The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [126]
If you walked along the Ginza, the central shopping boulevard in Tokyo, in the summer of 1951 you would pass one well-stocked store after another: Japan was making its way in the modern world. You would also pass Takumi, a long thin shop with dark bowls and cups stacked on shelves alongside bolts of indigo cloth from folk-craft weavers. In 1950 the Japanese government introduced the category of the National Living Treasure, someone – usually an elderly man – whose skill in lacquer or dying or pottery was rewarded with a pension and fame.
Taste had swung round towards the gestural, intuitive, ineffable. Anything made in a remote village became ‘traditional’ and was marketed as intrinsically Japanese. These years saw the start of Japanese tourism, with booklets published by the Japanese Department of Railways: Some Suggestions for Souvenir Seekers. ‘Travel of any kind would not be complete without some souvenirs to take home.’ You should return with the right o-miyagi, or gift. It could be a sweetmeat, a kind of biscuit or dumpling specific to one village, a box of tea, a pickled fish. Or it could be a handicraft, a sheaf of paper, a tea-bowl from a village kiln, an embroidery. But it must have its regional specificity pulsing behind its paper-and-cord wrapping, its calligraphic tag: there is a mapping of Japan, a geography of appropriate gifts. Not to bring an o-miyagi is an affront in some way to the idea of travelling itself.
Netsuke now belonged to the age of the Meiji and the opening up of Japan. In the hierarchies of knowledge, netsuke were now rather looked down on as over-skilled: they carried the slightly stale air of Japonisme with them, of the marketing of Japan to the West. They were just too deft.
No matter how many calligraphies were shown – a single explosive brushstroke of black by some monk, a concentration of decades into four seconds of control – show something small and ivory, ‘a group of Kiyohimi and a dragon circling the temple bell within which the monk Anchin hides’ and everyone marvelled. Not at the idea, or the composition, but at the possibility of concentrating for so long on such a small thing. How did Tanaka Minko carve the monk inside the bell through that tiny, tiny hole? Netsuke were too popular with Americans.
Iggie wrote about his netsuke in an article published in Japanese in the Nihon Keiza Shimbun, the Tokyo equivalent of the Wall Street Journal. He described his memories of them as a child in Vienna and their escape from the Palais, under the noses of the Nazis in the pocket of a maid. And he wrote of them returning to Japan. Good fortune had brought them back to Japan after three generations in Europe. He had, he said, asked Mr Yuzuru Okada of the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno, the writer on netsuke, to come and examine the collection. Poor Mr Okada, I think, trailing out to a gaijin’s house to smile over another collection of Westerner’s bric-a-brac evening after evening. ‘He met me very reluctantly – I did not know why – and he glanced at about three hundred netsuke spread out on a table as if he were sick of seeing them . . . Mr Okada picked up one of my netsuke. Then he began to carefully examine the second one with his magnifier. At last, after he had examined the third one for a long time, he suddenly stood up and asked me where I got them . . .’
The vitrine of netsuke in Iggie’s house in Azabu, Tokyo, 1961
These were great examples of Japanese art. They might be currently out of fashion – in Okada’s museum in Ueno Park in Tokyo’s National Museum of Japanese