上野公園清水堂西郷南州銅像之図 [Uenokoen Shimizu Do Saigo Nanshu Dozo no Zu] Tokyo, Tsunashima Kamekichi 1908 (Meiji 41). Colour woodcut 27x39cm. Rather good. Au$125
An almost sombre day in Ueno Park in comparison with the psychedelic colouring of cheap lithograph views of the time. Still, you can be sure that the photographer at work turned out less exciting views than this. The statue is of Saigo Takamori. Least said about him by me the better.
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 of a book I'm yet to see in good shape, in a modern chitsu. Au$350
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).
A captivating but badly put together 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.
Hikifuda. Tsumura Juntendo. 中將湯 - へルプ [Chujo Yu - Herupu]. [Tokyo? 1908-09]. Colour lithograph 265x375mm. Old vertical folds, stabholes in the right margin and tips clipped from the left corners indicating it was once part of an album. A pretty good copy. Au$225
Tsumura Juntendo - still in business - began selling herbal remedies in Tokyo in the 1890s and 'Help' - Tsumura's herbal wonder cure for women - went on the market in 1907. This handsome hikifuda - handbill or poster - includes a calendar for 1909.
Miyatake Gaikotsu. 奇想天来 [Kiso Tenrai]. Osaka, Gazokubunko 1910 (Meiji 43). 26x19cm publisher's wrapper with printed label; [2],30pp on double folded leaves, 16 pages in colour woodcuts, 14 in b/w. Minor signs of use, rather good. Au$900
Charming, delightful, if you like being taken aback every now and then, baffled often, and can overlook the occasional tortured pun. This is very much in the spirit of Miyatake's series of sometimes bewildering and surreal series of postcards issued as extras to his humourous newspaper, Kokkei Shimbun, in 1907. Miyatake wasn't the artist as far as I know, he was writer and publisher and directed his stable of artists to produce the sort of images he enjoyed. The kind of humour he enjoyed apparently earned him four prison sentences. He was a revered senior (senpai) of banned publications by his death. His work had been banned 43 times.
The text may solve the mysteries of several images; it may explain the point of the book, if there is one. I leave that to you. Worldcat finds no copies outside Japan.
Hikifuda. 六神丸 アプト - 富山製剤株式会社 [Rokujinmaru aputo - Toyama Seizai Kabushikigaisha]. Toyama Pharmaceutical [191-?]. Three lithographs 39x18cm each. Au$300
A trio of carols to modernity, the future and whatever it is that Rokujinmaru does. Some sort of herbal medicine, presumably it makes children joyous, smart and eager to speed into the future.
Nakamura Fusetsu, Takahama Kyoshi, Kawahigashi Hekigodo & Natsume Soseki. 不折俳画 [Fusetsu Haiga]. Tokyo, Kokado 1910 (Meiji 43). Two volumes 30x17cm publisher's cloth* wrappers, title labels (the first a touch nibbled); 20 colour woodcuts by Fusetsu in each volume plus woodcut titles and another colour print in the second; Natsume Soseki's preface printed as a manuscript in umber. In a cloth case missing its clasps, title label stamped with five red seals including what looks to be Fusetsu's and at least one of the other contributor's own seals (that on the title of the second volume - is it one of Soseki's innumerable seals?). A remarkably bright copy of a book prone to foxing. Au$800
Is this a large paper or deluxe copy? The first thing that struck me when these arrived was how tall they are and I can't find a record of any other copy much less than an inch shorter (and thinner when a clear enough picture is available). Or is it just that copies measured and catalogued as first editions aren't? This copy does not have and never had the publisher's announcements and colophon at the end of each volume like the copy reproduced by the NDL.
Haiga - the mix of picture and haiku - is by 1910 very old school and Fusetsu's drawings have a direct lineage to Buson. But Fusetsu was a star of the generation that studied western painting and went on to forge a new style of Japanese painting which, given ink and paper and freed from the weight of oil, canvas and the academy, breathed life back into Japanese drawing with the same sharp eye but more affection than their European contemporaries, making the best of those draughtsmen look a bit mean and studied.
*Neither can I find another copy bound with what looks like a loose weave muslin.
Exhibition - Nagoya 1910. 第十回関西府県連合共進会全図 [Daijikkai Kansai fuken rengen kyoshinkai zenzu]. Nagoya Yodatsu Goshigaisha 1910 (Meiji 43]. Colour lithograph 54x78cm with b/w map and photos of Nagoya on the back. Rather good with illustrated outer wrapper. Au$200
A handsome large birds-eye view. The 10th Kansai Prefectural Union Exhibition was a big jump from previous shows, held every three years since 1883. This was meant to put Nagoya on the map and so it did. Apparently more than two and a half million visitors went through.
Hikifuda. 学用品 ... [Gakuyohin ...]. np [191-?]. Colour lithograph 26x38cm. A nice copy. Au$135
Presumably this hallucinatory hikifuda dates from around the first world war. At first I feared that the 'clay' of 'clay pigeons' had been lost in translation but these dopey looking young soldiers are concentrating rather than thick or stoned. The young men and animals of Japan are prepared.
Hikifuda - small posters or handbills - were usually produced with the text panel blank. The customer, usually a retailer, had their own details over printed, so the same image might sell fine silk or soy sauce. Here, I believe, the products on offer are school supplies.
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?
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. A couple of tiny edge chips, a near invisible repair to a short tear; a rather good copy. Au$1200
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. Born Tatsuko Takaoka, in this poster she is about 14 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 jokai, tengu, spirit or minor god here, but for that suit.
Hikifuda. 高橋屋 ... 太郎丸 ... [Takahashiya ... Taromaru ...]. n.p. [c1910?]. 26x38cm colour woodcut. Margins browned. Au$125
I don't know what Takahashiya sold, I'm sorry, but I can tell you that Taromaru is in Toyama and that this patriotic hikifuda celebrates the royal family who in turn celebrate Japan taking to the air. That's the crown prince, soon to be emperor Taisho and some family: wife and presumably his oldest child, Hirohito.
These hikifuda - small posters or handbills - were usually produced with the text panel blank. The customer, usually a retailer, had their own details over printed, so the same image might sell fine silk or soy sauce.
Paper toys. A gathering of eleven Taisho period cheap and flimsy paper games and booklets. n.p. 1910s to 20s. Sizes range from 8x5cm to 17x11cm closed. Obviously never used. Au$400
These look very much like they were gifts that accompanied something else or were rewards for coupons or suchlike. Five, including the origami-like soldier, fold out to be 'board' games with playing pieces inside; two are cinema like thrillers on accordian leaves and the two smallest are puzzling envelopes containing blank sheets and what looks like talcum; finally are the two booklets, smaller illustrated in black and white, larger in colour, telling the story of the Tongue Cut Sparrow.
Specimen Hikifuda. Hikifuda of lucky gods driving a motor car. n.p. [1911]. Colour lithograph and woodcut 52x38cm. Stab holes in the margin show it was once in an album. Horizontal fold; quite good. The picture is lithographed, the calendar woodcut. Au$200
An extra psychedelic extravaganza in experimental colour showing lucky god Ebisu being chauffered by Daikokuten. These two did embrace modernity and had very good tailors as can be seen when the occasion demanded a smart suit or an even more smart uniform. Here they haven't dressed; it's just two friends on an outing. Maybe a joyride. I wonder whether it was good luck to have these two snaffle your car.
These hikifuda - small posters or handbills - were usually produced with the text panel blank. The customer, usually a retailer, had their own details over printed. The handy calendar is for 1912.
Hikifuda. Hikifuda of a woman driving a motor car. n.p. [1912]. Colour woodcut 53x37cm. Old folds, rumpling and a couple of small repairs. Au$800
A while ago I offered a 1914 printed hikifuda something like this and asked whether anyone had seen an earlier picture of a Japanese woman driving a car? Now the answer is: I have. Cars and planes were the password for modernity through the Taisho, especially in advertising like this, but sleek women were driven by sleek husbands or chauffeurs. This is radical stuff. It's not until well into the twenties that women behind the wheel became common. Common but not really acceptable. Cars were driven by Mogas - modern girls - louche young women with bobbed hair and short skirts: flappers. The history of early Japanese women motorists, in English, is blank. Can some expert out there help?
These hikifuda - small posters or handbills - were usually produced with the text panel blank. The customer, usually a retailer, had their own details over printed. In this case it was Tamachi Taya of Kaneko-mura. The handy calendar is for 1913.
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 western copyists, instead forging new a Japanese art which saw some of the most delightful illustrated books you could wish to see. Here he is gently subverting traditional Japanese forms for a radical end. The women are delicate and lovely but they are delicate and lovely with lovely big feet, capable hands and a hint of perspiration more than perfume.
Catalogue - Iron gates, fences &c. Handa Shonosuke Shoten. 製御門扉鉄柵類 [Sentetsuseio Monpi Tetsusakurui?]. Tokyo, Handa Shonosuke Shoten [c1913]. Lithograph broadside 40x56cm. A couple of small blotches, still a nice copy. Au$100
A handsome array of iron gates, fences and doors. Very similar - but not quite the same - to a broadside from the same place dated 1913.
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, partly because it most recently came from Tokyo and partly because of the modern simplicity of several designs.
Specimen hikifuda. Hikifuda of a woman driving a motor car. n.p. [1914]. Colour woodcut 52x38cm. Stab holes in the margin showing it was once in an album; a little browned and minor signs of use. Rather good. Au$500
An shockingly early picture of a Japanese woman driving a car. Cars and planes were the password for modernity through the Taisho, especially in advertising like this, but sleek women were driven by sleek husbands or chauffeurs. This is radical stuff. It's not until well into the twenties that women behind the wheel became common. Common but not really acceptable. Cars were driven by Mogas - modern girls - louche young women with bobbed hair and short skirts, flappers. The history of early Japanese women motorists, in English, is blank. Can some expert out there help?
These hikifuda - small posters or handbills - were usually produced with the text panel blank. The customer, usually a retailer, had their own details over printed. The handy calendar is for 1915.
Exhibition - Tokyo 1914. 東京大正博覧会各館之光景 [Tokyo Taisho Hakurankai Kaku Kan no Kokei] Tokyo, Shobundo March 1914 (Taisho 3). Colour lithograph 39x55cm. A bit rumpled along the bottom edge with a couple of short tears in the margins. Rather good. Au$150
Fine views of the psychedelic Taisho exposition - to celebrate the enthronement of the emperor - held in Ueno Park, which introduced any number of technical advances to the Japanese, including an escalator and a cable car. 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 so capture the thrill of being out and about in Tokyo on a Taisho afternoon.
Specimen hikifuda. Large hikifuda of a boy flying his mother in a monoplane. n.p.n.d. (1914). Colour lithograph 53x38cm. Stab holes in the top margin, catalogue number on the back, showing it was once in a specimen book. Folded rather than creased. Au$200
That woman and child are modelled on the crown princess and her first son - Hirohito - as they were a few years before. She is adventurous enough to go skylarking but still the boy must drive. Around and below are most of the things that make Japan Japan - cherry blossoms, industry and Fuji.
Hikifuda - small posters or handbills - were usually produced with the text panel blank. The customer, usually a retailer, had their own details over printed, so the same image might sell fine silk or soy sauce. This one is double the standard size; the timetable or calendar is for 1915.
Trams (streetcars). お伽絵本 : 電車づくし [Otogi Ehon : Densha-Dzukushi]. Tokyo, Seibido? 1914 (Taisho 3). 12x17cm publisher's woodblock colour illustrated wrapper; four double folded leaves with eight colour woodblock prints. An outstanding copy. Au$200
The quality of printing in this celebration of the tram goes down hill once we're past the front cover but the cover is worth it, what with the silver printing and sprinkles. And inside there is a too rarely seen view of a boy being knocked off his bike.
This is maybe not properly a modern akahon (red book), the ultra cheap and lurid kids books that came out of Osaka but it is a blood relation.
日本海軍 - 教育繪話 [Nihon Kaigun - Kyoiku Ebanashi]. Osaka, Enomoto 1917 (Taisho 6). 19x13cm publisher's colour illustrated wrapper; 10pp including wrapper, seven full page colour illustrations. Expected browning of the paper, short marginal tear and a nibble from the front wrapper; pretty good for one of these cheap booklets. Au$165
The glory of the Japanese navy for kids in the eye watering colours of akahon (red book) tradition. This is apparently the fifth edition, it first appeared in 1915.
Catalogue - medical and dental equipment. Kawai Shoten, Tokyo. Caialogue [sic] 醫療器械圖譜 (?) No. 5. [Iryokikkai Zufu?]. Tokyo, Kawai Shoten 1917 (Taisho 6). 22x15cm publisher's printed wrapper (covers somewhat shabby & ragged); [4],200pp, illustrated throughout. A used but decent copy. Au$200
An extensive catalogue of medical and dental equipment and all the necessary ancillaries - furniture, laboratory equipment, a few artificial limbs, and so on. This is Kawai's fifth catalogue but I can't find a record of any of them.
日比谷公園鶴の噴水光景 [Hibiyakoen Tsuru no Funsui Kokei]. Tokyo 1918 (Taisho 7) Colour lithograph 39x55cm. Folded, a nice copy. Au$200
There is some warp in time operating around the Hibaya Park fountain where men and women from their grandparents' generation promenade with present day residents and pioneer aviators from the previous decade appear overhead. Only a couple of children seem to notice.
TAUT, Bruno. アルプス建築 [Arupusu Kenchiku] Alpine Architektur. Hagen, Folkwang 1919 [ie Tokyo, 1944]. 36x26cm publisher's flexible cloth and dustwrapper; title page in Japanese and 37 leaves consisting of 29 monochrome mounted leaves (title and contents leaves, five section titles and 22 plates) and eight colour lithographs. Covers chewed around the edges and along the spine, dustwrapper torn but pretty much all there. Usual browning of the uncoloured leaves. With the booklet containing the Japanese translation. Au$700
This might be the most curious Japanese book on western architecture. It's officially part of the collected works of Taut in Japanese (Tauto Zenshu) but while his other works were translated and collected into four solid sensible octavo volumes, here the original has been followed faithfully, lavishly. A translation was provided as an inserted booklet.
It has been sorted out thanks to the generous diligence of a librarian at the Art Institute of Chicago (the only library I could trace that had both versions) who, twice, compared them side by side and sent me a list of seven plates that vary in image size, that this isn't a re-issue of original sheets - once a common claim. So this is no photographic process reprint; the colour plates are proper colour lithographs that match the originals. While there's no doubt that elaborate and fine printing could be and was done in war time it still doesn't make sense. The flimsy translation booklet is what we expect from wartime printing - why not do a better job with that? The binding is war time, the printing is not.
So when were these plates produced? Were they prepared with Taut when he was in Japan - by 1936? The whole business of a collected edition of Taut in the middle of the war becomes something of a circular puzzle. Japan's ties with Germany are clear enough and the Japanese showed their appreciation of radical German modernists, or expressionists, like Taut and Mendelsohn pretty much even before Germany did, and Taut had spent years in Japan. But he was part of the exodus from Germany in 1933 and had died in Turkey in 1938. Still, a devoted band of fans did manage what seems unimaginable and got the job done.
Visionary, the term mostly used to describe this book, is often just another word for lunatic and Taut's utopian scheme for these monumental crystal structures marching across the mountain ranges of the world is captivatingly nutty. If this were to be judged on its own we would have just another eccentric, if endearing, relic of a dead end dream. But, in place in a cohesive group of theoretical writing and extensive design, both built and unbuilt, possible and impossible, this book wielded influence beyond its limited circulation in advancing the notion that, for the architect, principle, theory and social concern were tools as important as a T-square.
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