Trades and Crafts of Old Japan. Eric A. Kaemmerer

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      In these and other ways, the Tokugawa regime commenced, and expanded as time went on, a legislation restricting human conduct and thereby hampering progress, and this ultimately contributed to its downfall, since, whatever the artificial barriers, European culture and technique profoundly influenced Japan even in those days. Firearms changed the art of war; Western ideas of shipbuilding and castle construction were adopted; and new materials and designs in woven apparel came from the Occident. Thus, in spite of all the seclusion laws, Japan received through the tiny door in Nagasaki—during the 250 years of Tokugawa rule—new ideas from outside which came like fresh winds into the thin and refined, yet actually stale, air of the shogunate. It was again proved that any rigid form is open to decay and that nothing in the world can escape change.

      Though the system of guilds was officially abolished in 1867-68, this type of organization never entirely vanished from Japanese commercial practice. The modernized kumiai (associations) that flourished up to the beginning of the great war in 1941 had similar objectives, and at present a distinct resurgence of the practice has been noted.

      The pictures presented in this book are contained in an album dating from early Tokugawa days. They form no recognizable sequence; on the contrary, they seem to follow one another in quite a haphazard way. Their coloring is still excellent, even if it has mellowed with the passing of more than three centuries, and there are extremely few defects due to handling. The forty-nine items may, however, be but half of an original series of the "hundred occupations" that were depicted by subsequent generations of artists of the popular school of the ukiyo-e. Unfortunately we do not know the name of the artist (or artists) who created these pictures. Nevertheless, we may note that they were painted at a time when one of the most attractive apartments in Nagoya Castle had already been decorated by Iwasa Matabei with multitudinous scenes from the life of the commoners. Such pictures were for a long time fashionable among the nobility, and there can be no doubt that our album, too, served as a sort of guidebook for noble ladies and children.

      It will be recognized at once from the paintings that in most cases the manufacturer was also the dealer. He was an artisan in the best sense of the word. Part of his small house contained his workroom, and the front was the shop. The family lived in one or two back rooms, and it did not matter if the wife and children also used the workshop and the salesroom. Some articles were made regularly and according to standard; the better ones were usually manufactured to order, after careful discussion of size, material, and pattern.

      Several conventions of perspective and delineation in the pictures seem to call for a brief note of explanation. With regard to perspective, it will be observed that parallel lines do not converge with increasing distance from the foreground and that the higher an object appears from the bottom of the painting, the farther back it is from the foreground, regardless of its size in relation to nearer objects. These two principles of Japanese perspective, which are not caused by inaccuracy but by a different manner of viewing a scene, also distinguish the ukiyo-e. The golden clouds that occupy the top and bottom of each painting, and sometimes intrude from the side, are a conventional decorative effect designed for several possible reasons: perhaps to soften the scene and save it from excessive angularity or perhaps to enhance the illusion that the viewer is looking down into the scene from above.

      For the commentaries on the paintings, several authorities have been consulted. In a few cases, nevertheless, the interpretations remain somewhat doubtful. It is not easy to know how people lived three hundred years ago, and some of the objects then in general use have long since become obsolete. The pictures should nonetheless prove of interest as a relic from early Tokugawa days.

      1: A Brusk Shop (see frontispiece)

      In Japan, as in China, the writing brush has for centuries symbolized the scholar and the artist as well as the intimate relation between calligraphy and painting. This fude, as it is called in Japan, is a pointed brush of soft animal hair inserted into a tube of bamboo or other material, which is sometimes lacquered. It is made in an almost infinite variety of sizes, since it must serve an equally countless number of purposes—from the writing or painting of extremely delicate lines to the inscribing of broad and bold strokes in massive calligraphy for a kakemono. There are also variations in the fineness or coarseness of the hair used for making the brush. To prevent damage to the point, fude are usually displayed in vaselike containers.

      The master and his wife are at work making brushes from the piles of hair on the small stands behind which they sit. In the street we see a two-sworded man in a conical rush hat. For its sign, the shop has a black lacquer board trimmed with gold and carrying a picture of a dwarfed but very fat writing brush.

      2: A Screen Dyeing Craftsman

      The surikomi style of dyeing pictured here consists of applying color patterns to cloth by using several heavy paper screens with excised designs, as the man in the lower right section of the painting is doing. The man at the left draws water from a well while the woman rinses the white cloth that is to be dyed. In the upper part of the picture, we see how the patterned cloth (of the type used for kimono) is dried on bamboo racks. The man on the left starches it with a broad brush. An interesting method of combined drying and stretching is shown in the short piece of cloth directly under the roof. This consists of fastening the selvage to thin bamboo bows provided with pins at each end.

      3: A Shibori Dyeing Shop

      The dyeing process known as shiborizome, which closely resembles the tie-and-dye process of the West, is an old and famous one in Japan. It is used to produce a pattern of white or light-colored areas on a dyed ground and thereby to give a dappled effect and, at the same time, a kind of waffle texture to the cloth. The pattern may be either a small allover one or a large and rather loose one.

      In this picture we see several stages of what appears to be the hoshi-shibori process used in earlier times to produce a large loose pattern: the folding of the white cloth before dyeing, the sealing of the drum-shaped containers in which the white areas are protected against penetration by the dye, and the preparations for removal of the dyed cloth from the containers. Unfortunately, we are not shown any finished products in which we can see the pattern produced by the boshi-shibori process. In the mother and child at the center of the picture, we note again the domestic touch which tells us that shop and home are one and the same.

      4: The Embroidery Shop

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