The Scroll of Ages
Fourteen thousand years of Japanese craft, and what each age left behind in this house.
Pots older than farming, older than the wheel, older than almost anything fired anywhere.
The name means cord pattern, and that is exactly how it was made: a length of twisted cord rolled across wet clay. The pots were built by stacking coils and smoothing them by hand, then fired in an open pit rather than a kiln — which is why they are thick, and why so many survived.
The famous ones are the flame-rimmed vessels of about 3000 BC, whose rims rise into shapes no cooking pot needs. Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained them.
Nothing from it is in the collection, and nothing ever will be — Jōmon pottery belongs in museums, and the honest pieces on the market are fragments.
Rice, bronze and iron arrive together from the continent, and the pots go quiet.
Wet-rice farming came from the Korean peninsula, and metal came with it. Yayoi pottery is thinner, plainer and turned on a simple wheel — a complete reversal of Jōmon taste in a few centuries.
The strange object of the age is the dōtaku, a tall bronze bell cast in a clay mould, decorated, then buried on a hillside. Hundreds have been dug up. No one knows what they were for.
Nothing in the collection. But every bronze here is cast by the method that arrived in these centuries and never fundamentally changed.
Buddhism becomes a state project, and craft is scaled up to match.
The Great Buddha at Tōdai-ji was cast in 752 and took most of the country's available bronze to do it. Around that effort grew workshops of gilders, lacquerers, weavers and metalworkers on a scale Japan had not needed before.
The Shōsōin storehouse still holds what was left over — glass, lacquer, a shell-inlaid lute — sealed since the eighth century. It is the oldest intact collection of its kind anywhere, and the reason we know what these trades could already do.
The lion dance is recorded from this century, arriving with continental court music. The heads are still carved for it.
The court stops importing taste and starts making its own.
Embassies to China ended in 894, and what followed was four centuries of refinement turned inward. Maki-e — gold and silver powder sprinkled into wet lacquer and polished back — was perfected here, and it remains the most Japanese of luxuries.
The painted handscroll was invented in these years too: a story told in a continuous horizontal picture, read by unrolling with the right hand and rolling up with the left. This page is one.
Nothing in the collection. Heian lacquer of any quality is a museum object; what the market calls Heian is almost never Heian.
Warriors take the country, and sculpture stops being serene.
Unkei and his workshop carved figures with weight, muscle and bad temper, assembled from joined blocks of cypress so the wood would not split. They set rock-crystal eyes into the heads from the inside, which is why a Kamakura figure seems to look back at you.
Armour became the age's finest craft: iron plates lacquered against rust and laced together with silk cord in patterns that identified a house at a distance.
The helmet displayed each May, and the mounted warrior beside it, descend directly from the armour of these years.
Ink, Nō, and the beginning of the idea that a plain bowl can be worth more than a decorated one.
Zen temples brought monochrome ink painting and a taste for restraint. Tea, until then a medicine and then a gambling game, began to turn into the discipline that would decide Japanese taste for the next five hundred years.
The seven lucky gods were assembled into their fixed group in these years — an Indian, three Chinese and three Japanese deities, put together by merchants who wanted every kind of luck covered.
The seven, still cast as a set. And the single-knife festival figures, which come down from the medieval carvings.
Thirty years, and the most extreme taste in Japanese history: gold screens in one room, a rough clay bowl in the next.
The warlords covered their walls in gold leaf and then knelt in a hut the size of two mats to drink tea from a bowl that looked like an accident. Both were the same statement about power, and both were deliberate.
Hideyoshi's invasions of Korea in 1592 and 1597 are remembered in Japan as the pottery wars. Korean potters were brought back to western Japan, and the kilns they started — Hagi, Karatsu, and shortly after, Arita — changed what this country could make.
The Hagi bowl comes directly from those potters. And the old kilns — Bizen, Shigaraki, Tokoname — had been working for centuries by then, but it was Momoyama tea taste that made them worth collecting.
Two and a half centuries without a war, and almost everything in this house begins.
Peace made a merchant class with money and no permitted way to display it. Sumptuary laws banned the townsman from silk and gold, so the money went into what could not be seen from the street: a plain kimono with an extravagant lining, and a two-inch carved toggle holding the cord of his tobacco pouch.
The dates read like a founding charter. Takaoka bronze, 1609. Arita porcelain, about 1616 — the first in Japan. Nambu ironware, 1659. The Inami carvers, 1763. Kutani, Kokeshi, the folk toys, the festival masks: all of it Edo.
Most of the collection. If a piece here has no date, Edo is the safest guess for where its form was settled.
The lords who paid for craft are abolished, and the craftsmen find new customers abroad.
When the domains went, so did the patronage that had kept armourers, lacquerers and metalworkers in work for centuries. Those trades survived by turning to export: Satsuma pottery painted far more densely than any Japanese room would want, cloisonné, and ivory carving on a scale that had no domestic market at all.
At Vienna in 1873 and Philadelphia in 1876 the West saw it and lost its head. Japonisme changed European painting. It also taught Japanese workshops to make what foreigners thought Japan looked like.
Mashiko, which began firing in 1853, grew up in exactly this period — and stayed a working village pottery rather than an export factory.
A philosopher looks at a cheap rice bowl and says it is better than the signed one.
Yanagi Sōetsu named the idea mingei in 1925: that the honest, unsigned, repeated work of an anonymous craftsman reaches a beauty the self-conscious artist cannot. It rescued a dozen village potteries that were about to close, Mashiko among them.
In 1950 the state went the other way and began naming individual masters Living National Treasures. Both impulses are still arguing, and both kept the trades alive.
The carved Hokkaido bears, made from 1924. The marquetry boxes. And the clay bells, most of which are far newer than they look.
The workshops are still there. The benches beside the master are not.
Nothing dramatic has happened to Japanese craft in these years. It is simply that the apprentices stopped coming, and a trade that takes fifteen years to learn cannot survive two decades without new hands.
This is not a lament, and it is not a sales line. It is the plain reason a well-made twentieth-century piece costs what it costs, and why it will not get cheaper.
Everything here that was made recently, which is more of it than most dealers will tell you.
End of the scroll