POTTERIES AND PAPER WARES
The porcelains of Kiomidzu, renowned as they are throughout Japan, figure
lightly in the export trade lists, as compared to the immense shipments
of decorated faience from the Awata district, for which there is such
demand in foreign countries. On the main street of that quarter, which
is the beginning of the Tokaido, the larger establishments cluster
near together, and Kinkozan, Tanzan, and Taizan attract one in turn.
Latticed walls and plain gate-ways admit visitors to a succession of
show-rooms, where they may wander and look. As it is the characteristic
Japanese custom to consider every foreigner as a mere sight-seer, who
puts tradesmen to trouble for nothing, the bushy-headed young men in
their clean, cool cotton gowns make no effort to sell until he purchases
something. Then he is led through further rooms to godowns or upper
chambers, and their more desirable wares are displayed.
Kinkozan’s specialty is the manufacture of the fine, cream-colored
faience with a crackled glaze, which, when decorated in one way,
is known as Kioto or Awata ware, and when covered with a blaze of
color and gilding is the gaudily gorgeous, modern, or Kioto Satsuma,
exported by ship-loads to America, where its crude hues and cheap
effects are enjoyed. No cultivated Japanese, however, would ever give
these monstrosities a place in his own home. In America these garish
six-months-old vases and koros are even passed off as old Satsuma, to
which softly-toned and simply-decorated ware it is no more like than
is a Henri Deux _tazza_ to a Limoges garden-stool. Kinkozan turns out
also a coarse _shippoyaki_, or _cloisonné_ enamel, some on faience and
some on copper ground; and the blue-and-white-gowned young man will
lead one past garden and godown, and show one every stage and process
of the manufacture of the different wares. The potters sit in little
open alcoves of rooms, each with his low wheel and heap of clay before
him. One old man sits with his feet doubled up before him, his right
foot locked fast in the bend of the left knee, and the left foot laid
sole upward on the right thigh, in the impossible attitude of so many
Buddhas. This position he maintains with comfort for hours, and this
lean, bald-headed, old man, wearing nothing but a loin-cloth and a pair
of huge, round, owlish spectacles, is as interesting as his work. He puts
a handful of wet gray clay on the wheel before him, making it revolve
with a dexterous touch of the hand, while he works the lump of clay into
a thick, broad bowl. With his fingers and a few little sticks he soon
stretches the bowl upward, narrows it for a neck, broadens and flattens
it a little at the top, and presently lifts off a graceful vase and
sets it on a board with a row of others. In another place the workmen
are grinding and working the clay; in another, preparing the glaze and
applying it, and near them are the kilns in every stage. In a further
garden the decorators are at work, each with his box of brushes and
colors beside him, the vase being kept in half-horizontal position before
him by a wooden rest. Each piece goes from one man to another, beginning
with the one who sketches the designs in faint outline, thence passing
to him who does the faces, to a third who applies the red, to a fourth
who touches in the diaper-work and traceries, and so on to the man who
liberally bestows the gilding. Lastly, two women slowly burnish the gold
by rubbing it over with wet agates or carnelian.
At the other houses faience, in an infinity of new and strange designs
and extraordinary colors is seen, each less and less Japanese. All
these Awata potters work almost entirely for the foreign market, and
their novelties are not disclosed to the visitor, nor sold in Japan,
until they have had their vogue in the New York and London markets.
From those foreign centres come instructions as to shapes, colors, and
designs likely to prove popular for another season, and the ceramic
artists abjectly follow these foreign models. All this helps to confuse
a stranger; for, though the wares are named for the districts, towns,
and provinces of their supposed nativity, he finds them made everywhere
else—Satsuma, in three or four places outside of Satsuma; the Kaga of
commerce, almost anywhere except in Kaga; while undecorated porcelain is
brought from France by ship-loads to be decorated and sent out again,
and everywhere the debasing effect of imitation and of this yielding to
foreign dictates appears.
Cart-loads, car-loads, and ship-loads of screens go from the great
ports to foreign countries, and in Kioto the larger proportion of these
are manufactured. Whether _byobu_, the screen, is a purely Japanese
invention, or a variation of the hinged door easily suggested to any
primitive people who can watch Nature’s many trap-doors and hinges, this
people certainly makes most persistent use of it. Twenty different kinds
may be seen in one’s daily rides past the little open houses, but never
does one discover the abominations in coarse gold thread on black satin
grounds so common in our country and so highly esteemed. The four-fold
or six-fold screen of a Japanese house has its plain silk, paper, or
gold-leaf surface, covered with one large design or picture extending
over the whole surface, instead of the narrow panels and patches of
separate pictures which Western taste demands. In great establishments
and monasteries there is a _tsui taté_, or flat, solid screen of a single
panel, within the main door-way or vestibule—a survival of a Chinese
fashion, intended less to baffle inquisitive eyes than to keep out evil
spirits and beasts. Peculiar to Kioto are screens on which phosphorescent
paint is used. A favorite design for these is the rice field at dusk,
starred with flickering fire-flies, whose lights glow the more as the
room darkens. A half century ago Gioksen, the artist, achieved great fame
with these phosphorescent fire-flies; and recently the idea has been
revived, with a fine promise of being vulgarized, growing coarser and
cheaper in execution and poorer in quality, to meet the demands of the
barbarian markets of the Occident. In the New-year week, when each family
brings out its choicest screens, the display in the best streets is an
art exhibition.
Screens of all sorts are more important in summer life than clothing,
and, of necessity, are greatly relied on in the absence of garments.
Screens with tiny windows in them shelter the undressed citizen and give
him glimpses of the road, and screens with a variety of shelves and
hooks bring a whole kitchen to the side of the hibachi on a windy day.
Among summer screens, the commonest is the _sudare_, or curtain of reeds
or tiny bamboo joints strung on threads. The waving of these strings
and their tinkling sound are supposed to suggest the freshness of the
stirring breeze, and the Japanese imagination transforms the bits of
crystal, strung here and there, into cool rain-drops slipping down the
bamboo stems. The taste of the foreign buyer has vulgarized the sudare,
which is often a nightmare of crude design and worse color, weighted with
glass beads of every color, and even made entirely of beads. The sudare
in the streets of a Japanese town is almost as surely a sign of a shop
where shaved ice and cooling drinks may be had, as is our striped pole
of the Occidental barber’s premises.
Kioto fans are celebrated, but they are no better now than those of
other cities, and prettier Japanese fans are sold in New York for less
money than in Japan, because the enormous foreign demand keeps the best
fan-painters and fan-makers of Kioto constantly employed on export
orders. American importers send their buyers to Kioto and Osaka every
spring to order fans for the following year. Designer and maker submit
hundreds of models, and the buyer offers suggestions as to color and
shapes. The men who execute these large orders seldom have an open shop
or sales-room, and their places are known only to the trade. Thousands
and hundreds of thousands of _ogi_, or folding fans, go annually from the
port of Hiogo-Kobé to America, and as many more from Yokohama; while of
the flat fans with handles, the _uchiwa_, the number is even greater. One
American railroad company has for years taken a hundred thousand uchiwa
each season for advertising purposes, one side being left plain, to be
printed upon after they reach the United States.
The fan is the most ancient and important utility in Japan, and since
Jingo Kogo invented the ogi, after the model of a bat’s wing, men,
women, and children have never ceased carrying one in their summer
obi folds. Fans are the regulation gift upon every occasion and lack
of occasion, and a large collection is acquired in the fewest summer
weeks. Every large shop and tea-house has its own specially decorated
and perfectly well-known uchiwa to be given to patrons, who in that way
declare their wanderings; and at feasts each guest receives a plain white
ogi, upon which poems, autographs, and sketches are to be traced by his
fellow-guests.
Formerly, Kioto shops exhibited many more kinds of fans than at present.
Among them were the court fans, or _hiogi_, made of twenty-five broad
wooden sticks strung together, and wound with heavy silk cords, and as
long as the Empress retained the old dress she and her ladies carried
these heavy and useless articles. The _suehiro_, or wide-end fans of the
priests, were a specialty of Kioto and Nara, and the suehiro accompanied
every gift at New Years, weddings, and anniversaries, as certainly as the
red and gold cords and oddly folded little papers now do. The _gumbai
uchiwa_, heavy war fans, often with iron or bronze outer-sticks, went
with each suit of armor; and the large oblong uchiwa, descending from
priests to No dancers and to umpires in games and contests, were equally
well-known productions of Kioto. Fans serve an infinite variety of
purposes and speak a language in this land of their own, and no season
or condition of life is without its ministrations. The farmer winnows
his grain with a fan, the housewife blows up the charcoal fire with a
fan, and gardeners, sitting for hours on patient heels, will softly
fan half-open flowers until every petal unfolds. For specific gifts,
specific designs and colors appear. One fan may be offered to a lady as
a declaration of love. Another serves as her sign of dismissal, and the
Japanese are often amused to see foreigners misapply the language and
etiquette of fans.
Although gas and electricity light every Japanese city, and American and
Russian kerosene come in whole cargoes, the manufacture of paper lanterns
increases apace, for now all the quarters of the globe demand them.
Constructing the flimsy frames is a sleight-of-hand process, and with the
same deftness the old lantern-makers dash on designs, characters, and
body-colors, with a bold brush. But one must live in Japan to appreciate
the softened light of lanterns, and in the lavish and general nightly use
of them learn all the fairy-like and splendid effects to be obtained with
a bit of paper, some wisps of bamboo, and a little vegetable wax poured
around a paper wick.
Cotton goods are largely manufactured in Kioto, and at all seasons
the upper reaches of the Kamogawa’s broad, stony bed are white with
bleaching cloth. The Kamogawa’s water, which is better for tea-making,
for rice-boiling, and for mixing dyes than the water of any other stream
in Japan, is also sovereign for bleaching, and its banks are lined for
a long distance with dyeing establishments. The river-bed, paved with
stones under each of its great bridges, is dreary, wind-swept, and
colorless in winter-time, as compared to its summer brilliancy; but in
January it is the place of the kite-flyers, and Hideyoshi’s bronze-railed
Shijo bridge—the southern end of the Tokaido, the centre from which all
distances are measured—commands a view of an unexampled aerial carnival.
Thousands of giant kites float upward, and the air is filled with a
humming, as they soar, sweep, and circle over the city like huge birds.
Kite combats take place in mid-air, and strings covered with pounded
glass cut other strings, and let the half-animate paper birds and demons
loose. Jinrikisha coolies on bridges and streets must dodge the hanging
strings, and boys run over and into each other while watching their
ventures; but the traditional kite-flying grandfathers whom one reads
about in Western prints are conspicuous by their absence.
There is a game of battledore and shuttlecock much played at the same
season by the girls, the battledore a flat wooden paddle ornamented with
gaudy pictures of Japanese women. The game is a pretty one, and the girls
are wonderfully graceful in playing it, the long sleeves and the flying
obi-ends taking on expressive action when these charming maidens race and
leap through its changes.
Kioto is not without its theatres and places of amusement, ever ready
to beguile one from the sight-seeing and shopping rounds. Its great
actor is Nakamura, and it maintains an academy for the training of maiko
and geisha, where every spring there is a long-drawn-out festival of
dances to help on the rejoicings of the cherry-blossom season. But its
great place of amusement, its Vanity Fair, is the narrow theatre or show
street running from Sanjio to Shijo Street, just beyond the bridges.
This thoroughfare is lined all the way with rows of shops, labyrinthine
bazaars, stalls, and booths, theatres, side-shows, peep-shows,
puppet-shows, wax-works, jugglers, acrobats, wrestlers, trained animals,
story-tellers, fortune-tellers, all exploited by the voice and drum of
their loquacious agents at the door-way. No jinrikishas are allowed to
run on this highway, and day and night, morning and midnight, it is
filled with strolling people and playing children. In winter it is a
cheering refuge from the wider, wind-swept streets, and in summer days
it is cool and shady, the pavement constantly sprinkled, and the light
and heat kept out by mat awnings stretched across the narrow road-way
from roof to roof, in Chinese fashion. At night it is the busiest place
in Kioto, even with the rival attraction of the river-bed; crowded with
revellers, torches flaring, drums and gongs sounding, the high-pitched,
nasal voices, of the showmen sing-songing their stories and programmes;
and peddlers, pilgrims, priests, men, women, and children, and the
strangers within their gates, making up the throng. Once when a giantess
was on exhibition in a tent the spectators, instead of being awed by her
heroic eight feet of height, were convulsed with laughter at sight of
her. Every movement of the colossus sent them into fresh spasms. It was
like a personification of some netsuke group to see this huge creature,
with hair-pins like clubs, and clogs as large as a door-step, standing
with folded arms, while pigmy visitors climbed up to perch like insects
on her shoulders.
In this ever-open market one may buy the tailless cats of the country;
forlorn, spiritless creatures, staying at home and in-doors at night,
and never going on midnight prowls. Or, if he prefer, there are the
wonderful long-tailed Tosa chickens, fowls kept in tall, bamboo cages,
that their tail-feathers, measuring ten and twelve feet in length, may
make a graceful display. When they are let out to scratch and wander
about like other chickens, their precious feathers are rolled up in
papers and protected from any chance of harm. Japanese spaniels, or
Kioto _chins_, those little black-and-white, silky-eared pets, with big,
tearful, goggle eyes, and heads as round and high as Fukurokojin’s, are
fashionably dear, ranging from five to forty dollars each, even in their
native town.
From the lower end of Theatre Street a covered way leads to the
fish-market of the city, a dark, cool, stone-floored place, where more
peculiar things may be bought, and more picturesque groups may be
studied, in the strange Rembrandtesque light, than anywhere else in
Kioto. The foreign artists, who carry away scores of sketches of Japanese
life, seem never to find this fish-market, nor in general to seize the
best and least hackneyed subjects. Most of their pictures have been
long anticipated by the native photographers, and the foreign artist
repeats, with less fidelity, the familiar scenes and subjects, with that
painstaking western method that, to the Japanese eye, leaves as little to
the imagination as the photograph itself.