Around Edo

Kanda Myōjin stands in the middle of Tokyo and enshrines, among others, Taira no Masakado — a tenth-century warlord who declared himself emperor of the east, held eight provinces for two months, and was killed in 940. His head was displayed in Kyoto. The story is that it flew back east on its own. Where it is said to have landed, in what is now the financial district, there is still a grave mound. The land around it is worth a fortune and nobody will build on it.

Daruma is Bodhidharma, the monk who sat facing a wall for nine years until his legs withered away. Takasaki’s Shōrinzan hands out the round red figures with no legs and no pupils. You paint one eye when you make the wish and the other when it is granted, which means the doll sits in the house all year, half blind, looking at you.

The paper dog is set beside a newborn because dogs give birth easily and without fuss. That is the shape of belief in this region: practical, urban, and transactional. You want something, you buy the object, and you keep your side of the arrangement.

In 1590 Tokugawa Ieyasu was given the Kantō plain — a demotion dressed as a reward, well away from the capital. Edo was a fishing village on a marsh. He drained it, cut a canal system, moved a river, and within a century and a half the place held over a million people and was the largest city on earth.

The reason was sankin-kōtai. Every lord in Japan had to keep a household in Edo and spend alternate years living in it. That put hundreds of thousands of retainers in one city with money to spend and nothing much to do, and no old aristocracy sitting above them. What grew there belonged to merchants and craftsmen: printed books, theatre, cheap bright things bought on a whim.

And it burned. The Meireki fire of 1657 took two thirds of the city and perhaps a hundred thousand people, and there were dozens of large fires after it. Edo people said that fires and quarrels were the flowers of Edo, which is the kind of thing you say once you have decided not to be destroyed by something that is going to keep happening. A city that burns every generation is a city of carpenters, plasterers and lacquerers — and a city where nobody makes anything meant to last forever.

Nothing in this region was made for a lord’s tea room. It was made for a shop. You can feel it in the objects: quick, bright, cheerful, and not the least embarrassed about being cheap.

Mashiko began firing in 1853 to supply Tokyo with water jars and teapots, nothing more ambitious than that, and stayed unremarkable until the 1920s, when Hamada Shōji settled there precisely because the pots were honest. Hakone’s marquetry began as something to sell travellers stopping at the pass on the Tōkaidō. Both are the trade of a road.

The kimekomi doll came the other way. It started at the Kamo shrine in Kyoto in the eighteenth century, where an attendant carved a figure out of leftover willow, cut grooves into it, and tucked scraps of shrine cloth down into the grooves. Edo took the method, switched from willow to a paste of paulownia sawdust, and turned a priest’s pastime into a trade.