Abstract
Netsuke immediately appealed to foreigners but antiquarian demand limited growth for artisans. The demand for export art and the dearth of demand for traditional carving crafts like temple images swelled the ranks of ivory carvers. Lacking government assistance, the craftsmen took the future of their profession into their own hands by developing new art forms like okimono and organizing and participating in professional organizations like the Chōkoku Kyōgikai [Sculpture Competition] and Ryūchikai [Dragon Pond Society]. The transformation from artisan to artist and craft to art is elucidated.
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Notes
Marcus B. Huish, “The Evolution of a Netsuke” Transactions and Proceedings of the Japan Society London, Vol. 3, Part IV (1897), 2.
Douglas Sladen, Queer Things about Japan (London: Anthony Treherne & Co. 1904), 427.
Rutherford Alcock, Capital of the Tycoon (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1963), 2:247.
T.P. Scaffner and W. Owen, The Illustrated Record of the International Exhibition of the Industrial Arts and Manufactures and the Fine Arts of All Nations, in 1862 (London and New York: The London Printing and Publishing Company, 1862), 112.
A.L. Liberty, “The Industrial Arts of Japan”, The Decorator and Furnisher, Vol. 17, No. 2 (November 1890), 63–64. Liberty was founder of Liberty and Co. a famous London department store.
See e.g. Okakura Kakuzo, Ideals of the East (London: John Murray, 1903).
H. Seymour Trower, “Netsukes and Okimonos” Artistic Japan Vol. 5, No. 27 (1890), 348.
H. Seymour Trower “Netsukes and Okimonos — Part II” Artistic Japan Vol. 5, No. 28 (1890), 362.
Frank Brinkley, Japan: Its History Arts and Literature, Vol. 7 (London: T.C. & E. C. Jack, 1904), 176–177.
H. Seymour Trower, “Netsuke, Their Makers, Use and Meaning” Frank Leslies’s Popular Monthly, Vol. 45, No. 6 (June 1898), 8.
Ernest Hart, “Japanese Art Work” Journal of the Society of Arts Vol. 34, No. 1769 (15 October 1886), 1215. Hart was a prominent ophthalmic surgeon who edited The Lancet as well as the British Medical Journal, and exposed poor medical treatment in workhouses. “Ernest Hart Dead in London” New York Times, 8 January 1898.
James Yoxall, More about Collecting (Philadelphia: G.W. Jacobs & Co., 1913), 53–54.
Frank Dillon, Exhibition of Japanese and Chinese Works of Art (London: The Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1878), 38. The club was established in 1866 and dissolved in 1952•
Takamura Kōun, Kibori shichijtūnen (Tokyo: Nihon zusho senta, 2000), 147
Myra M. Sawhill, “The Heinz Collection of Ivory-Carvings” Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. 64, No. 2 (August 1918), 256.
Ernest Hart, “Japanese Art Industries” Journal of the Society of Arts Vol. 13, No. 2234 (Friday, 13 September 1865), 870.
Olive Checkland, Japan and Britain after 1859 — Creating Cultural Bridges (New York and London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 31. Sydenham is a suburb of London and it was also where the Crystal Palace was relocated in 1854.
Junichirō Suzuki, “A Resume of the History of Japanese Industries” in Shigenobu Okuma and Marcus B. Huish, eds Fifty Years of New Japan (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1909), 545.
In this text it is called Kiryu Kosho Kaisha. “Kiritsu Kosho Kaisha hojokin shobun” Asahi Shinbun, 27 October 1891: 1.
David G. Wittner, Technology and the Culture of Progress in Meiji Japan (Routledge, 2008), 122–123.
See Martha Chaiklin, “The Fine Art of Imperialism-Japanese Participation in World’s Fairs”, Japan Studies Review Vol., 12 (2008): 71–80.
Edward K. Pratt, Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite: The Economic Foundations of the Gono (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Center, 1999) 74.
Bryan K. Marshall, Capitalism and Nationalism in Prewar Japan: The Ideology of the Business Elite, 1868–1941 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), 27.
William Griffis, The Mikado: Institution and Person (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1915), 310 and Sawhill, “The Heinz Collection”, 256.
See Naito Masamune, ed. Tokyo chōkōkaishi (Tokyo: Privately Printed, 1927.)
Urazaki Eiyo, ed. Nihon kindai bijutsu hattatsushi (Tokyo: Nihon kindai bijutsu hattatsushi kankokai, 1959), 298.
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© 2014 Martha Chaiklin
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Chaiklin, M. (2014). Transformations of the Craftsman. In: Ivory and the Aesthetics of Modernity in Meiji Japan. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363336_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363336_3
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