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History in the Humanities and Social Sciences

This interdisciplinary volume explores the relationship between history

and a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: eco-
nomics, political science, political theory, international relations, soci-
ology, philosophy, law, literature and anthropology. The relevance of
historical approaches within these disciplines has shifted over the cen-
turies. Many of them, like law and economics, originally depended on
self-consciously historical procedures. These included the marshalling
of evidence from past experience, philological techniques and source
criticism. Between the late nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth
centuries, the influence of new methods of research, many indebted to
models favoured by the natural sciences, such as statistical, analytical
or empirical approaches, secured an expanding intellectual authority
while the hegemony of historical methods declined in relative terms.
In the aftermath of this change, the essays collected in History in the
Humanities and Social Sciences reflect from a variety of angles on the
relevance of historical concerns to representative disciplines as they are
configured today.

Richard Bourke is Professor of the History of Political Thought and

a Fellow of King’s College at the University of Cambridge. He has
published widely in the History of Political Ideas and Intellectual His-
tory, including Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke
(2015) and, as co-editor, The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution
(Cambridge, 2022).
Quentin Skinner is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary
University of London. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study
at Princeton between 1974 and 1979, and was Regius Professor of
History at the ­University of Cambridge 1996–2008. He is the author
of numerous books on Renaissance and Modern Intellectual History,
most recently From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics
(Cambridge, 2018).
History in the Humanities
and Social Sciences

Edited by
Richard Bourke
University of Cambridge

Quentin Skinner
Queen Mary University of London
Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,

a department of the University of Cambridge.
We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009231046
DOI: 10.1017/9781009231053
© Cambridge University Press 2023
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions
of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take
place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment.
First published 2023
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bourke, Richard, author, editor. | Skinner, Quentin, author, editor.
Title: History in the humanities and social sciences / edited by Richard Bourke,
University of Cambridge, Quentin Skinner, Queen Mary University of London.
Description: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022024928 | ISBN 9781009231046 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781009231053 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: History – Philosophy. | History – Study and teaching. |
Humanities – Study and teaching. | Social sciences – Study and teaching. |
Social sciences and history. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / History &
Theory
Classification: LCC D16.9 .H567 2023 | DDC 901–dc23/eng/20220720
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024928
ISBN 978-1-009-23104-6 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-009-23100-8 Paperback
Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence
or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this
publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will
remain, accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

List of Figures page vii

List of Contributors viii
Acknowledgements ix

Introduction1
1 Law and History, History and Law 20
m ich a e l l obba n 

2 History, Law and the Rediscovery of Social Theory 49

sa mu e l moy n 

3 The Uses of History in the Study of International Politics 69

j e n n i f er pi t ts 

4 International Relations Theory and Modern

International Order: The Case of Refugees 90
m i r a si egel berg 

5 The Delphi Syndrome: Using History in

the Social Sciences 116
stat h is n . k a ly va s a n d da n i el f edorow ycz 

6 Power in Narrative and Narratives of Power

in Historical Sociology 141
h a ze m k a n di l 

7 History and Normativity in Political Theory:

The Case of Rawls 165
r ich a r d bou r k e 

8 Political Philosophy and the Uses of History 194

qu e n t i n sk i n n er 

9 The Relationship between Philosophy and its History 211

susa n ja m es 

v
vi Contents

10 When Reason Does Not See You: Feminism at

the Intersection of History and Philosophy 229
h a n na h dawson 

11 On (Lost and Found) Analytical History

in Political Science 260
i r a k atz n el son 

12 Making History: Poetry and Prosopopoeia286

c at h y sh r a n k 

13 Reloading the British Romantic Canon: The Historical

Editing of Literary Texts 306
pa m el a cl em i t 

14 Economics and History: Analysing Serfdom 329

sh ei l agh ogi lv i e 

15 The Return of Depression Economics: Paul Krugman

and the Twenty-First-Century Crisis of American
Democracy354
a da m tooze 

16 Anthropology and the Turn to History 379

joe l isa ac 

Index408
 Figures

14.1 Per capita GDP in different parts

of Europe, c.1300–c.1850 page 343
14.2 Percentage of population in agriculture
in different parts of Europe, c.1400–c.1800 345

vii
 Contributors

r ich a r d bou r k e , University of Cambridge

pa m e l a cl em i t, Queen Mary University of London
h a n na h dawson , King’s College London
da n i e l f edorow ycz , University of Oxford
joel isaac, University of Chicago
susa n ja m es , Birkbeck College, University of London
stat h is n . k a ly va s , University of Oxford
h a ze m k a n di l , University of Cambridge
i r a k atz n el son , Columbia University
m ich a e l l obba n , University of Oxford
sa mu e l moy n , Yale University
sh ei l agh ogi lv i e , University of Oxford
j e n n i f er pi t ts , University of Chicago
c at h y sh r a n k , University of Sheffield
m i r a si egel berg , University of Cambridge
qu e n t i n sk i n n er , Queen Mary University of London
a da m tooze , Columbia University

viii
 Acknowledgements

This volume began life as a collaborative enterprise designed to inves-

tigate the role of historical consciousness in the humanities and social
sciences. The editors would like to thank the United Kingdom’s Arts
and Humanities Research Council for the funding that enabled a series
of workshops in which the contributors to this volume participated. We
are naturally also indebted to the contributors for their work, and their
involvement in the intellectual exchanges which helped refine the project.
We would like to thank Emma Yates at Queen Mary University of
London and Allison Ksiazkiewicz at the University of Cambridge for
assistance in administering the award. We are also grateful to Jesus
­College, King’s College, and Corpus Christi College for hosting events.
In ­addition, we would like to record our very particular thanks to Vanessa
Lim for her extensive work helping to organise each of our workshops
and for designing the website that advertised our activities. Thanks also
to Charlotte Johann for her input in relation to the Introduction. The
editors would like to express their further gratitude to Elizabeth Friend-
Smith who commissioned this book on behalf of Cambridge Univer-
sity Press for her confidence in the venture. We are also indebted to
two anonymous reviewers of the penultimate version of the typescript
for their constructive comments, to Natasha Whelan for taking care of
the production process, to Mary Starkey for managing the copy-editing
­process, and to Balaji Devadoss for overseeing the proofs.

ix
 Introduction

This book addresses the role of history in the humanities and soc­ial
­sciences. Its purpose, however, is not narrowly conceived as a study of
relationships between discrete subjects understood in terms of the con­
temporary division of academic labour. The volume does not ask how
history as a discipline within a faculty ought to relate to other forms of
inquiry in the human sciences. Its concern is less with the university sub­
ject than with historical consciousness more generally. The chapters in
the book variously explore the role of historical knowledge in the fields
of economics, anthropology, political science, political theory, interna­
tional relations, sociology, philosophy, law and literature. Many of these
disciplines had their roots in historical study, only later to develop into
purely analytical or positivistic modes of investigation. Three examples
will serve to illustrate the point: legal scholarship in the sixteenth century
was regarded as dependent on historical information; politics in the eight­
eenth century was seen all round as involving historical judgement; and
sociology, even at the end of the nineteenth century, was cultivated by
many as a branch of historical science. It would be easy to multiply such
cases. Each of these activities was distinct from history as a discipline, yet
they were all nonetheless historical in character.
This pervasive historicism declined in the course of the twentieth cen­
tury. The decline began with a perceived crisis. Ernst Troeltsch explicitly
broached the problem in his 1922 essay ‘Die Krisis des Historismus’,
which argued that the nineteenth-century ambition to reconstruct the
world in terms of the developmental specificity of its components had an
inevitably relativising impact on the judgement of values. The historicist
vision, he noted, located all reality ‘in the flow of becoming’, empha­
sising particularity over universality, and subjecting truth to historical
determination.1 The only solution, Troeltsch argued, was to regard the
cumulative fate of the West as offering a historical benchmark. He had

1 Troeltsch 1922, p. 573. See also Troeltsch 2008 [1922].

1
2 Introduction

already arrived at this conclusion twenty years earlier, when he recog­

nised that the historical study of Christianity from Spinoza to David
Strauss had progressively undermined its claim to universality.2 But it
was during and after the 1920s that more widespread debate ensued,
eliciting arguments from all sides, including from Mannheim, Hintze,
Heidegger, Heussi, Arendt and Leo Strauss.3 In the aftermath of the cri­
sis, the central importance of historical sensibility within the humanities
and social sciences was steadily challenged. The shift coincided with the
rise of American power to pre-eminence after the Second World War,
the newfound prestige of US research universities, and the gravitational
pull of statistical, analytical and scientistic methods on a substantial pro­
portion of the professoriate. Viewed within a long-term perspective, this
amounted to a sudden reversal of an established trend.
This book explores what is lost by misusing or disregarding historical
understanding in the pursuit of knowledge about society, politics and
culture. Such a rendering of accounts must begin by asking what it means
to examine a subject historically. This Introduction lays the groundwork
for that enterprise by outlining the emergence of historical mindedness
in the aftermath of the scientific revolution, between the Enlightenment
and the early twentieth century. In his great work of 1748, The Spirit of
the Laws, Montesquieu declared that ‘laws should be so appropriate to
the people for whom they are made that it is very unlikely that the laws
of one nation can suit another’.4 This amounted to claiming, as Montes­
quieu went on to make plain, that for laws to be effective they had to con­
form to the nature of the government under which they operated and the
animating principle that gave a regime its momentum. This meant that
in the case of a monarchy, for example, legal provisions should be com­
patible with the type of administration and with the principle of ‘honour’
that Montesquieu believed made it function in the way it did. More than
this, a system of laws should be attuned to a people’s economic way of
life, their political values, their physical environment, their manners and
their forms of worship. A state, in other words, was a product of its his­
torical conditions. It followed that the science of politics, at least in part,
depended on historical understanding and judgement.
It is true that politics for Montesquieu was not exclusively a mat­
ter of adjusting laws and legislation to prevailing attitudes and institu­
tions. There was also the issue of the fundamental values against which

2 Troeltsch 1902.
3 Mannheim 1968 [1924]; Hintze 1927; Heussi 1932. For Heidegger see Bambach 1995;
for Arendt and Strauss see Keedus 2015.
4 Montesquieu 1989 [1748], p. 8.
 Introduction 3

contingent arrangements had to be estimated. From Montesquieu’s per­

spective this meant that law ought to be evaluated by reason in accor­
dance with transcendent norms of justice: ‘relations of fairness’ (rapports
d’équité) were necessarily prior to ‘the positive law that establishes them’.
Even the Creator’s decrees had to accord with ‘invariable’ rules.5 Mon­
tesquieu’s historicism, therefore, did not entail an endorsement of relativ­
ism. To that extent his aims were continuous with mainstream Christian
thought. Nonetheless, The Spirit of the Laws did mark an epochal shift in
political understanding. Montesquieu dedicated just one brief chapter
in the first book of his magnum opus to an examination of the laws of
nature. The remaining thirty books were concerned with civil laws and
their manifold relations situated in comparative and historical contexts.
A glance at the great natural law texts of the seventeenth century
underscores the major shift in approach. Hobbes, whose humanist
training inspired him to translate Thucydides early in his career, largely
excluded empirical analysis from Leviathan. He conceded that prudence,
which formed part of politics, was grounded on the experience of the
past. However, true wisdom, which begins with definitions, involved
pure rational appraisal, or the ‘summing up of the consequences of one
saying to another’.6 In the preceding generation Grotius had confined
his use of historical data to illustrating the laws of nations recorded by
ancient authorities. His primary goal was to examine fundamental rights
as ‘Mathematicians consider figures abstracted from Bodies’. In pursuit
of that objective, he generally endeavoured to withdraw his mind ‘from
all particular facts’.7
Set alongside these exercises in mathematical reasoning, the eighteenth
century signalled a clear break with earlier traditions of political philoso­
phy. Even so, one has to be careful not to overdraw the contrast. For
instance, the ancient historians regarded their works as offering instruc­
tion in practical principles. Over a millennium and a half later, but in
much the same spirit, Machiavelli commended the study of the past as
a guide to the present, complaining in the preface to his Discourses that
the example of the Romans was ‘sooner admired than imitated’.8 Again
in this vein, Bodin insisted that history presented the surest method
of acquiring ‘reliable maxims’.9 However, during the Enlightenment a
change of emphasis becomes apparent. By mid-century the utility of

5 Montesquieu 1989 [1748], p. 4.

6 Hobbes 2012 [1651], I, p. 58.
7 Grotius 2005 [1625], I, p. 132.
8 Machiavelli 1989 [1521], I, p. 190.
9 Bodin 1945 [1566], p. 9.
4 Introduction

history no longer consisted in a record of achievements to be imitated.

Instead, inspecting the past aided the discovery of regularities that could
assist judgement. For that reason, history did not merely yield exemplary
episodes; rather, it uncovered the conditions that structured possibili­
ties. In Hume relations between property, government, law, the sciences,
commerce, mores and opinion constituted an object of systematic study.
Writing just six years before Montesquieu, he made clear that social
science relied on general principles. That implied uncovering the under­
lying causes of phenomena. While chance for Hume played a definite
role in human affairs, many outcomes in social life came about for ascer­
tainable reasons: patterns could be seen to emerge ‘from certain and
stable causes’.10 Society and politics were historically relative.
In much the same way that Hume examined the systematic intercon­
nections that determined relations between society and government,
Adam Smith analysed the factors that conditioned the growth of opu­
lence in the Wealth of Nations. This involved explaining fluctuations in
national riches, which depended in turn on the extent of the division of
labour, the proportion of the population engaged in work, and the quan­
tity of capital available to sustain employment. These interdependent
variables relied in turn on the accumulation of stock. How they oper­
ated was then shaped by the way in which industry was applied either
in cultivating the agriculture of the countryside or the manufactures of
the towns as policy and circumstances have varied across time, although
Smith concentrated on the particular transition from the Roman Empire
to the states of modern Europe.11 Only on the basis of comprehensive
analysis of this kind could the causes of the wealth of nations be deter­
mined. There was yet another consideration that Smith included in
his account: the role of theory in formulating policy. His example of
a scheme of false assumptions that had guided the approach of sover­
eigns was the ‘mercantile system’, which he explicated in Book IV of the
Wealth of Nations. The ‘sophistical’ precepts of balance-of-trade theory
had governed the management of European empires since the discovery
of the New World.12
From the perspective advanced by Smith, history was not simply a
product of human needs. Rather, any arrangement concerned with the
supply of necessities and the creation of luxuries was governed by the
conception of how the system ought to operate. On this reckoning, a

10 Hume 1985 [1742], p. 111.

11 Smith 1976 [1776]. These various factors are analysed respectively in Books I, II
and III.
12 Smith 1976 [1776], I, p. 433.
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carelessly tied obi of the bath kimono, or as obishime, tied over the
women’s heavy satin and brocade obis to keep their stiff folds in
place, these stringy scarfs add a last artistic touch of color to a
costume. Kinu chirimen shrinks half its width, but loses nothing in
length in the bath, and a tan a yard wide ranges from eighteen to
twenty-eight dollars in price. Kanoko chirimen is plain crape dotted
over with knots or projections in different colors, a result arrived at
by processes similar to those employed at Arimatsu for dyeing cotton
goods.

CHIRIMEN

Yamamai, so little known outside the home market, is a most

artistic fabric, roughly and loosely woven of the threads of the wild,
mountain silk-worm, that is fed on oak-leaves. Yamamai has the
natural yellow color of the cocoons, is considered both a cure and
preventive of rheumatism, and is often worn at the command of
foreign physicians. It is softer to the touch than the Chinese pongee,
not being weighted with the clay dressing of Shantung pongees,
while much heavier than the Indian tussores, all three of these
fabrics being the product of the same wild oak-spinner.

EBISU CHIRIMEN
 KINU CHIRIMEN

The painted crapes of Kioto, specially designed for children’s

holiday dresses and obis, are works of art, in the manufacture of
which the old capital holds almost a monopoly. All the elaborate
processes of patterning such crapes were shown us one morning at
Nishimura’s great establishment. First, on a square of white crape,
wrung out in water and pasted down at the edges on a board, the
outline of the principal design was sketched in indigo. This line was
then carefully covered by a thread of starch, drawn from a glutinous
ball held upon the point of a stick, while the painter turned and tilted
the crape to receive it. This starch, or “resist,” as occidental dyers
term it, is to prevent the spreading of the colors by capillary
attraction, and the limits of every color must be carefully defined,
unless the fabric is to be made one of those marvellous studies of
blended and merging tints. As soon as the first color dried, the first
starchy outline was washed out, and another drawn for the second
color. After the removal of each “resist,” the square was stretched on
bowed bamboos and dried over a hibachi. The artist had purposely
worked out his design with such cunning that it was only when the
last touches in red had been given that we discovered the Daimonji’s
fires burning on the mountain-side, and a troop of men, women,
children, and jinrikishas, all with glowing lanterns, figuring as
silhouettes on Sanjio bridge.
When a whole tan of crape is to be painted, much of the design
may be stencilled through perforated card-board, but, in general, the
best painted crapes display free-hand sketches, with patterns never
exactly repeated, nor exactly matching at the edges. After the
general outline is sketched, the tan, sewn together at the ends, is
made to revolve horizontally on two cylinders, like a roller towel,
passing before a row of seated workmen, each of whom adds a
single color, or applies the “resist,” and slips it along to the next.
Sitting on the mats, the soles of his feet turned upward in his lap, in
a pose that a circus contortionist might envy, each workman has a
glowing hibachi at his knees, over which he dries his own work. And
such work! Hazy rainbows on misty skies, flights of birds, shadows
of trees and rushes, branches of pines and blossoming twigs,
comical figures, animals, and fantastical chimeras, kaleidoscopic
arrangements of the most vivid colors the eye can bear. These
painted crapes are beyond compare, and the English and Dutch
imitations in printed delaines fall absurdly short.
Following the Chinese example, Kioto silk-weavers now make silk
rugs equalling the famous ones of Pekin. Even when new they have
a finer bloom and sheen than the old prayer-rugs of western Asia,
but their designs, first made from the suggestions of an American
house, are neither Japanese, Turkish, nor at all Oriental, nor do they
allow the best effects to be obtained. At two dollars a square foot,
these thick, soft rugs make the costliest of floor coverings in a
country where the cotton and hemp rugs of Osaka sell for a few
cents a square foot, and the natural camel’s-hair rugs of North China
for eighteen cents a square foot.
 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.
 FUKUSA

The stores of fukusas seemed inexhaustible a few years ago, and I

can remember days of delight in that ill-smelling 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 lute.
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.
This manji is the Svastika, or Buddhist cross of India, which
appears in the frescos of the Pyramids and the Catacombs, in Greek
art, in Etruscan tombs, in the embroideries and missals of mediæval
Europe, in the Scandinavian design known as Thor’s hammer, in old
English heraldry, in the Chinese symbol called the “tablet of honor,”
and on innumerable temple ornaments.
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.
The mitsu tomoyé is another universal
symbol of innumerable meanings. It occurs
on the crests of eight daimio families; on
temple drums, lanterns, the ends of tiles, and
on Daikoku’s mallet. It is variously said to
represent falling snow, leaping flames,
dashing water, and clouds; the thongs of a
warrior’s glove, uncurling fern-fronds, the
down of seed pods; the three great
elements, fire, air, and water, the origin of matter, the great
principles of nature, an oriental trinity. On house-tiles and ridge-
poles it invokes protection from the three evils—fire, thieves, and
flood, and everywhere these two mysterious symbols confront one.
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 Ikeda’s, 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.
 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 cloisonné 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 farmer 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.
 CHAPTER XXIX
GOLDEN DAYS

Nammikawa, the first cloisonné artist of the world, has his home,
his workshop, and his little garden in a quiet corner of the Awata
district. Most visitors never pass beyond his ante-room, as
Nammikawa holds his privacy dear, and that small alcove with the
black table gives little hint of what lies beyond. The more fortunate
visitor follows the master through a dark recess to a large room with
two sides open to the garden, and a tiny balcony overhanging a
lakelet. He claps his hands, and big golden carp rise to the surface
and gobble the mochi thrown them. In that little paradise, barely
sixty feet square, are hills, groves, thickets, islands, promontories,
and bays, a bamboo-shaded well, and a shrine, while above the
farthest screen of foliage rise the green slopes of Maruyama.
A Japanese friend, who described Nammikawa as “the most
Japanese and most interesting man in Kioto,” took us to drink tea
with him in this charming garden, and, on the hottest afternoon of a
hot Kioto summer, we noted neither time nor temperature until the
creeping shadows warned us to depart. Old Japan seemed to re-live
in the atmosphere of that garden, and a cha no yu was no more
finished than the simple tea-ceremony the master performed there.
By the old etiquette a Japanese gentleman never intrusted to any
servant the making of tea for a guest, nor allowed the fine art of
that simple, every-day process to be exercised unseen. The tea-tray,
brought and set before the master, bore a tiny jewel-like teapot of
old Awata, and the tiny cloisonné cups with plain enamelled linings
were as richly colored as the circle of a tulip’s petals, and smaller far.
With them was a small pear-shaped dish, not unlike our gravy-boats,
a beautiful bronze midzu tsugi, or hot-water pot, and a lacquer box
holding a metal tea-caddy filled with the finest leaves from Uji tea-
gardens. Taking a scoop of yellowed ivory, carved in the shape of a
giant tea-leaf, our host filled the little teapot with loosely-heaped
leaves, and having decanted the hot water into the little pear-shaped
pitcher to cool a little, poured it upon the tea-leaves. Immediately he
drew off the palest amber fluid, half filling each cup, and presented
them to us, resting on leaf-shaped stands or saucers of damascened
metal. The tea was only lukewarm when we received it, but as
delicate and exquisitely flavored as if distilled of violets, as rich and
smooth as a syrup, the three sips of it constituting a most powerful
stimulant. In the discussion of tea-making that followed, our
Japanese mentor explained to us that to the epicurean tea-drinkers
of his country, boiling water was an abomination, as it scorched the
leaves, drove out the fine fragrance in the first cloud of steam, and
extracted the bitterness instead of the sweetness of the young
leaves. “It may be well enough to pour boiling water on the coarse
black tea of China’s wild shrub,” said this delightful Japanese, “but
the delicate leaf of our cultivated tea-plant does not need it.”
With the tea our host offered us large flat wafers of rice and fancy
confections in the shape of most elaborate asters and
chrysanthemums, too artistic to be eaten without compunction. The
cups were refilled with the second and stronger decoction, which set
every nerve tingling, and then only were we permitted to see the
treasures of Nammikawa’s creation. From box and silken bag within
bag were produced vases, whose lines, color, lustre, and brilliant
intricacy of design made them beautiful beyond praise. They were
wrought over with finest traceries of gold, silver, and copper wires,
on grounds of dull Naples yellow, soft yellowish-green, a darker
green, or a rich deep-red, wonderful to behold, the polished surface
as even and flawless as that of a fine onyx.
One by one some smaller pieces were brought in, in little boxes of
smooth white pine, beautifully made and joined. Nammikawa
opened first the cotton wadding, then the inevitable wrapping of
yellow cloth, and lastly the silken covers, and handled with a tender
reverence these exquisite creations of his genius, every one of
which, when placed on its low teak-wood stand, showed faultless.
For two years his whole force was at work on the two sixteen-inch
vases which went to the Paris Exposition, and four years were given
to the Emperor’s order for a pair for his new palace. These bore the
imperial emblems, and dragons writhed between chrysanthemums
and through conventional flower-circles and arabesques, and the
groundwork displayed the splendid red, green, russet, mottled gold,
and glistening avanturine enamels, whose secret Nammikawa holds.
For it is not only in his fine designs, but in the perfect composition
and fusing of his enamels and the gem-like polish that this great
artist excels all rivals.

IN NAMMIKAWA’S WORK-ROOM

In another garden, concealed by a bamboo hedge, is the tiny

laboratory, and the one work-room where less than twenty people,
all told, execute the master’s designs. One etches these patterns on
the copper base, following Nammikawa’s delicately traced outlines;
another bends and fastens the wires on the etched lines, and a third
coats the joinings with a red oxide that, after firing, unites the wires
more firmly to the copper. Others dot the paste into the cell-like
spaces, or sit over tubs of water, grinding with fine stones, with
charcoal, and deer-horn the surface of the pieces that have been
fired. Nammikawa adds the master-touches, and after conducting
the final firing, himself gives them the last incomparable polish, after
his men have rubbed away for weeks. These workmen come and go
as they please, working only when the spirit moves them, and doing
better work, the master believes, when thus left to their own
devices. All of them are artists whose skill is a family inheritance,
and they have been with Nammikawa for many years. The most
skilful of these craftsmen receive one yen a day, which is
extravagant pay in this land of simple living, and shows in what high
esteem they are held. A few women are employed in the polishing
and the simpler details, and, while we watched them, were
burnishing a most exquisite teapot covered with a fine foliated
design on pale yellow ground. This treasure had been bought by
some connoisseur while the first rough filling of paste was being
applied, and he had bided his time for a twelvemonth, while the slow
processes of filling and refilling the cells, and firing and refiring the
paste had succeeded one another until it was ready for the first
grinding.
Fifty or sixty small pieces, chiefly vases, caskets, and urns, three
and four inches high, and ranging in price from thirty to ninety yen
each, are a whole year’s output, and larger pieces are executed by
special order at the same time with these. Nammikawa does not like
to sell to the trade, and has been known to refuse the requests of
curio merchants, making his customers pay more if he suspects that
they are buying to sell again. It is his delight to hand the precious
article to its new owner, enjoining him to keep it wrapped in silk and
wadding, and always to rub it carefully to remove any moisture
before putting it away. He cautions visitors, when they attempt to
handle the precious pieces in his show-room, not to touch the
enamelled surface with the hand, the metal base and collar being
left free on each piece for that purpose. Nor must two pieces of
cloisonné ever be knocked together, as the enamel is almost more
brittle than porcelain. Curiously enough, this great artist uses no
mark nor sign-manual. “If my work will not declare itself to be mine,
then the marking will do no good,” he says; and, indeed, his
cloisonné is so unlike the crude and commonplace enamels exported
from Japan by ship-loads for the foreign market, that it does not
need the certification of his name.
Nammikawa has the face of a saint, or poet—gentle, refined, and
intellectual—and his beautiful manner and perfect courtesy are an
inheritance of the old Japan. His earlier days were not saintly,
although they may have been poetical. He was a personal attendant
of Prince Kuné no Miya, a brother of Prince Komatsu, and cousin of
the Emperor, and was brought up in the old court life with its
atmosphere of art and leisure. The elegant young courtier was noted
for his gayety and improvidence. He remained in Kioto when the
court moved northward, and all at once ceased his dissipations, even
putting aside his pipe, to devote himself to experiments in the
manufacture of cloisonné, for which he had always had a passion. In
his laboratory there is a square placque, a bluish bird on a white
ground diapered with coarse wires, which was his first piece. One
can hardly believe that only fifteen years intervene between this
coarse, almost Chinese, specimen of his work, and the vases for the
Emperor’s palace. From the start he threw himself into his profession
with his whole soul and spirit. Incessant experiments in the solitude
of his laboratory and work-room at night, and the zeal and patience
of a Palissy at the furnace, conquered his province. He is still
constantly studying and experimenting, and always fires his pieces
himself, keeping long vigils by the little kiln in the garden.
Hurry and money-making he despises. Gazing dreamily out into
his garden, Nammikawa declared that he had no ambition to have a
large godown, a great workshop, and a hundred workmen; that he
always refused to take any large commissions or commercial orders,
or to promise a piece at any given time. Neither good art nor good
work can be commanded by money, he thought, nor did he want his
men to work faster, and therefore less carefully, because greater
prices are offered him for haste. It was his pleasure, he said, to take
years for the execution of a single piece that might stand flawless
before all connoisseurs, and receive its just reward of praise or
medals. The latter are dearer to him than any sum of money, and in
his own garden he finds happiness with them.
There is a Nammikawa of Tokio who is not to be confounded with
this Kioto artist. The Tokio enameller has an entirely different style, a
simple design thrown in a broad style upon an unbroken
groundwork, easily distinguishing his work from any other; but
Nammikawa of Tokio deals directly with the trade, even contracting
with foreign curio dealers for seasons of work, and makes replicas of
his exquisite pieces by the score for them. Imitators of his style have
arisen, and already many cheap pieces, copying his best models, can
be purchased in foreign cities.
The idling most delightful of all in Kioto is going over and over
again to the same places, doing the same thing repeatedly, and
arriving at that happy and eminently Japanese frame of mind where
haste enters not; time is forgotten, days slip by uncounted, and
limits cease to be. The spring days, when the rain falls in gauziest
mist—the rain that is so good for young rice—or summer days, when
the sun scorches the earth and burns one’s very eyeballs, seem to
bring the most unbroken leisure and longest hours in any agreeable
refuge.
Sitting on Yaami’s veranda, with the great plain of the city
wreathed in mists or quivering in heat, I have recognized my
indebtedness to Griffis, Dresser, Mitford, Morse, and Rein, those
authorities on all things Japanese, not to mention Murray and his
ponderous guide-book, whose weight and polysyllabic pages strike
terror to the soul of the new-comer. Griffis I read, until Tairo and
Minamoto, Hideyoshi and Iyeyasu, grew as familiar as William the
Conqueror and the Declaration of Independence; Dresser’s text and
illustrations were a constant delight and illumination, explaining the
incomprehensible and pointing to hidden things; and Morse’s
Japanese Homes laid bare their mysteries, and made every fence,
roof, rail, ceiling, and wall take on new features and expression.
Rein’s is the encyclopædia, and he the recorder, from whose
statements there is no appeal, and to him we turned for everything.
It is only on the sacred soil that the student gets the true value and
meaning of these books; while nothing so nearly expresses and
explains the charm of the country as that prose idyl, Percival Lowell’s
Soul of the Far East, nor so perfectly fits one’s moods on these long,
leisure days, and Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan are of ceaseless
delight.
In this Japanese atmosphere the traveller feels what he misses
through his ignorance of the vernacular, and is even inspired with a
desire to study the language; but a little skimming of the grammar
usually brings down that vaulting ambition. It is easy to pick up
words and phrases for ordinary use, as all servants understand some
English, and every hotel and shop has its interpreter. Upper-class
people, whom one meets socially, always speak English, French, or
German. Scholars declare that the mastery of the language takes
from twelve to thirty years, and the compiler of the standard lexicon
modestly says for himself that forty years is not enough. With a few
most illustrious exceptions, no foreigner, who has not learned
Japanese almost before his own tongue, has ever been able to grasp
its idioms so as to express himself with clearness and accuracy. The
whole theory and structure of the language are so different from and
so opposed to European speech—so intricate and so arbitrary, that
the alien brain fails to grasp it. The lower, middle, and upper classes
have each a different mode of expression, and the women of each
class use a still simpler version. He who learns the court language
cannot make himself understood by shop-keepers or servants. He
who has acquired coolie-talk insults a gentleman by uttering its
common words and inelegant expressions in his presence.
As if the differences between the polite and the common idioms
and names for things did not make verbal complications enough, the
imperial family and their satellites have a still finer phraseology with
a special vocabulary for their exclusive use. Saké, or rice brandy,
becomes kukon at court; a dumpling, which is a dango in the city,
becomes an ishi-ishi when it enters the palace-gates; and a shirt, or
juban, is transmuted to a heijo on an imperial back. Well-bred
women say o hiya for cold water, and men always call it mizu. A dog
not only gets the honorific prefix o, but if you call him, you say
politely o ide, just as you would to a child; while the imperative koi!
koi! (come, come,) is polite enough for the rest of the brute
creation. Children say umamma for food, but if you do not say
omamma instead, nesans will giggle over your baby talk.
Dialects and localisms contribute still further to confusion of
tongues. A hibachi in Kioto is a shibachi in Yokohama, as a Hirado
vase is a Shirado one. When you inquire a price, you say ikura for
“how much” in Yokohama, and nambo in Kioto. All around Tokio the
g has the sound of ng, or gamma nasal, and this nasal tone of the
capital is another point of conformity with the modern French.
Everywhere in Japan an infinity of names belongs to the simplest
things. Twenty-five synonyms for rice are given in Hepburn’s smaller
dictionary, all as different as possible. Rice in every stage of growing,
and in every condition after harvesting, has a distinct name, with no
root common to all. Endless mistakes follow any inexactness of
pronunciation. The numerals, ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi,
hachi, ku, ju, are easily memorized, and learning to count up to one
hundred is child’s play compared to the struggle with French
numerals. It is not necessary to say “four times twenty, ten, and
seven,” before ninety-seven is reckoned; that is simply ku ju shichi,
or nine tens and a seven. Twenty is ni ju, thirty is san ju, fifty is go
ju, and so through the list. The ordinal numbers have dai prefixed or
ban added, and “fourth” is then yo ban. That ichi ban means
“number one,” and ni ban, “number two,” surprises people who had
supposed that Mr. Ichi Ban and Mr. Ni Ban owned the great Japanese
stores that used to exist in two American cities. After learning the
plain cardinal and ordinal numbers, the neophyte must remember to
add the syllable shiki when mentioning any number of animals, nin
for people, ken for houses, so for ships, cho for jinrikishas, hai for
glasses or cups of any liquid, hon for long and round objects, mai for
broad and flat ones, tsu for letters or papers, satsu for books, wa for
bundles or birds. Any infraction of these rules gives another meaning
to the intended phrase, and the slightest variation in inflection