Kakemono : $b Japanese sketchesEdwards, A. Herbage
Religion
Kakemono : $b Japanese sketches
Edwards, A. Herbage
Japan -- Description and travel; Japan -- Social life and customs
had to be made beautiful, and so the pure perfect curves of Fuji were
traced upon the glass. The design was quite small and only occupied
one end, but the area of the glass was no longer blank space, but the
demanded setting to a picture.
There is no place in a Japanese house for wall-papers, but the number
of foreign-built hotels and houses has created a certain demand for
them. Also the Japanese are beginning to export wall-papers abroad. As
the patterns are mostly supplied to them direct from European firms, or
copied from models sent them on order, they have to please their market,
and yet I have seen a wall-paper in a hotel bedroom where two golden
dragons drawn back to back studded a white ground. It was a perfectly
conventional pattern, and at first there seemed nothing remarkable about
it. The tiny dragons, looking something like a _fleur de lys_, occurred
at six-inch intervals. Then it dawned gradually, the intervals were not
regular, they differed both lengthways and width-ways. It took indeed
ten feet of wall before the pattern absolutely repeated itself.
But windows, wall-papers and beer-glasses are new growths, only just
engrafted on to the life of the people. They are still thought of
as something foreign, whereas pipes and pouches, although coming
originally from the West, have in the course of three hundred years
become thoroughly absorbed and transformed by the genius of the nation.
To judge from the old pictures the first pipes were three or four feet
long, with a bowl to correspond, in size and capacity suggestive of
those long wooden pipes with china bowls smoked by the traditional
Dutchman. At the same time we in the West have also been evolving our
pipes and pouches, as the art and the convenience of Europe demanded,
and to-day the British navvy has arrived at his clay and the city
clerk at his briarwood, and both at the gutta-percha pouch. When bent
on “something tasty,” they may indulge in skeleton-head pipes with
carbuncle eyes, or magenta plush pouches embroidered in apple-green
silk. In Japan the navvy (or his wife, for smoking is equally common
to both sexes) uses a doll’s pipe made of a slender bamboo reed, whose
bowl and mouthpiece are of metal, beautifully finished, and holding
just three whiffs of their fine-cut red-brown tobacco. The pouch is
made of leather, fastening like a purse, and the metal snap is always
fashioned into a design, however simple--two birds flying, a fish, a
grasshopper. There is also a leather case to keep the pipe in, like
an open spectacle-case, and the two are fastened together by means of
a twisted silken cord. The pipe-case is stuck into the _obi_, and the
pouch hangs over. It was to allow of the free hang of the pouch, and
also as a finish to the silken cord, that the _netsuké_ was invented,
and some of the most beautiful of museum art objects produced. But
_netsuké_ are not for the navvy or the people, or if they do occur in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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