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Ishii Usaburo. 新撰大匠雛形大全 [Shinsen Taisho Hinagata Taizen]. Osaka, Seikado 1897 [Meiji 30]. Six volumes small quarto by size, publisher's embossed wrappers with title labels; illustrations throughout, a couple folding - all lithographed. The cover surfaces well grazed by insects, excellent inside; a rather good set. Au$850
First edition of this excellent builder/architect's pattern book - it was reprinted in 1910 - published just at the time when there was both a cultural argument and a government led reaction against the wholesale importation of western architecture into Japan. This particular book bridges the confrontation between a nationalistic return to ancient temple forms and the fervour for modernisation.
Two thirds of this book is traditional Japanese design, structure and carpentry but the last two volumes introduce western building designs and, in the details, western building methods. Here nuts, bolts and metal brackets replace traditional carpentry and forms in masonry are described. In the last volume are a series of profiles of mouldings, architectural hardware and fairly elaborate gates, fences and entries in western styles.
At this time architecture itself was an innovation - the first generation of trained architects were beginning to replace the craftsman, until then designer and builder. But the Imperial Palace, despite the Emperor's push for modernity for the country, was not built to the designs of any of the western or western trained architects who submitted designs; it was built by the Imperial Carpenter, who went on to teach many of these young, new architects then, in turn, responsible for the resurgence of Japanese historicism.
Hikifuda. A large hikifuda - handbill - or modest poster for Kyoto haberdashery bargain sales. n.p. [Kyoto 190-?]. Colour lithograph 37x26cm. An outstanding copy. Au$650
This splendidly flamboyant and assertive modern young Japanese woman is unlike any other I've seen from this period. Pretty much any period. Being able to decipher phrases like "bargain sale" but unable to decipher the trademark or any particular merchant's name here I suspect this is a sample produced by or for Kyoto silk merchants and haberdashers. Being on much heavier paper than usual for hikifuda clinches the matter for me.
Hikifuda were often produced with blank spaces for the client to insert their particular message. Many were clearly aimed at certain markets and some were so generic that you might see the same image advertising fashion and smoked eel.
Hikifuda. Benkyo Shoten? 和洋雑貨毛織物類 [Wayo Zakka Keorimono-rui]. Hikifuda - or handbill - for a sale of Japanese and western wool textiles. n.p. [190-?]. Colour lithograph broadside 38x26cm. A touch browned round the edges. sold
An exuberant yet elegant thoroughly up to the minute snapshot of a stylish woman - with her painfully exquisite daughter - graciously acknowledging the attention of the shop boy at a busy warehouse sale of fabrics.
Tobacco hikifuda. 喫煙勸誘 [Kitsuen Kan'yu?]. Hikifuda - handbill - or poster. n.p. [190?-]. Colour lithograph 25x37cm. Minor signs of use, a couple of small professional repairs to the margin. sold
A lively and rowdy advertisement that has the look of a town meeting run by a plutocratic lucky god and attended by representatives of Japan throughout the ages. A livid Kintaro holds his axe with two bijin and a sumo wrestler just behind him.
This advertises tobacco and I don't know what else. The largest characters say something about clothes and Karamono, which may be the tea implements. Perhaps someone literate can help.
Yukawa Shodo. War Nurse from the series 今古風俗百美人 [Kinko Fuzoku Hyaku Bijin - 100 Beauties Past and Present]. [Osaka, Wakita Ainosuke?] c1903. Colour wood block print, 42x28cm. A little browning; with full margins. Au$375
Shodo's series is mostly dress up. He put his beauties into costume, gave them a prop or two, maybe a hint of background. And the majority are decorative and little more. But here and there are exceptions. A weaver hold us with her confident gaze, gripping her shuttle like a club, and a couple of his modern women are truly modern rather than mannequins put into trousers. A young student in hakama - men's wide trousers - reading while she leans against the window has the true defiant insouciance of a young woman going places and this nurse is nothing less than majestic with her implacable calm. This is a woman with a job to do. This is not a woman to be ordered about.
Most but not all prints I've seen from this series have the red numbers in Arabic and Japanese at the top which don't relate to the print's place in the series. Is this that French invention - a numbered limited edition? I've seen numbers up to about 130. Some also have a caption in the bottom margin; those I've seen have been both numbered and unnumbered.
Russo-Japanese War Textile Designs. A Kyoto kimono draper's book of original colour designs. n.p. [c1905]. 48 sheets of rice paper oblong folio (28x40cm) pinned together with two metal pins along the right edge; each leaf with one or two colour designs. sold
A wonderful sample book of designs, most likely for the linings of men's and boy's haoris (the inner short coat) for which martial themes were popular. Until Japan's victory over China and, in particular, Russia such themes were inspired by historic battles of samurais but from this time on the privacy of a man's coat leapt with the rest of Japan into the modern world - here with battleship, cannon and rifle; later with aircraft and tanks. Such designs matched the popularity of the senso-e - the vibrant, sometimes chaotic, sometimes peacefully hushed, woodcut prints of slaughter and mayhem.
This book contains a mixture of stylish designs for large central panels and borders - scenes of daily life, familiar landscapes, animals and birds and plants and abstract designs as well as a number inspired by the war with Russia. The designs never stray far from the exquisite in execution but the results are often puzzling, perhaps a bit disturbing: say, the border that is a pattern of post-battlefield corpses and artillery detritus.
The first leaf - three realistic depictions of battleships with a variety of borders - is inscribed in ink (in Japanese) #26 Nihonkai Kaisen Moyo:- the Battle of the Sea of Japan design, also known as the battle of Tsushima, which took place in 1905.
Furuya Korin. 竹づく志 [Take Zukushi]. Kyoto, Unsodo 1906 (Meiji 39). 18x25cm publisher's boards; 50 colour woodcut designs on 25 double leaves, accordian folding. Light signs of use, a rather good copy. Au$1650
Exquisite printing, with metallic inks and dustings of mica, of often exquisite designs by the foremost of neo-Rimpa designers. One of three independent portfolios of designs by Korin each devoted to one plant. This one is bamboo. The others are pines and plums.
Korin, whose name is taken from the original master, started as a gifted but unsurprising designer - prolific and workmanlike in ambition compared to Sekka. But come the twentieth century - the final years of his life; he died young in 1910 - his albums of designs (rather than art) need no apology.
The neo-Rimpa movement is a good exercise in the problems with trying to unpick how, when and what passed from east to west and back again. Westerners may well point out the obvious effects of art nouveau and the stylized simplification and abstraction of French drawing - much of which came out of Japan - and a polite neo-Rimpa artist will nod agreeably before showing you Korin's Gafu from 1802 - our Korin named himself in homage - where near everything we admire most about early 20th century graphic art has been surpassed.
Exhibition - Tokyo 1907. The Tokyo Industrial Exhibition, an extra number of the 'Teikoku Gaho', an illustrated monthly magazine. Tokyo, Fuzanbo [1907]. Quarto publisher's colour illustrated wrapper (a bit used); profusely illustrated throughout, mostly photo illustrations, a few folding, two folding maps, some colour lithographs, including a folding plate of caricatures and an odd depiction of the 'patron goddis of industry'; interspersed sections of advertising on red paper. Au$500
A substantial and very useful round-up of the exhibition; there is a summary in English and the illustrations have English captions. The 1907 exhibition was conceived as an international exhibition but this ambition fizzled due to lack of enthusiasm, if not nerve, on the part of officialdom. Nonetheless this was big stuff, expansive in its inclusion of technology, culture, the arts and popular entertainment - introducing not one but two ferris wheels to Tokyo. And it did pretty good business, apparently atttracting some six or seven million visitors.
Exhibition - Tokyo 1907. 風俗画報 . 東京勧業博覧会図会 [Special number of Fuzoku Gaho devoted to the 1907 Tokyo Industrial Exhibition]. Tokyo 1907. Small quarto publisher's illustrated wrapper (spine worn); four double page plates (two colour), one tinted full page plate, b/w photo illustrations. A bit used but a pretty good copy. English translations of the plate captions on typed slips are loosely inserted. Au$175
The Fuzoku Gaho (1889 - 1916) was Japan's first graphic magazine. I'd like to know who the artist was of some of these plates. They masterfully capture the eagerness for the new, the wonder, the distractions, the shared delights, and the weary resignation of some parents.
Nakazawa Hiromitsu, Kobayashi Shokichi & Okano Sakae. 東洋未来双六 [Toyo Mirai Sugoroku]. Tokyo, Hakubunkan 1907 (Meiji 40). Colour printed broadside, 55x78cm. Minor flaws and signs of use, some ink splodges on the back. sold
A view, or a panoply of views, of a future Asia. Some of these vignettes of what's to come are obvious enough - schoolgirls at rifle drill and sumo wrestlers in striped bathers - but a few seem fairly recondite to me. I'm not sure how much is optimistic, how much is dire warning and how much is wearily stoic.
Nakazawa, Kobayashi and Okano, still young, had been fellow students at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and of Kuroda Seiki, and collaborated on the five volume Nihon Meisho Shasei Kiko, issued over several years.
Tea Label. Smile Extra Choicest Spring Leaf Japan Tea. n.p. n.d. (early c20th?) Colour woodcut 39x34cm. An outstanding, crisply impressed copy. Au$225
A fabulous and puzzling large label - ranji - for export tea chests that would do any sixties' album cover proud. I have learnt that woodcut printing survived for tea labels after other printing went litho because exporters didn't want the ink smell contaminating their tea. Printing quality was high, this was international advertising, but the labels that survive are of course remainders or samples. I take this to be a sample - the paper is good quality and heavy and the printing immaculate - for a label maybe never used. I have looked through hundreds of labels online without finding any Smile Tea. Can an expert put me straight?
This has what a label needs: bright colours, bold contrast, lively typography and an arresting design. But it doesn't have what other tea labels have: a pretty picture that foreigners will immediately recognise as Japan. No elaborately kimonoed beauty, no Fuji, no lucky god. No kimonoed beauty on a tea plantation terrace with a lucky god in attendance and Fuji in the distance. What we have is a happy but somehow sinister character.
With those ears he is surely a wrestler. But bald? Was there a happy bald wrestler famous enough in Japan that someone thought he might translate to the outside world? An ex-wrestler who became famous as the eternally cheerful muscle for the mob?
Ogawa Usen [also known as Soju Usen]. 草汁漫画 [Soju Manga]. Tokyo, Hidaka Yurindo 1908 (Meiji 41). 255x190mm publisher's printed wrapper (some wear, spine chipped); [6],136;[4],[8]pp; woodcut illustrations throughout, a few colour, most printed in sienna. Originally stapled, the staples have perished; a used but very decent copy in a modern chitsu. Au$750
First edition of Usen's first book; a facsimile was published in the seventies. A lively collection of pictures, seemingly naive at times but as Hillier said of a later book - Sangushu (1921) - "The childlike naivete of the original sketches is ... actually the acme of sophistication ... the artist is as elliptical as the poet." (Hillier; The Art of the Japanese Book). Usen hadn't yet attained the fame that brought the quality of printing his later work has but he makes up for that here with humour and imagination.
Usen studied western painting before starting his career as a newspaper and magazine illustrator and is among the best of the generation of artists born and educated with the Meiji, soaked in both the foreign and the nationalistic reaction to the foreign, and determined not to step backwards into regurgitating tradition nor become mimics of the west. Some of his late work seems refined to the point of kitsch to me but when sleek expensive art journals publish articles in English on the hitherto neglected anarchistic aims of Usen's early work we know that he has truly arrived.
OCLC finds no copy of this outside the National Diet Library.
幾何文様 [Kika Monyo - Geometric Patterns]. n.p. n.d. [c191-?]. Oblong folio (275x365mm) decorated cloth with paper title label (some insect nibbling of the cloth); 50 double page leaves of light card bound as an accordian fold - meaning that each design is 275x730mm and given enough room the whole could be opened out some 36 and a half metres - each a design painted in gouache with some metallic and transparent layers. Rubbing or offsetting of colours here and there and a few leaves with some adhesion at each edge, nothing too serious. Au$3500
A spectacular collection of large designs and something of a mystery. This is a sophisticated, professional production for presentation; this is not an artist's personal scrapbook and there is nothing amateurish or studentlike about the designs or the album; but I can't find a name anywhere. On the back of some sheets are some sketched pencil designs and occasional characters, nothing I can interpret. Design competitions were held in the textile trade in the early 20th century and entered albums of designs were both serious and anonymous; perhaps this was for some such competition.
One current chic kimono maker (撫松庵 ) has a signature pattern that looks like it was lifted almost whole from this album. If this was western I would date it to the sixties, perhaps the fifties, but I have no hesitation declaring this decades earlier. I have seen a 1913 album of original designs that contains what could be one of the dullest designs in this.
It took me a while to see that page after page of this album comes from the same six straight lines - the hemp (Asanoha - 麻の葉) pattern. Plenty of cultures mastered ornamental pattern, even an Englishman, Robert Billings, did a good job in the 1850s, but no-one seems to be able to re-invent over and over from the most simple foundation with such vibrant strength as a Japanese designer of this calibre.
Once Japan took back and redigested - from the late 19th century on - what the west had taken from Japan, what we regard as modernism, I find it almost impossible to decide what is borrowed and what was always theirs. Can I see the influence of the scraperboard technique popular in the twenties or is it the development of the traditional asymetrical graining of nature? I saw a giant Argyle sock but it is, I think, based on the swastika design popular in textile design for centuries. And what would have been produced using smart new technology in the west - plastics, spiral binding perhaps - has been put together with materials and techniques unchanged for a couple of centuries or so.
The previous owner of this firmly equivocated and dated it somewhere between 1900 and 1940. After studying it for some time I think he was right. But having seen some of these patterns used in early Taisho books and posters, I narrow it down to between 1910 and 1920.
Teruha toiletry poster. 白麗水 [Hakuresui or Hakureisui]. A shop poster for Hakuresui toiletry to whiten the skin and remove blemishes. Osaka, Takegaki Shokai c1910. Colour lithograph 53x38cm on quite heavy paper. In excellent condition with the original metal strips, top and bottom, and ribbon loop for hanging in a shop. sold
Among the myriad images that use race superiority and fear to sell goods - particularly soaps, toiletries and cosmetics - this is the weirdest and most hypnotic that I've ever seen. The weirdness intensifies if you know that the model is Teruha, maybe Japan's most famous geisha and pin-up girl at the end of the Meiji and through the Taisho period. So sex is not just implicit, it's inter-racial sex. This is probably Japan's most desired woman, or child.
Born Tatsuko Takaoka, in this poster she is 14 or so and has possibly graduated from her apprentice name, Chiyoha. Sold by her father at 12, her virginity was soon sold to the president of the Osaka stock exchange and by the time she was 14 she had been engaged to one wealthy business man, promised to another and had a secret affair with an actor. The extended left pinkie finger must be a joke about her misguided sacrifice to love which earnt her yet another name: the Nine Fingered Geisha.
Before and after - or with and without - comparisons were nothing new in Japanese advertising. Neither were celebrities: courtesan prints sold patent medicines long before the Americans arrived and Bismarck adorned adverts for a patent syphilis cure that did for medicine what Bismarck did for Germany. Darkie - coon, nigger, whatever you want to call it - advertising images were obviously not unknown but neither can they have been familiar enough to be taken for granted and reproduced to the American and British formula in the way that the jazz age negro became a standard pattern to be played with by artists and designers in Japan as everywhere else. There is more than hint of a jovial tengu, spirit or minor god here, but for that suit.
Nakamura Fusetsu. 世界一周双六 [Sekai Isshu Sugoroku]. Tokyo, Asahi Shimbun 1910 (Meiji 47). Colour printed broadside 55x78cm. Folded as issued, mild browning and signs of use. With the playing pieces intact in the margins. sold
An elegant sugoroku - racing game - issued by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun to celebrate the 1910 Anglo-Japanese Exhibition in London.
Nakamura was a star of the generation that studied western painting and went on to forge a new style of Japanese painting, enlivening magazine work and book illustration.
Dye colours. Kohiyama H. (?). An album of annotated dyed fabric swatches with the binding title, "Dyed Pattern - The Higher Technical School of Tokyo - H. Kohiyama." n.p. [191-?]. Oblong folio (28x38cm) half calf (scuffed and worn but solid); Some 1600 samples mounted on both sides of 62 lined leaves - plus some unused leaves. A couple of swatches missing and couple insect chewed. Copiously annoted in ink. Au$1500
The "Higher Technological School" of Tokyo was third name for what is now the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Founded in 1881 as the Vocational School it graduated to Higher in 1901.
As a colour dictionary I've not seen many that can match 1600 samples. Here is a thorough record of dye colours, their ingredients, recipes and processes. Much is Japanese but names, chemicals and quantities are in English and doubtless any reasonably proficient dyemaker, anywhere, could reproduce these colours now. I'm not sure what it means but I notice that some reds that include alizarine paste are not colour fast - a few have left strong impressions on facing pages. I'd guess that H. Kohiyama was the instructor and this was likely bound by the school bindery.
Hikifuda - fashion. 河喜商店 A small hikifuda - handbill - advertising fashion from Kawaki Shoten in Ogawamachi in Tokyo. Tokyo [c1910?]. Colour lithograph broadsheet 18x19cm. Illustration on one side, text in blue on the other. An old crease. Au$65
Small but chic. Is the young dandy wanting the stylish but undeniably bourgeois family to move on or is that merely a dandy's customary expression of disdain?
Ota Saburo. 朝霧 [Asagiri]. Tokyo, Seibido 1912 (Meiji 45). Two volumes 19x13cm publisher's colour illustrated wrappers; excellent in a mildly shabby publisher's box; illustrated in colour throughout. An outstanding copy. Au$1300
"A series of small colour prints of astonishing invention and charm," said Hillier in the Art of the Japanese Book and there is no need to improve on that. Hillier was uncertain as to what is woodblock and what is lithography and I'm not sure it matters much. The tangle of western and traditional technique and discernment could take years to untangle with artists and books like this. The covers play with the popular sword and sash novels of an earlier generation for which some great artists did woodblock covers that put together formed a picture. Warrior on one and beauty on the other was standard.
Ota Saburo is among the best of the generation of artists who studied oil painting and refused to become a western copyist, instead forging new a Japanese art which saw some of the most delightful illustrated books you could wish to see.
Design. An album of designs for textiles and/or paper. c1913-1920's? Large folio cloth [620x430mm]; 24 card leaves with 39 mounted original colour block prints (3 double page). Expected signs of use but nothing drastic; one print removed. Au$1200
Doubtless the designer's album of designs, these are proof prints from the blocks, each show the shape where the repeat pattern fits. The first pages are annotated with details of the client ('Achete a George. 9 Rue St Fiacre Paris' - in earlier decades this was the home of a calico manufacturer, which makes sense, and now houses a public relations firm and Ella Bache, which is neither here nor there) and the engraver (Gillet, sometimes in concert with someone else); the details dwindle as the album proceeds until we reach the large and dramatic geometric design in black and white which was "vendu a Mrs Bosset".
Dating these designs to 1913 would seem foolish but for the first few leaves being dated 1913 in the top corner; two or three are dull, traditional floral patterns but the rest, while by no means radical avant garde, would sit more happily in the next decade or two - some are really quite stylish.
The theme is floral, or at least botanical although one is based on a Chinese cloud pattern; several are oriental in style or inspiration and one is a very stylish piece of Japanese abstraction. I'm pretty sure this is the work of a Japanese designer in Paris or with Parisian clients. Partly because it most recently came from Tokyo, mostly because of the ineluctably Japanese elegance of several designs.
Tokyo. 東京名所万世橋広瀬中佐銅像 [Tokyo Meisho Manseibashi Hirose Chuza Dozo?]. Tokyo 1913 (Taisho 2). Colour lithograph 27x40cm. A bit rumpled. Lightly tipped at two corners onto card. sold
The statue of Hirose Takeo - Russo-Japanese War hero - was erected in 1910 and in 1913 the monumental pile of Manseibashi station - opened in 1912 - should be right behind him. It would spoil the composition of this view so it has understandably been omitted.
Once the eyes stop watering these acid trip views of late Meiji and Taisho Japan start to make sense. They may have started as a cynical grab at attention for cheap, often nasty, prints but after a while they become a celebration of being in a place and time so exciting that no portrait can be too brightly, too impossibly, coloured. Photographs may be in some way a more reliable record but no photographer could gather the cast of characters - and the characters include trams and motor cars and the latest fashions - and arrange them to so capture the thrill of being out and about in Tokyo on a Taisho afternoon.
Shopping sugoroku. Kawabata Ryushi & Hoshino Suiri. 買い物双六 [Kaimono Sugoroku]. Tokyo, 1914 (Taisho 3). Colour printed broadside 79x55cm. Minor signs of use; a nice copy. sold
The New Year gift from the magazine Shojo no Tomo - the Girl's Friend. Shopping and fun, fun and shopping, indivisible here as it should be. There is a zen-like approach to this. The goal is the top balcony where the winner can gaze with calm detachment back and down on the world of the great department store. Only by immersing yourself in the experience can you come to comprehend. As the master who gave me the only coherent account of zen I ever heard said, as he bit the top off the eleventieth bottle of beer, "When you're drinking you're only drinking."
Kawabata's career took a curious turn during a 1913 stay in America to study western painting. Apparently he was so impressed with the Japanese art he saw in Boston he switched to being a Nihonga painter. Still, he remained being an illustrator for magazines for quite some time. As did most of the early to mid 20th century artists now revered.
Fire safety poster. Hokkaido Police. A fire safety poster produced by the Hokkaido Police. Hokkaido-cho Keisatsubu, 1918 (Taisho 7). Colour lithograph 79x54cm. A bit of browning, a short marginal tear and piece from one corner. sold
As a fan of safety posters I can tell you they are not known for subtlety, taste or elegance. I'm not sure whether the quite delicate style and colouring of this makes it more or less chilling. In any case nothing could be more chilling than your sleeping infant burning while you gossip over tea. And not only is the baby barbequeing, it is Japan's most precious family treasure - a boy. On a value scale I'd say it goes boy then house then girl.
