CHAPTER XXVII
EMBROIDERIES AND CURIOS
Their range of stitches, their ingenious methods and combinations, and the variety of effects attained with the needle and a few strands of colored silk, easily place the Japanese first among all embroiderers. Although China taught them to embroider, they far surpass the Chinese in design, color, and artistic qualities, while they attain a minute and mechanical exactness equal to the soulless, expressionless precision of the best Chinese work. They can simulate the hair and fur of animals, the plumage of birds, the hard scales of fishes and dragons, the bloom on fruit, the dew on flowers, the muscles of bodies, tiny faces and hands, the patterned folds of drapery, the clear reflection of lacquer, the glaze of porcelains, and the patina of bronzes in a way impossible to any but the Japanese hand and needle. Sometimes they cover the whole groundwork with couched designs in a heavy knotted silk, and this peculiar embroidery has the name of kindan nuitsuké. With floss silk, with twisted silks, with French knots, and with gold and silver thread, couched down with different colored silks, with silk threads couched, and with concealed couchings, a needle-worker attains every color effect of the painter; nor does the embroiderer disdain to use the brush, or to powder and spatter his designs with gold, nor to encroach upon the plastic art by his wonderful modelling of raised surfaces, rivalling the sculptor with his counterfeit faces. His invention and ingenuity are inexhaustible, and the modern craftsmen preserve all the skill of their ancestors.
The oldest existing piece of Japanese needle-work is the mandalla of a nun, kept at Tayema temple in Yamato, which is certainly of the eighth century, although legend ascribes it to the divine Kwannon. Pieces of equal antiquity, doubtless, are in the sealed godowns of Nara temples, but very little is known of them. The latest triumphs of the art, pieces showing the limit of the needle’s possibilities, are the ornamental panels and makemono executed for the Tokio palace, and other work by the same artists exhibited at Paris in 1889. This exhibition work was executed under imperial command at Nishimura’s, the largest silk-shop in Kioto, a place to which every visitor is piloted forthwith. Solid brown walls, black curtained doors, and the crest of three hexagons are all that one sees from without; but the crest is repeated at door-ways across the street and around corners, until one realizes what a village of crape-weavers and painters, velvet-weavers and embroiderers, is set in the heart of Kioto by this one firm. The master of the three hexagons has taken innumerable medals, gold, silver, and bronze, at home and abroad, and, in response to every invitation to make a national exhibit. Government commands are sent him at Kioto. The blank outer walls and common entrance, the bare rooms with two or three accountants sitting before low desks, do not indicate the treasures of godown and show-room that lie beyond. In an inner room, with an exquisite ceiling of interlaced pine shavings, curtains, kakemono, screens, and fukusa are heaped high, while others are continually brought in by the small porters. In spite of the reputation and the artistic possibilities of the establishment, it sends out much cheap, tasteless, and inferior work to meet the demands of foreign trade, and of the tourists who desire the so-called Japanese things they are used to seeing at home.
For the old embroideries, those splendid relics of the national life with its showy and picturesque customs, the buyer must seek the second-hand clothes-shops, the pawn-shops of the land. In the Awata district lives the great dealer who gathers in old kimonos, obis, fukusas, kesas, temple hangings, brocades, and embroideries from the godowns of nobles, commoners, priests, actors, saints, and sinners, to whom ready money is a necessity. Geishas and actors, with the extravagant habits of their kind, are often forced to part with their wardrobes, and the second-hand shops are half filled with beautiful and purely Japanese things which they have sacrificed. When I first beheld “my uncle” of Awata, his was a dark, ill-smelling, old clo’ shop, with two bushy-headed, poorly-dressed attendants. Gilbert and Sullivan unwittingly made his fortune, and the old dealer could not at first understand why the foreign buyers, hitherto indifferent, should suddenly crowd his dingy rooms, empty his godowns, and keep his men busy collecting a new stock. Three years after my first visit there was a large, new building with high-heaped shelves, replacing the dirty old house and its questionable bales tied up in blue cotton, and horribly suggestive of smallpox, cholera, and other contagions. Prices had trebled and were advancing steadily, with far less embarrassment of choice in the stock than formerly.
The gorgeous kimonos of actors and geishas offered at such shops far outnumber those richly-wrought gowns worn by women of rank at holiday times and at the palace, and most of the showy and gorgeously-decorative gowns displayed in western drawing-rooms have questionable histories. Even the stores of No dance costumes have been drawn upon, and choice old brocades are rarer now than good old embroideries. The priest’s kesa, or cloak, a symbolic patchwork of many pieces, and the squares and bits from temple tables, for a long time offered exquisite bits of meshed gold-thread and colors, and on the back of such pieces one often found poems, sacred verses, and fervent vows, written by the pious ones who had made offerings of them to the temples.
The stores of fukusas seemed inexhaustible a few years ago, and I can remember days of delight in that ill-smelling
FUKUSA
old corner of Awata, when one out of every five fukusa was a treasure, while now there are hardly five good ones in a hundred of those needle pictures. The finest work was lavished on these squares of satin or crape, which former etiquette demanded to have laid over the boxes containing gifts or notes, both box and fukusa to be duly admired and returned to the sender. These ceremonial cloths were part of the trousseau of every bride of high degree, and old families possess them by scores. The nicest etiquette ordered the choice of the fukusa, and the season, the gift, the giver, and the receiver were considered in selecting the particular wrapping. The greatest artists have made designs for them, and a few celebrated ones, bearing Hokusai’s signature, are owned by European collectors. The crests of the feudal families become familiar to one from their constant repetition on fukusas. Numberless Japanese legends, and symbols as well, constantly reappear, and no two are ever exactly alike in design or execution, however often one may see the same subject treated. Equally popular are all the symbols of long life—the pine, the plum, the bamboo; the tortoise with the fringed shell that lives for a thousand years; the peach that took a thousand years to ripen; the stork, the old man and woman under the pine-tree hailing the rising sun—and all, when wrapping a gift, equally convey a delicately expressed wish for length of days. The fierce old saints and disciples, who with their dragons and tigers live on old Satsuma surfaces, keep company with the sages who rode through the air on storks, tortoises, or carp, or stand unrolling sacred scrolls beneath bamboo groves. And the Seven Household Gods of Luck, the blessed Shichi Fukujin, are on the fukusa as well. There smile Daikoku, the god of riches, upon his rice-bags, hammer and purse in hand; Ebisu, the god of plenty, with his little red fish; Jurojin, the serene old god of longevity, with his mitred cap, white beard, staff, and deer; high-browed Fukurokujin, lord of popularity and wisdom; Hotei, spirit of goodness and kindness, sack on back, fan in hand, and children climbing and tumbling over him; black-faced Bishamon, god of war and force, holding his lance and miniature pagoda; and Benten Sama, goddess of grace and beauty, playing the flute.
Takara Buné, the good-luck ship, the New-year’s junk, with dragon beak and silken sail, bearing rich gifts from the unknown land, is another favorite subject. To sleep with takara buné’s image under one’s wooden pillow on New-year’s night insures good-luck and good dreams for the rest of the year. Quite as significant are the takara mono, the ancient and classic good-luck symbols, which are the hat, hammer, key, straw coat, bag or purse, sacred gem or pearl, the scrolls, the clove, the shippo, or seven precious things, and the weights. These emblems, introduced everywhere, fill flower-circles, or the spaces and groundwork of geometrical designs, and are always received with favor. The shojo, who have drunk saké until their hair has turned red, the rats and the radish, the cock on the temple drum, poems in superb lettering, all ornament the fukusa, and there the mysterious manji, or hook-cross, and the mitsu tomoyé, or three commas curved within a circle, are continually reproduced.
Five of the old daimio families had the manji as their crest, and it came to Japan from China and India, along with the Buddhist religion. On old armor, flags, and war fans it is constantly found, and it is the sign of life, of the four elements, of eternity; the portent of good-luck, the talisman of safety from evil spirits, and an amulet against threats or harm from any of the four quarters; while the word “manji” is derived from the Chinese word “mantse,” meaning ten thousand.
Kioto abounds in curio-shops, ranging from the half-mile long row on either side of the Manjiuji to the splendid accumulations and choice art collections of Ikeda, Hayashi, Kiukioda, Takada, and the bazaar at the foot of Maruyama. At Ikedas, which is really an art museum filled with precious things, the processes of damascening and lacquering may be watched. It has been proven of late that, when patrons will pay a price to warrant the endless labor and care, as good lacquer may be made to-day as formerly. Connoisseurs admit that they are often deceived, and that they are able to tell the quality only, and not the age, of any really choice piece. The new is as indestructible as the old, if carefully made. A pin-point or a hot coal leaves no mark, a year’s bath in sea-water no trace, and amateur photographers have found it proof against the acids and chemicals of developing fluids. Yet this substance, enduring as crystal, is made by coat upon coat of an ill-smelling black varnish, which, stirred in a tub with iron-filings, and set in the sun to thicken and blacken, may be seen daily in the streets of any Japanese city. New lacquer is so poisonous to many persons that the curious are content to watch at a distance, while the workmen apply coat after coat, set the article in a moistened box to dry slowly, and grinding and polishing surface after surface, add those wonderful decorations that result in a trifle light as air and precious as gold or gems.
The “incense-shop” is one of the choicest and most truly Japanese of curio-shops. It looks, from the street, an every-day affair; but after propitiating the attendants by a purchase of perfume, the inner wealth is revealed in rooms filled with the choicest old wares. The salesmen tempt the visitor with rare koros, or incense-burners, and, in an elementary way, the master plays the daimio's old game of the Twenty Perfumes. He sprinkles on the hibachi’s glowing coals some little black morsels in the shape of leaves, blossoms, or characters; scattering green particles, brown particles, and grayish ones, and showing the ignorant alien how to catch the ascending column of pale-blue smoke in the bent hand, close the fingers upon it, and convey it to the nose. You cannot tell which odor you prefer, nor remember which dried particle gave forth a particular fragrance. The nose is bewildered by the commingled wreaths and mixed cathedral odors, and the master chuckles delightedly.
There are certain curio-shops of an even more exalted kind, unknown to tourists, and reserved to Japanese connoisseurs and to those few eminent foreign residents who, in taste and appreciation, are Japanese. There, little tea-jars, ancient tea-bowls, and ornaments for the ink-box delight those to the manner born, and command great prices; and there one sees the precious iron pots of Riobondo lifted from brocade bags, and ancient pieces of wrought and inlaid bronze and iron, old helmets and swords, such as are to be found nowhere else.
Tokio and Osaka rival the Kioto makers of the finer modern metal-work, all three cities having been equal capitals and centres of wealth and luxury in the feudal days, when the armorer was the warrior’s right-hand. The descendants of the ancient metal-workers of Kioto still labor at the old forges, and marvels of art, as well as of patient labor, come from the various workshops of the town. Both old and new designs are employed to beautify new combinations of metals, but at the present day the metal-workers’ art expends itself on trifling things. Instead of adorning armor and weapons and fashioning their exquisite ornaments, the artists’ taste and skill must be lavished on vases, placques, incense-burners, hibachis, water-pots, and flower-stands, and the countless cheap trifles and specimens of bijouterie made for exportation. In the coloring, cutting, and inlaying of bronze the Japanese are unrivalled; but for the great metal-work of the empire the student of native art must visit private collections and the treasures of the great curio-shops.
Feudal life invested swords and armor with their high estate, and gave the armorer his rank, The fine temper of the old blades has long challenged European admiration, and the sword-guards, the knife-handles, and the minute ornaments of the hilt are beyond compare. Sentiment, legend, and poetry glorify the sword, and the edict of 1871, which forbade their use as weapons, increased their value as relics, and brought thousands of them into the curio market. In rich and noble families they have always been treasured, but collections of fine blades are found in other countries as well, and the names of Muramasa and Masamuné and the Miochin family, are as well known as that of Benvenuto Cellini to connoisseurs of metal-work anywhere.
In the earlier uncommercial times little distinction was recognized in the comparative value of metals. Their fitness for the purpose required, and the effectiveness of their tints and tones for carrying out ornamental designs, were what the artist considered. One metal was as easily wrought by him as another. Iron was like clay in his competent hands, and he moulded, cut, and hammered as he willed, using copper, gold, silver, iron, tin, zinc, lead, and antimony simply as pigments, and combining them as a painter would his colors. The well-known shibuichi, or mixed copper and silver, and shakudo or mixed iron, copper, and gold, are only general names for the great range of tints and tones, shading from tawniest-yellow to darkest-brown and a purple-black, and from silver-white to the darkest steely-gray. Silver and gold were inlaid with iron, the harder metal upon the softer, and solid lumps of gold, silver, and lead are found encrusted in bronze in a way to defy all known laws of the fusion of metals. While good and even marvellous work is still done, the old spirit is gone, and the objects of to-day seem almost unworthy the art lavished on them.
The magic mirror is still manufactured in Kioto, and although the tourist is often assured that it does not exist, innumerable specimens prove that the face of a common polished steel mirror, of good quality, will reflect the same design as that raised in relief on its back. With small mirrors ten inches in diameter, as with the largest, in their elaborate lacquered cases, one may throw, with a ray of sunlight, a clear-cut image on wall or ceiling. The pressure of the uneven surface at the back, the varying density of the metal, and the effect of polishing, all combine to give this curious attribute to these kagami, which are gradually giving place to foreign glass and quicksilver.