Jinrikisha days in Japan

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

IN NAMMIKAWA’S WORK-ROOM

In another garden, concealed by a bamboo hedge, is the tiny laboratory, and the one work-room where less than twenty people, all told, execute the master’s designs. One etches these patterns on the copper base, following Nammikawa’s delicately traced outlines; another bends and fastens the wires on the etched lines, and a third coats the joinings with a red oxide that, after firing, unites the wires more firmly to the copper. Others dot the paste into the cell-like spaces, or sit over tubs of water, grinding with fine stones, with charcoal, and deer-horn the surface of the pieces that have been fired. Nammikawa adds the master-touches, and after conducting the final firing, himself gives them the last incomparable polish, after his men have rubbed away for weeks. These workmen come and go as they please, working only when the spirit moves them, and doing better work, the master believes, when thus left to their own devices. All of them are artists whose skill is a family inheritance, and they have been with Nammikawa for many years. The most skilful of these craftsmen receive one yen a day, which is extravagant pay in this land of simple living, and shows in what high esteem they are held. A few women are employed in the polishing and the simpler details, and, while we watched them, were burnishing a most exquisite teapot covered with a fine foliated design on pale yellow ground. This treasure had been bought by some connoisseur while the first rough filling of paste was being applied, and he had bided his time for a twelvemonth, while the slow processes of filling and refilling the cells, and firing and refiring the paste had succeeded one another until it was ready for the first grinding.

Fifty or sixty small pieces, chiefly vases, caskets, and urns, three and four inches high, and ranging in price from thirty to ninety yen each, are a whole year’s output, and larger pieces are executed by special order at the same time with these. Nammikawa does not like to sell to the trade, and has been known to refuse the requests of curio merchants, making his customers pay more if he suspects that they are buying to sell again. It is his delight to hand the precious article to its new owner, enjoining him to keep it wrapped in silk and wadding, and always to rub it carefully to remove any moisture before putting it away. He cautions visitors, when they attempt to handle the precious pieces in his show-room, not to touch the enamelled surface with the hand, the metal base and collar being left free on each piece for that purpose. Nor must two pieces of cloisonné ever be knocked together, as the enamel is almost more brittle than porcelain. Curiously enough, this great artist uses no mark nor sign-manual. “If my work will not declare itself to be mine, then the marking will do no good,” he says; and, indeed, his cloisonné is so unlike the crude and commonplace enamels exported from Japan by ship-loads for the foreign market, that it does not need the certification of his name.

Nammikawa has the face of a saint, or poet—gentle, refined, and intellectual—and his beautiful manner and perfect courtesy are an inheritance of the old Japan. His earlier days were not saintly, although they may have been poetical. He was a personal attendant of Prince Kuné no Miya, a brother of Prince Komatsu, and cousin of the Emperor, and was brought up in the old court life with its atmosphere of art and leisure. The elegant young courtier was noted for his gayety and improvidence. He remained in Kioto when the court moved northward, and all at once ceased his dissipations, even putting aside his pipe, to devote himself to experiments in the manufacture of cloisonné, for which he had always had a passion. In his laboratory there is a square placque, a bluish bird on a white ground diapered with coarse wires, which was his first piece. One can hardly believe that only fifteen years intervene between this coarse, almost Chinese, specimen of his work, and the vases for the Emperor’s palace. From the start he threw himself into his profession with his whole soul and spirit. Incessant experiments in the solitude of his laboratory and work-room at night, and the zeal and patience of a Palissy at the furnace, conquered his province. He is still constantly studying and experimenting, and always fires his pieces himself, keeping long vigils by the little kiln in the garden.

Hurry and money-making he despises. Gazing dreamily out into his garden, Nammikawa declared that he had no ambition to have a large godown, a great workshop, and a hundred workmen; that he always refused to take any large commissions or commercial orders, or to promise a piece at any given time. Neither good art nor good work can be commanded by money, he thought, nor did he want his men to work faster, and therefore less carefully, because greater prices are offered him for haste. It was his pleasure, he said, to take years for the execution of a single piece that might stand flawless before all connoisseurs, and receive its just reward of praise or medals. The latter are dearer to him than any sum of money, and in his own garden he finds happiness with them.

There is a Nammikawa of Tokio who is not to be confounded with this Kioto artist. The Tokio enameller has an entirely different style, a simple design thrown in a broad style upon an unbroken groundwork, easily distinguishing his work from any other; but Nammikawa of Tokio deals directly with the trade, even contracting with foreign curio dealers for seasons of work, and makes replicas of his exquisite pieces by the score for them. Imitators of his style have arisen, and already many cheap pieces, copying his best models, can be purchased in foreign cities.

The idling most delightful of all in Kioto is going over and over again to the same places, doing the same thing repeatedly, and arriving at that happy and eminently Japanese frame of mind where haste enters not; time is forgotten, days slip by uncounted, and limits cease to be. The spring days, when the rain falls in gauziest mist—the rain that is so good for young rice—or summer days, when the sun scorches the earth and burns one’s very eyeballs, seem to bring the most unbroken leisure and longest hours in any agreeable refuge.

Sitting on Yaami’s veranda, with the great plain of the city wreathed in mists or quivering in heat, I have recognized my indebtedness to Griffis, Dresser, Mitford, Morse, and Rein, those authorities on all things Japanese, not to mention Murray and his ponderous guide-book, whose weight and polysyllabic pages strike terror to the soul of the new-comer. Griffis I read, until Tairo and Minamoto, Hideyoshi and Iyeyasu, grew as familiar as William the Conqueror and the Declaration of Independence; Dresser’s text and illustrations were a constant delight and illumination, explaining the incomprehensible and pointing to hidden things; and Morse’s Japanese Homes laid bare their mysteries, and made every fence, roof, rail, ceiling, and wall take on new features and expression. Rein’s is the encyclopædia, and he the recorder, from whose statements there is no appeal, and to him we turned for everything. It is only on the sacred soil that the student gets the true value and meaning of these books; while nothing so nearly expresses and explains the charm of the country as that prose idyl, Percival Lowell’s Soul of the Far East, nor so perfectly fits one’s moods on these long, leisure days, and Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan are of ceaseless delight.

In this Japanese atmosphere the traveller feels what he misses through his ignorance of the vernacular, and is even inspired with a desire to study the language; but a little skimming of the grammar usually brings down that vaulting ambition. It is easy to pick up words and phrases for ordinary use, as all servants understand some English, and every hotel and shop has its interpreter. Upper-class people, whom one meets socially, always speak English, French, or German. Scholars declare that the mastery of the language takes from twelve to thirty years, and the compiler of the standard lexicon modestly says for himself that forty years is not enough. With a few most illustrious exceptions, no foreigner, who has not learned Japanese almost before his own tongue, has ever been able to grasp its idioms so as to express himself with clearness and accuracy. The whole theory and structure of the language are so different from and so opposed to European speech—so intricate and so arbitrary, that the alien brain fails to grasp it. The lower, middle, and upper classes have each a different mode of expression, and the women of each class use a still simpler version. He who learns the court language cannot make himself understood by shop-keepers or servants. He who has acquired coolie-talk insults a gentleman by uttering its common words and inelegant expressions in his presence.