-dye, 75, 183, 184fig., 188 timber, 26, 31–35, 153. See also wood timber-frame construction, 181 Tōfukumon’in, Empress, 62 Tōkaidō Road, 48, 188 Tōkō hitsuyō (Essentials for the potter), 161, 162–63 Tokugawa Iemitsu, 130 Tokugawa Ieyasu, 28, 147 Tokugawa Mitsutomo, betrothal of, 130 Tokugawa shogunate: and craft guilds, 116–17; dyers to, 116; hierarchy instituted by, 61; mortuary complex of, 88; Owari branch, 188; as patrons, 121, 124; sumptuary regulations, 154 Tokugawa Yoshimune, 52 Tokyo National Museum, 134 tools, 10, 165, 175; agricultural, 25, 31; carpentry, 142, 181–82; mining, 30, 32–33fig. tororo plant, 170, 216n6 Tosa Mitsunobu, 113 Tosa painting style, 113 Totman, Conrad, 54 tourism, 88, 107 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 31, 115, 128, 167 trade secrets, 148–53, 161, 163, 170 traditional crafts (dentō kōgei), 3, 7, 11–13, 166, 197n5 transmission of knowledge, 3, 18, 53, 141, 148–49, 167, 171. See also print media transport networks, 97; packhorse, 121. See also highway system Treasury of Greater Learning for Women (Onna daigaku takarabako), 59–60, 71–75, 74fig., 80, 147, 204nn3–4

251

trees, 25, 35–38, 41. See also forests; lac trees; mulberry trees; timber Tsuchida Sōtaku, 147 Tsuchiya dye workshop, 116 Tsugaru domain, 35, 38, 168 Tsugaru Nobuhisa, 38, 131, 132, 133, 136, 215n2 Tsugaru Nobumasa, 38, 176 Tsugaru-nuri lacquerware, 38, 133, 200n30; oval inkstone box with Chinese recluse, 39fig. Ueda domain, 85 umbrellas, 121 Urasenke school of tea, 5 urbanization, 14, 16, 24, 85 urushi (urushiol/Japanese lacquer), 5–6, 21, 41. See also lacquer Ushigome Chie, 147–48 Utagawa Hiroshige: “Kanda, Kon’yachō,” 58fig., 116; Oroku comb maker from Compendium of Famous Artisans, 190, 191fig.; portrayal of female craft makers, 190, 191fig., 217n31 Utagawa Kunisada, “Narumi” from Fifty-Three Pairings for the Tōkaidō Road, 188, 189fig. Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Wisdom (Chi) from Mirror of Eternal Feminine Virtue, 143–45, 144fig. Vienna International Exposition (1873), 11, 200n30 visuality, 141, 193 Wajima, lacquerware of, 38, 40fig. Wakan sansai zue (Illustrated SinoJapanese encyclopedia), 171 warrior class, 31, 48, 125, 154, 183. See also Tokugawa shogunate

Index

Watanabe Sansei, 97 weaving: of cotton, 45, 84; of Echigo cloth, 96–97, 100–101fig.; fragment of cloth of plain silk and cotton with stripes, 46fig.; Kyoto and Kiryū, 117, 149, 166; looms for, 66, 115, 168; by men, 71; in rural households, 45, 84; silk, 115, 117; by women, 45, 96–97, 143. See also looms; Nishijin weavers Wigen, Karen, 120 women in crafts: apprenticeships, 70, 146; Arita porcelain, 106; carpentry, 80; documented in prints and publications, 17, 71, 76, 77, 81–84; Echigo cloth, 96; at home, 70–71, 206n40; ie system and, 194; paper decorations and fans, 75–77, 78–79fig.; papermaking, 77–80; physical labor, 80; practice and guidance, 143; preparing cotton wadding, 206n40; sericulture, 80–81, 82fig., 83fig.; weaving, 45, 96–97, 143. See also Treasury of Greater Learning for Women; women’s work women’s dowry goods, 128–30, 136 women’s work, 59, 71–72, 143, 147–48 wood: agency of, 16; for fuel, 31, 34, 54; for temples, 31–32, 54; overuse of, 31. See also timber woodblock printing, 17, 59, 167, 177

252

wood bracketing, model of, 182fig. woodcarvers, 68, 69fig., 142–43 workshops: ceramics, 80, 116, 161; codes and practical matters, 125; districts of, 115; dye, 46, 71, 116; Edo, 116; embroidery, 2–4; familial, 111, 112; Kōami, 17, 111, 124; Kyoto, 4, 161; lacquer, 17, 38, 41, 88, 109–11, 110fig., 113, 125, 130–31; of Ogata Kenzan, 116, 161–62, 162fig.; of Ogawa Haritsu, 121, 133; papermaking, 43, 45; and patronage, 16; tatami, 116; as technology, 166; urban, 57, 115–16; women’s membership restrictions, 81. See also ie world expositions, 12; Vienna (1873), 11, 200n30 Yamakawa Kikue, 143 Yamamura, Kozo, 84 Yamauchi Toyomasa, 52 Yonezawa, 38–39 Yosa Buson, 176 Yoshihara Yoshindo, 155–58, 156fig., 163 Yoshiwara brothel district, 131–32 yukata, 116, 188 Zhu Xi school, 48–49 Zhu Yan, Tao shuo/Tōsetsu (Discussions on ceramics), 175

Index