KINU CHIRIMEN
The painted crapes of Kioto, specially designed for children’s holiday dresses and obis, are works of art, in the manufacture of which the old capital holds almost a monopoly. All the elaborate processes of patterning such crapes were shown us one morning at Nishimura’s great establishment. First, on a square of white crape, wrung out in water and pasted down at the edges on a board, the outline of the principal design was sketched in indigo. This line was then carefully covered by a thread of starch, drawn from a glutinous ball held upon the point of a stick, while the painter turned and tilted the crape to receive it. This starch, or “resist,” as occidental dyers term it, is to prevent the spreading of the colors by capillary attraction, and the limits of every color must be carefully defined, unless the fabric is to be made one of those marvellous studies of blended and merging tints. As soon as the first color dried, the first starchy outline was washed out, and another drawn for the second color. After the removal of each “resist,” the square was stretched on bowed bamboos and dried over a hibachi. The artist had purposely worked out his design with such cunning that it was only when the last touches in red had been given that we discovered the Daimonji’s fires burning on the mountain-side, and a troop of men, women, children, and jinrikishas, all with glowing lanterns, figuring as silhouettes on Sanjio bridge.
When a whole tan of crape is to be painted, much of the design may be stencilled through perforated card-board, but, in general, the best painted crapes display free-hand sketches, with patterns never exactly repeated, nor exactly matching at the edges. After the general outline is sketched, the tan, sewn together at the ends, is made to revolve horizontally on two cylinders, like a roller towel, passing before a row of seated workmen, each of whom adds a single color, or applies the “resist,” and slips it along to the next. Sitting on the mats, the soles of his feet turned upward in his lap, in a pose that a circus contortionist might envy, each workman has a glowing hibachi at his knees, over which he dries his own work. And such work! Hazy rainbows on misty skies, flights of birds, shadows of trees and rushes, branches of pines and blossoming twigs, comical figures, animals, and fantastical chimeras, kaleidoscopic arrangements of the most vivid colors the eye can bear. These painted crapes are beyond compare, and the English and Dutch imitations in printed delaines fall absurdly short.
Following the Chinese example, Kioto silk-weavers now make silk rugs equalling the famous ones of Pekin. Even when new they have a finer bloom and sheen than the old prayer-rugs of western Asia, but their designs, first made from the suggestions of an American house, are neither Japanese, Turkish, nor at all Oriental, nor do they allow the best effects to be obtained. At two dollars a square foot, these thick, soft rugs make the costliest of floor coverings in a country where the cotton and hemp rugs of Osaka sell for a few cents a square foot, and the natural camel’s-hair rugs of North China for eighteen cents a square foot.
CHAPTER XXVII
EMBROIDERIES AND CURIOS
Their range of stitches, their ingenious methods and combinations, and the variety of effects attained with the needle and a few strands of colored silk, easily place the Japanese first among all embroiderers. Although China taught them to embroider, they far surpass the Chinese in design, color, and artistic qualities, while they attain a minute and mechanical exactness equal to the soulless, expressionless precision of the best Chinese work. They can simulate the hair and fur of animals, the plumage of birds, the hard scales of fishes and dragons, the bloom on fruit, the dew on flowers, the muscles of bodies, tiny faces and hands, the patterned folds of drapery, the clear reflection of lacquer, the glaze of porcelains, and the patina of bronzes in a way impossible to any but the Japanese hand and needle. Sometimes they cover the whole groundwork with couched designs in a heavy knotted silk, and this peculiar embroidery has the name of kindan nuitsuké. With floss silk, with twisted silks, with French knots, and with gold and silver thread, couched down with different colored silks, with silk threads couched, and with concealed couchings, a needle-worker attains every color effect of the painter; nor does the embroiderer disdain to use the brush, or to powder and spatter his designs with gold, nor to encroach upon the plastic art by his wonderful modelling of raised surfaces, rivalling the sculptor with his counterfeit faces. His invention and ingenuity are inexhaustible, and the modern craftsmen preserve all the skill of their ancestors.
The oldest existing piece of Japanese needle-work is the mandalla of a nun, kept at Tayema temple in Yamato, which is certainly of the eighth century, although legend ascribes it to the divine Kwannon. Pieces of equal antiquity, doubtless, are in the sealed godowns of Nara temples, but very little is known of them. The latest triumphs of the art, pieces showing the limit of the needle’s possibilities, are the ornamental panels and makemono executed for the Tokio palace, and other work by the same artists exhibited at Paris in 1889. This exhibition work was executed under imperial command at Nishimura’s, the largest silk-shop in Kioto, a place to which every visitor is piloted forthwith. Solid brown walls, black curtained doors, and the crest of three hexagons are all that one sees from without; but the crest is repeated at door-ways across the street and around corners, until one realizes what a village of crape-weavers and painters, velvet-weavers and embroiderers, is set in the heart of Kioto by this one firm. The master of the three hexagons has taken innumerable medals, gold, silver, and bronze, at home and abroad, and, in response to every invitation to make a national exhibit, Government commands are sent him at Kioto. The blank outer walls and common entrance, the bare rooms with two or three accountants sitting before low desks, do not indicate the treasures of godown and show-room that lie beyond. In an inner room, with an exquisite ceiling of interlaced pine shavings, curtains, kakemono, screens, and fukusa are heaped high, while others are continually brought in by the small porters. In spite of the reputation and the artistic possibilities of the establishment, it sends out much cheap, tasteless, and inferior work to meet the demands of foreign trade, and of the tourists who desire the so-called Japanese things they are used to seeing at home.
For the old embroideries, those splendid relics of the national life with its showy and picturesque customs, the buyer must seek the second-hand clothes-shops, the pawn-shops of the land. In the Awata district lives the great dealer who gathers in old kimonos, obis, fukusas, kesas, temple hangings, brocades, and embroideries from the godowns of nobles, commoners, priests, actors, saints, and sinners, to whom ready money is a necessity. Geishas and actors, with the extravagant habits of their kind, are often forced to part with their wardrobes, and the second-hand shops are half filled with beautiful and purely Japanese things which they have sacrificed. When I first beheld “my uncle” of Awata, his was a dark, ill-smelling, old clo’ shop, with two bushy-headed, poorly-dressed attendants. Gilbert and Sullivan unwittingly made his fortune, and the old dealer could not at first understand why the foreign buyers, hitherto indifferent, should suddenly crowd his dingy rooms, empty his godowns, and keep his men busy collecting a new stock. Three years after my first visit there was a large, new building with high-heaped shelves, replacing the dirty old house and its questionable bales tied up in blue cotton, and horribly suggestive of smallpox, cholera, and other contagions. Prices had trebled and were advancing steadily, with far less embarrassment of choice in the stock than formerly.