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Title: Japanese Crafts: A Complete Guide to Today's Traditional Handmade Objects by Craft Forum Japan, Craft Forum Japan, Diane Durston ISBN: 4-7700-2734-6 Publisher: Kodansha International Pub. Date: June, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: The best book available on a complex subject
Comment: Fascination with Japanese arts is never ending. Perhaps that is because so many Japanese forms are timeless. The witheringly busy life of business and entertainment today is balanced by careful nurturing of the crafts of old, practiced the way have for centuries endured without substantial change. Today the old craftways are enjoying a renaissance like none before-"Renaissance" in the true meaning of the word: "resurgence." In Japan's case, the resurgence looks backwards to a romantic version of emperors and shoguns just as the Italians looked back to an idyllized aeolia named Greece.
The meticulous attention to precision and concept that characterized Japanese product design in the electronics and auto industries in the 1980s and 90s didn't just suddenly erupt from wily kids fresh from design and engineering schools. It came from men in their thirties through fifties who remembered the early years of Postwar Japan during which the craft shops of old were as ubiquitous as today's franchises and brand logos. Until quite recently, local crafts people were the main purveyors of the necessities of life like metal wares, ceramics, rope, fabric, writing tools, even cast-iron hibachis to heat homes in the winter. Craft wasn't fodder for the middle-class preoccupation with the cute. Nor was it cultural identity. It was survival.
Much in the same way their counterparts in today's India are mad about homes decorated with old dhurries and woven saddlebags and spun copper trays, today's Japanese middle class longs for homes dotted with the miniature masterpieces that comprise much of the land's crafts traditions.
"Masterpieces" is the right word for many of them. Nowhere else in the world is such lavish government support and consumer affection lavished on such tinyness: ceramics, lacquer ware, weaving, bamboo, paper, wood, metalwork, fans, umbrellas, art dolls, ink, ink stones, ink brushes, on and on. Often these are produced by "Living National Treasures" (the Japanese words translate much more elegantly to "Bearers of Intangible Cultural Assets"), a title bestowed by a government committee for each craft tradition.
This book-and much of today's enthusiasm for collecting superior objects-can be traced to a 1974 Japanese government law for the "Promotion of Traditional Craft Industries" as a way of keeping alive traditions in danger of being lost. Those laws were extraordinarily enlightened for their time. They included provisions for subsidies for apprentices, conservation of the natural resources vital to crafts like wood wares and ceramics, and mandates for healthy working environments. They also provided that, to be officially recognized and supported, the craft had to be used in everyday life, made from all-natural materials, followed techniques dating from at least the Edo period, and was a tradition practiced by at least thirty other people in the area (i.e., no hobby clubs or fine artists using a craft as a means rather than the end).
The results were spectacular. By 1990 over 1060 clearly distinct crafts had been cataloged, employing nearly a quarter-million people. All this had to be systematized in some meaningful way, so in 1987 the Japanese government established the Japan Craft Forum. Members of that Forum are the "authors" of this book.
And oh my what they have wrought. The flyleaf sums the book this way: "This is the first book in English to present Japan's traditional crafts under one cover . . . a monumental effort seven years in the making." Inside some 99 crafts from all genres are documented in what amounts to a national crafts catalog raisonée. The depth and accuracy of detail in the descriptions is astounding. To take one instance, following a detailed description of the names, materials, and procedures of applying each layer (of eight) of lacquer in making the dense, rich black boxes of Wajima ware, "the final burnishing before the top coat is applied is done only by elderly women because they have little or no oil in their hands."
Japanese Crafts describes twelve kinds of ceramics (as varied a set of appearances from one fundamental technique as a craft can produce); twenty-four types of textile weaving, braiding, and dyeing; ten types of lacquer ware (including an extended discussion of lacquer itself); four kinds of bamboo work (including the birdcage-intricate Takayama tea whisks most prized for the tea ceremony); five of paper; eleven forms of woodcraft; seven metalcrafts. Plus a potpourri of more modest crafts comprising objects often overlooked-the abacus, portable shrines, umbrellas, fans, combs. Brightly decorated molded bricks of ink are ground with water on an inkstone to the exact viscosity needed for any given kind of brushwork, from swashy calligram on a hanging scroll, to haiku poem posted to a friend, to a price per kilo sign above the long beans and plucked chickens in a market.
And so much more. It is hard to imagine a cornucopia of detail being interesting, but this is. Each craft is described in a mere few hundred words according to a formula that commences with milieu and history, proceeds to raw materials and production methods, and finally lists usages and religious significance if a ceremonial object. All this is accompanied by a splendid vocabulary of technical terms that, aside from being fun in themselves, will in times to come be a trove of terms whose use by linguists and cultural historians will go far beyond the world of objects. Few books have come down the road so tightly edited. And so elegantly, for this is not a written book nearly so much as it is an edited one.
As if all this wasn't enough, each object is superbly photographed in such a way as to reveal its meticulous (yes, again that word) detail. The photography-close-ups shot in studio settings-are as dramatically lighted as images in the best books about sculpture or cuisine.
This is the kind of book books were meant to be, starting with the first pen-and-ink scroll or Western illuminated manuscript. Japanese Crafts is to the breadth and span of craft what Sesshu's Long Scroll was to geography: the painting of a journey the way it actually was journeyed, as a long ribbon of pen-and-ink footsteps from Edo to Kyoto. No Japanophile's library should lack Japanese Crafts.
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