Hokkaidō's most famous carving was copied from a Swiss souvenir.
In 1924 Tokugawa Yoshichika came back from Europe with a carved wooden bear he had bought in Berne, and showed it to the farmers on his estate at Yakumo. Winters there were long and there was no field work; he suggested they carve.
They did, and within a generation the bear with a salmon in its jaws had become the thing every visitor carried home from Hokkaidō.
Katsura or linden, cut so the grain runs the length of the animal.
The bear is found in the block with an axe and a large gouge.
Every hair is a separate chisel cut. This is the whole difference between one bear and another.
Eyes and claws set or cut, then oiled. Rarely painted.
The surface is the whole craft. The fur is not smoothed — it is left as hundreds of short gouge cuts laid in rows, so the light catches each ridge and the animal reads as fur from across a room.
It is worth saying plainly that this is not an Ainu tradition. Ainu carving is its own art with its own subjects, and the souvenir bear is a twentieth-century industry that grew up beside it.
The most precisely dated craft in this house. In 1924 Tokugawa Yoshichika, whose family held the farm settlement at Yakumo, came back from Europe with a carved wooden bear he had bought in Switzerland, and gave it to the farmers as something to make and sell through the winter when there was no field work.
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Noted. We will write when something arrives.