The Old Capitals

Kyoto has a mountain covered in torii gates, thousands of them, each one donated by a business and dated, climbing the hill at Fushimi in a tunnel of vermilion. The god is Inari, who looks after rice and therefore after anything that grows, including profit. The messengers are foxes, and there are stone foxes at every turn, most of them holding a key in the mouth — the key to the granary.

Nara’s deer are not a tourist accident. The shrine at Kasuga was founded when a god was invited from Kashima in the east and is said to have come riding a white deer. The deer in the park are held to be the escort’s descendants, and until 1637 killing one was a capital offence.

The clay bells in this house were sold at shrine gates, a different shape for each shrine: a fox for Inari, a deer for Kasuga, a monkey where the monkey is the messenger. You bought one for a few coins, hung it up at home, and it did the work of the visit for a year.

The court was at Nara from 710 and at Kyoto from 794, and it did not leave until 1869. Nowhere else in Japan had a single, unmoving, absolutely demanding customer for a thousand years, and it shows in the objects.

The court ran official workshops. When the court’s money failed — and it failed repeatedly — the craftsmen did not stop; they went into the town and sold to whoever else could pay. That is why Kyoto’s trades are split so finely that a workshop can survive making only the handles of brushes, or dyeing only one particular blue.

In 1467 the city destroyed itself. Two factions fought the Ōnin War in the streets for ten years and burned most of Kyoto to the ground. The craftsmen scattered into the provinces and took the techniques with them, to Sakai, to Hakata, to Kanazawa. A surprising number of the regional crafts in this museum can be traced back to somebody leaving Kyoto in a hurry.

At the end of the seventeenth century a fan painter in Kyoto named Miyazaki Yūzensai worked out how to keep dye inside a drawn line on silk: a fine paste of rice, squeezed from a tube along the outline, which resists the dye and washes away afterwards. It meant a kimono could carry a picture instead of a pattern, and it changed what a Japanese woman could wear.

The finished cloth used to be rinsed in the Kamo river, whole bolts laid out in the current with the paste and the loose dye going downstream. The rinsing moved indoors in the 1970s, when the river stopped being clean enough.

Nara went the other way, towards less. Ittōbori is cut with a single blade in a few decisive strokes, the facets left showing, then touched with a little colour. The dolls were made for the Kasuga festival, and the whole technique is a hundred cuts fewer than the carver could have made.