Jinrikisha Days in Japan/Chapter 28
CHAPTER XXVIII
POTTERIES AND PAPER WARES
The porcelains of Kiomidzu, renowned as they are throughout Japan, figure lightly in the export trade lists, as compared to the immense shipments of decorated faience from the Awata district, for which there is such demand in foreign countries. On the main street of that quarter, which is the beginning of the Tokaido, the larger establishments cluster near together, and Kinkozan, Tanzan, and Taizan attract one in turn. Latticed walls and plain gate-ways admit visitors to a succession of show-rooms, where they may wander and look. As it is the characteristic Japanese custom to consider every foreigner as a mere sight-seer, who puts tradesmen to trouble for nothing, the bushy-headed young men in their clean, cool cotton gowns make no effort to sell until he purchases something. Then he is led through further rooms to godowns or upper chambers, and their more desirable wares are displayed.
Kinkozan’s specialty is the manufacture of the fine, cream-colored faience with a crackled glaze, which, when decorated in one way, is known as Kioto or Awata ware, and when covered with a blaze of color and gilding is the gaudily gorgeous, modern, or Kioto Satsuma, exported by ship-loads to America, where its crude hues and cheap effects are enjoyed. No cultivated Japanese, however, would ever give these monstrosities a place in his own home. In America these garish six-months-old vases and koros are even passed off as old Satsuma, to which softly-toned and simply-decorated ware it is no more like than is a Henri Deux tazza to a Limoges garden-stool. Kinkozan turns out also a coarse shippoyaki, or cloisonneé enamel, some on faience and some on copper ground; and the blue-and-white-gowned young man will lead one past garden and godown, and show one every stage and process of the manufacture of the different wares. The potters sit in little open alcoves of rooms, each with his low wheel and heap of clay before him. One old man sits with his feet doubled up before him, his right foot locked fast in the bend of the left knee, and the left foot laid sole upward on the right thigh, in the impossible attitude of so many Buddhas. This position he maintains with comfort for hours, and this lean, bald-headed, old man, wearing nothing but a loin-cloth and a pair of huge, round, owlish spectacles, is as interesting as his work. He puts a handful of wet gray clay on the wheel before him, making it revolve with a dexterous touch of the hand, while he works the lump of clay into a thick, broad bowl. With his fingers and a few little sticks he soon stretches the bowl upward, narrows it for a neck, broadens and flattens it a little at the top, and presently lifts off a graceful vase and sets it on a board with a row of others. In another place the workmen are grinding and working the clay; in another, preparing the glaze and applying it, and near them are the kilns in every stage. In a further garden the decorators are at work, each with his box of brushes and colors beside him, the vase being kept in half-horizontal position before him by a wooden rest. Each piece goes from one man to another, beginning with the one who sketches the designs in faint outline, thence passing to him who does the faces, to a third who applies the red, to a fourth who touches in the diaper-work and traceries, and so on to the man who liberally bestows the gilding. Lastly, two women slowly burnish the gold by rubbing it over with wet agates or carnelian.
At the other houses faience, in an infinity of new and strange designs and extraordinary colors is seen, each less and less Japanese. All these Awata potters work almost entirely for the foreign market, and their novelties are not disclosed to the visitor, nor sold in Japan, until they have had their vogue in the New York and London markets. From those foreign centres come instructions as to shapes, colors, and designs likely to prove popular for another season, and the ceramic artists abjectly follow these foreign models. All this helps to confuse a stranger; for, though the wares are named for the districts, towns, and provinces of their supposed nativity, he finds them made everywhere else—Satsuma, in three or four places outside of Satsuma; the Kaga of commerce, almost anywhere except in Kaga; while undecorated porcelain is brought from France by ship-loads to be decorated and sent out again, and everywhere the debasing effect of imitation and of this yielding to foreign dictates appears.
Cart-loads, car-loads, and ship loads of screens go from the great ports to foreign countries, and in Kioto the larger proportion of these are manufactured. Whether byobu, the screen, is a purely Japanese invention, or a variation of the hinged door easily suggested to any primitive people who can watch Nature’s many trap-doors and hinges, this people certainly makes most persistent use of it. Twenty different kinds may be seen in one’s daily rides past the little open houses, but never does one discover the abominations in coarse gold thread on black satin grounds so common in our country and so highly esteemed. The four-fold or six-fold screen of a Japanese house has its plain silk, paper, or gold-leaf surface, covered with one large design or picture extending over the whole surface, instead of the narrow panels and patches of separate pictures which Western taste demands. In great establishments and monasteries there is a tsui taté, or flat, solid screen of a single panel, within the main door-way or vestibule—a survival of a Chinese fashion, intended less to baffle inquisitive eyes than to keep out evil spirits and beasts. Peculiar to Kioto are screens on which phosphorescent paint is used. A favorite design for these is the rice field at dusk, starred with flickering fire-flies, whose lights glow the more as the room darkens. A half century ago Gioksen, the artist, achieved great fame with these phosphorescent fire-flies; and recently the idea has been revived, with a fine promise of being vulgarized, growing coarser and cheaper in execution and poorer in quality, to meet the demands of the barbarian markets of the Occident. In the New-year week, when each family brings out its choicest screens, the display in the best streets is an art exhibition.
Screens of all sorts are more important in summer life than clothing, and, of necessity, are greatly relied on in the absence of garments. Screens with tiny windows in them shelter the undressed citizen and give him glimpses of the road, and screens with a variety of shelves and hooks bring a whole kitchen to the side of the hibachi on a windy day. Among summer screens, the commonest is the sudare, or curtain of reeds or tiny bamboo joints strung on threads. The waving of these strings and their tinkling sound are supposed to suggest the freshness of the stirring breeze, and the Japanese imagination transforms the bits of crystal, strung here and there, into cool rain-drops slipping down the bamboo stems. The taste of the foreign buyer has vulgarized the sudare, which is often a nightmare of crude design and worse color, weighted with glass beads of every color, and even made entirely of beads. The sudare in the streets of a Japanese town is almost as surely a sign of a shop where shaved ice and cooling drinks may be had, as is our striped pole of the Occidental barber’s premises.
Kioto fans are celebrated, but they are no better now than those of other cities, and prettier Japanese fans are sold in New York for less money than in Japan, because the enormous foreign demand keeps the best fan-painters and fan-makers of Kioto constantly employed on export orders. American importers send their buyers to Kioto and Osaka every spring to order fans for the following year. Designer and maker submit hundreds of models, and the buyer offers suggestions as to color and shapes. The men who execute these large orders seldom have an open shop or sales-room, and their places are known only to the trade. Thousands and hundreds of thousands of ogi, or folding fans, go annually from the port of Hiogo-Kobé to America, and as many more from Yokohama; while of the flat fans with handles, the uchiwa, the number is even greater. One American railroad company has for years taken a hundred thousand uchiwa each season for advertising purposes, one side being left plain, to be printed upon after they reach the United States.
The fan is the most ancient and important utility in Japan, and since Jingo Kogo invented the ogi, after the model of a bat's wing, men, women, and children have never ceased carrying one in their summer obi folds. Fans are the regulation gift upon every occasion and lack of occasion, and a large collection is acquired in the fewest summer weeks. Every large shop and tea-house has its own specially decorated and perfectly well-known uchiwa to be given to patrons, who in that way declare their wanderings; and at feasts each guest receives a plain white ogi, upon which poems, autographs, and sketches are to be traced by his fellow-guests.
Formerly, Kioto shops exhibited many more kinds of fans than at present. Among them were the court fans, or hiogi, made of twenty-five broad wooden sticks strung together, and wound with heavy silk cords, and as long as the Empress retained the old dress she and her ladies carried these heavy and useless articles. The suehiro, or wide-end fans of the priests, were a specialty of Kioto and Nara, and the suehiro accompanied every gift at New Years, weddings, and anniversaries, as certainly as the red and gold cords and oddly folded little papers now do. The gumbai uchiwa, heavy war fans, often with iron or bronze outer-sticks, went with each suit of armor; and the large oblong uchiwa, descending from priests to No dancers and to umpires in games and contests, were equally well-known productions of Kioto. Fans serve an infinite variety of purposes and speak a language in this land of their own, and no season or condition of life is without its ministrations. The fanner winnows his grain with a fan, the housewife blows up the charcoal fire with a fan, and gardeners, sitting for hours on patient heels, will softly fan half-open flowers until every petal unfolds. For specific gifts, specific designs and colors appear. One fan may be offered to a lady as a declaration of love. Another serves as her sign of dismissal, and the Japanese are often amused to see foreigners misapply the language and etiquette of fans.
Although gas and electricity light every Japanese city, and American and Russian kerosene come in whole cargoes, the manufacture of paper lanterns increases apace, for now all the quarters of the globe demand them. Constructing the flimsy frames is a sleight-of-hand process, and with the same deftness the old lantern-makers dash on designs, characters, and body-colors, with a bold brush. But one must live in Japan to appreciate the softened light of lanterns, and in the lavish and general nightly use of them learn all the fairy-like and splendid effects to be obtained with a bit of paper, some wisps of bamboo, and a little vegetable wax poured around a paper wick.
Cotton goods are largely manufactured in Kioto, and at all seasons the upper reaches of the Kamogawa’s broad, stony bed are white with bleaching cloth. The Kamogawa’s water, which is better for tea-making, for rice-boiling, and for mixing dyes than the water of any other stream in Japan, is also sovereign for bleaching, and its banks are lined for a long distance with dyeing establishments. The river-bed, paved with stones under each of its great bridges, is dreary, wind-swept, and colorless in winter-time, as compared to its summer brilliancy; but in January it is the place of the kite-flyers, and Hideyoshi’s bronze-railed Shijo bridge—the southern end of the Tokaido, the centre from which all distances are measured—commands a view of an unexampled aerial carnival. Thousands of giant kites float upward, and the air is filled with a humming, as they soar, sweep, and circle over the city like huge birds. Kite combats take place in mid-air, and strings covered with pounded glass cut other strings, and let the half-animate paper birds and demons loose. Jinrikisha coolies on bridges and streets must dodge the hanging strings, and boys run over and into each other while watching their ventures; but the traditional kite-flying grandfathers whom one reads about in Western prints are conspicuous by their absence.
There is a game of battledore and shuttlecock much played at the same season by the girls, the battledore a flat wooden paddle ornamented with gaudy pictures of Japanese women. The game is a pretty one, and the girls are wonderfully graceful in playing it, the long sleeves and the flying obi-ends taking on expressive action when these charming maidens race and leap through its changes.
Kioto is not without its theatres and places of amusement, ever ready to beguile one from the sight-seeing and shopping rounds. Its great actor is Nakamura, and it maintains an academy for the training of maiko and geisha, where every spring there is a long-drawn-out festival of dances to help on the rejoicings of the cherry-blossom season. But its great place of amusement, its Vanity Fair, is the narrow theatre or show street running from Sanjio to Shijo Street, just beyond the bridges. This thoroughfare is lined all the way with rows of shops, labyrinthine bazaars, stalls, and booths, theatres, side-shows, peep-shows, puppet-shows, wax-works, jugglers, acrobats, wrestlers, trained animals, story-tellers, fortune-tellers, all exploited by the voice and drum of their loquacious agents at the door-way. No jinrikishas are allowed to run on this highway, and day and night, morning and midnight, it is filled with strolling people and playing children. In winter it is a cheering refuge from the wider, wind-swept streets, and in summer days it is cool and shady, the pavement constantly sprinkled, and the light and heat kept out by mat awnings stretched across the narrow road-way from roof to roof, in Chinese fashion. At night it is the busiest place in Kioto, even with the rival attraction of the river-bed; crowded with revellers, torches flaring, drums and gongs sounding, the high-pitched, nasal voices, of the showmen sing-songing their stories and programmes; and peddlers, pilgrims, priests, men, women, and children, and the strangers within their gates, making up the throng. Once when a giantess was on exhibition in a tent the spectators, instead of being awed by her heroic eight feet of height, were convulsed with laughter at sight of her. Every movement of the colossus sent them into fresh spasms. It was like a personification of some netsuke group to see this huge creature, with hair-pins like clubs, and clogs as large as a door-step, standing with folded arms, while pigmy visitors climbed up to perch like insects on her shoulders.
In this ever-open market one may buy the tailless cats of the country; forlorn, spiritless creatures, staying at home and in-doors at night, and never going on midnight prowls. Or, if he prefer, there are the wonderful long-tailed Tosa chickens, fowls kept in tall, bamboo cages, that their tail-feathers, measuring ten and twelve feet in length, may make a graceful display. When they are let out to scratch and wander about like other chickens, their precious feathers are rolled up in papers and protected from any chance of harm. Japanese spaniels, or Kioto chins, those little black-and-white, silky-eared pets, with big, tearful, goggle eyes, and heads as round and high as Fukurokojin’s, are fashionably dear, ranging from five to forty dollars each, even in their native town.
From the lower end of Theatre Street a covered way leads to the fish-market of the city, a dark, cool, stone-floored place, where more peculiar things may be bought, and more picturesque groups may be studied, in the strange Rembrandtesque light, than anywhere else in Kioto. The foreign artists, who carry away scores of sketches of Japanese life, seem never to find this fish-market, nor in general to seize the best and least hackneyed subjects. Most of their pictures have been long anticipated by the native photographers, and the foreign artist repeats, with less fidelity, the familiar scenes and subjects, with that painstaking western method that, to the Japanese eye, leaves as little to the imagination as the photograph itself.