'Havel na Hrad' - Thirty Years On

Souvenir Series #12

Thirty years ago, on the 17^th November 1989, a series of political protests began in Czechoslovakia which culminated in the peaceful passing of totalitarian one-party state power from the Communist Party, who had ruled the country for 41 years, to an open democratic, multi-party system. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe had begun earlier that year with the rise of solidarity movements in Poland and Hungary, but really got going with the highly symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9^th. Watching these events unfolding as they were reported each evening on BBC TV News broadcasts in the UK, it seemed like a miracle was occurring. After so many years living with the threat of the Cold War, and having seen only very recently the brutal authoritarian state suppression of the student led democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square just a few months before in the tragic summer of 1989, the magnitude of these events felt huge. The Eastern Bloc seemed to suddenly fall apart like a house of cards. The opening up of East Germany (GDR), Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and just two years later the actual collapse of the USSR itself truly signalled that the world was entering a genuinely new era, one which seemed to be characterised with unbounded hope and forward-looking optimism. I was entering my early teens at this time. I had always been fascinated and frightened in equal measure when watching the Soviet military parades on the TV News bulletins. The ranks of goose-stepping soldiers marching past the Kremlin followed by huge mobile rocket launchers laden with ominous-looking ballistic missiles motoring past the grey faced grandees of the Soviet Communist Party leaders seemed such a contrast to our own rather quaint and faintly ridiculous-looking Trooping of the Colour ceremony every year!

Sometime around Christmas that year at a family gathering I eagerly quizzed a relative who had been travelling in Europe at the time of these remarkable events. He’d managed to get to Berlin and then he’d travelled on to Prague in time to witness the Velvet Revolution as it happened. On 29^th December the former dissident playwright, Václav Havel, was elected as free Czechoslovakia’s new President. This was something which really fascinated me – how could a playwright become a President? – My relative was handing out chips of concrete smashed from the Berlin Wall to everyone as historic souvenirs when he ducked out of the room. Returning a moment later he placed a crumpled roll of papers into my hands telling me I could keep them. Intrigued I unrolled the large sheets to find they were a set of posters, each bearing the smiling face of the dissident playwright with bold red letters proclaiming “Havel na Hrad” – “Havel to the Castle.” The Hrad being Prague Castle, the official office of the President.

I knew even then that these were important, tangible pieces of history. Only a few years later I too travelled to Europe and the former Eastern Bloc. I went on two student exchanges to the newly reunified Germany – first staying with a West German family in Hannover, and then secondly staying with an East German family in Berlin. These two experiences had a profound effect upon me. They gave me a realistic grounding upon which to build a greater understanding of these events. The peaceful resistance movements which stood up to these totalitarian regimes fascinated me. My interests at school in literature and activism concerning human rights issues began to coalesce at this time, hence, following on from that initial question of how could a playwright become a President, I became very interested in samizdat (banned and unofficial literature circulated privately and secretly in typescript) as an underground phenomenon, as a means of resistance, and an expression of the irrepressible human urge towards freedom. Later on at university, as part of my undergraduate degree in anthropology, I researched and wrote a short dissertation on the subject of samizdat and civic resistance. On the wall of my bedroom in my student digs at the time, blu-tacked above my desk was one of the posters of Václav Havel which I’d been given that Christmas back in 1989.

I read a lot of Václav Havel’s plays and his political prose. I particularly liked the Vaněk Plays which managed to twist situations, suspicions and sympathies through clever word-play in the fine tradition of absurdist theatre. Essays such as ‘Power of the Powerless’ which expressed his concept of resistance through the everyday acts of choosing to ‘live in truth’ rather than buying into the little lies which make us all complicit in our own oppression seemed to resonate beyond the totalitarian constraints which he was fighting against, it seemed to me that they could equally well apply to the way we choose to live and organise our lives in the West and how much credence and legitimacy we afford to our own political leaders and the kind of powers they exercise over us in our collective name. It seems ironic that the Castle which Havel managed to enter after so many years of frustration and persecution was perhaps somewhat prophetically akin to the Castle which inspired the Prague born writer, Franz Kafka, to which his much beleaguered character, K, was never granted admittance. That idea of the everyman pitted against the overwhelming bureaucracy of the impenetrable machine which is trying to break him is a theme which has continued to intrigue me, and in many ways has evolved or transmuted even into the core question of my current PhD research – how the individual fits into and navigates the enormity of the systems of imperialism and global history, how we each strive to survive especially if we’re not fortunate enough to be in the upper echelons who seem to have all their advantages handed to them on a plate.

A subversive birthday greeting to 'Ferdinand Vanek', a character in one of Havel's plays, published in an official Communist Party-run Newspaper on Vaclav Havel's birthday in 1989

It’s no wonder then that one particular essay of Havel’s painted a vivid picture which has never faded from my mind. It’s a short piece of prose, playfully titled ‘Meeting Gorbachev,’ originally published in 1987 only two years before the events of the Velvet Revolution and Havel’s election as President, in which he describes how one evening, whilst he is out walking his dog he happened to pass a theatre, outside which a small gathering of people are waiting to get a glimpse of a great man. The great man is Mikhail Gorbachev, then the leader of the USSR, who was on a State visit to Prague and was being entertained at a gala performance that evening. Havel stops to watch the ‘Glasnost Czar’ and finds himself (despite his opposing convictions) gradually being seduced by the man’s charisma, sucked into the collective spirit of anticipation he unconsciously finds himself waving at Gorbachev and Gorbachev waving back in that strange disconnected sense of intimate connection which arises between a celebrity and their fan, fused together by the unreal intoxication of close proximity. Havel was by no means a wholly obscure, nor unknown character at this time, but even still, despite the thawing of authoritarianism which Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost (Openness) and Perestroika (Restructuring) were beginning to initiate, that leap which propelled Havel to the Castle still seemed almost unimaginable at that time. Yet only two years later in his first Presidential New Year’s Address he was able to speak candidly to the Czechoslovakian people, opening with the following words: “For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme: how our country flourished, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. – I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.” – No longer a playwright leading a dissident movement, he was now leading a nation in transition, a world leader – like Gorbachev, standing on a world stage.

In the summers of 1992 and 1993 London seemed to be full of second-hand market stalls selling off old Soviet memorabilia. I used to rummage through these – mostly army surplus: old uniforms, enamel badges, fabric patches, peaked caps and the like. I never bought anything, though I knew acutely that these things were the material remnants of an era which had now ended – these were tangible pieces of history which were slowly being dispersed and lost, merging into the blank space of the future, dissolving memory into the stuff of history books and dusty museum displays. The few tangible pieces of this history which I had in my possession – two tiny fragments of the Berlin Wall, four posters of Václav Havel, and a small, blue toy Trabant – were more than enough for me, because they were part of a lived experience, my lived experience, something which was greater than the sum of its parts. The experience of seeing real Trabants beetling about the streets of Berlin, of talking to German friends from both sides of that former dividing Wall, the Iron Curtain itself, hearing what life had really been like for them and how it had all so suddenly fallen apart and what they felt about it. Seeing and touching and breathing-in the last days of that moment in history for myself, and the fact that it was all suffused with that genuine sense of hope and optimism was something which had entered too deep into my soul to ever be forgotten or subsumed even by the passing of time. I can still picture it all so clearly in my mind.

It’s amazing now to talk to younger friends and colleagues who have no or next-to-no knowledge of these things. The Cold War is just a murky blank, merely the backdrop to old James Bond movies and redundant spy novels. It’s a defunct era. This seems almost incomprehensible to me, but that is simply the way of the world. Time does move on. And the world has changed so much in just the last two decades. We’ve accelerated at light speed, our fingers firmly pressed to the fast-forward button. The recent past has been all too swiftly eclipsed. But such memories and experiences are the important things which we really need to pass on. I realise now that it must have felt very much the same for my grandparents’ generation in the decades that followed on from the Second World War; they understood how vital it was that their life stories and experiences should be passed on. Some say that history is cyclical – that it has a tendency to repeat itself if we’re not careful. The current rise of nationalism and its discontents are proof enough, should we care to notice it.

The main set of posters I was given were designed by Joska Skalnik, using a photograph taken by Miloš Fikejz, and show Havel very much as a man of the people with the call to send ‘Havel na Hrad.’ The second poster is a version which depicts Havel in a much more statesman-like manner, dressed in a smart suit and with the tag line promising a ‘guarantee of free elections.’ Both posters are notably in the national colours of white, red and blue. Thirty years is a long time ago now in many respects. Even though there are still many people alive who remember those events – the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution, the collapse of the USSR – people who  remember it all far more intimately than I do. I feel it’s important that these remembrances on each major anniversary shouldn’t be allowed to fade quietly from our collective memory. And so perhaps my small part in keeping those memories preserved and accessible for the future has been partly fulfilled in a small way this year by my donating those election posters – as tangible pieces of history – to the British Library to mark this thirtieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution; where I hope they will be used by curators and visitors in the study rooms and in future exhibitions seeking to understand and interpret the past, and to remember those days in Czechoslovakia in the last two months of 1989, when anything seemed possible and all possibilities seemed so positive; when the future was still to be found and was still something to be looked forward to.

Also on 'Waymarks'

"The Wind of Change" - Germany 1991 & 1993 

Rest In Peace - Vaclav Havel (1936-2011)

The Buddha at Kamakura - Japan

Souvenir Series #11

Oh ye who tread the Narrow Way

By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,

Be gentle when the heathen pray,

To Buddha at Kamakura!

Curiously, this verse about a statue in Japan begins the first chapter of Rudyard Kipling’s novel, Kim (1901) – a story set in India about a young European lad who has “gone native.”

Kimball O’Hara is the orphaned son of a dissolute Irish soldier – “a poor white of the very poorest” – adopted by a half-caste woman with an opium habit. Kim is a ragamuffin, wild and free, who befriends an old Tibetan Lama and together the unlikely pair end up on an eccentric and circuitous adventure travelling through northern India together. The young boy, Kim, is Kipling’s idealised bridge between the East and West. It is a puzzling novel which, somewhat out of joint with the time when it was penned, explores the Anglo-Indian fascinations of its author to the full – posing its readers many questions. Indeed, if “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” – what are we to make of Kipling’s idea of the Buddha at Kamakura?

At its heart much of Kipling’s work is marked by a distinct pessimism. Man lives in a state of constant war with the world around him. All is but a welter of chaos and mayhem waiting to descend. He is chiefly remembered today as 'the poet of empire' on one hand, and the father of the Jungle Book (1894) and Just So Stories (1902) on the other. As such, he is a hard literary figure to quantify. Fantastically popular in his day, he is now tainted with post-colonial guilt for being ‘the foremost poet of Victorian Imperialism.’ But he was very much a man disjointed and out of place. Born in India, but British; not an Indian, but neither wholly at home in his mother country, Britain. The curious melancholy found in his works is not as nihilistic, nor quite as intensely navel gazing, as the works of his contemporary, Joseph Conrad. But both Kipling and Conrad lived long enough to witness the Great War, an upheaval which in effect began an epochal sequence-shift of global transitions that would in time bring an end to the high era of Western imperialism.

Readers today still truly love Kipling’s Kim. Perhaps because of the author’s sympathies with arguably his most memorable character. Kim, the boy, is perhaps an attempt by Kipling to reconcile the diversity of a mixed up world of opposites. It can be read as an ecumenical plea for openness, for tolerance, for reconciliation, for magnanimity, for understanding. The book does this by skilfully offering up parallels, pairing the active and the passive; the secular and the sacred; youth and age; the individual and the community – this structure forms the moral and intellectual heart of the book. Indeed, Kim is described as the “Little Friend of all the World.” And as such, he subverts the subaltern with sympathies which weren’t exactly common for the novel’s time. Kim is actually one of us, but he’s also our key to accessing the inner lives of those who are not us – he is as much one of them, those who are the Oriental ‘other.’ Kim is the true child of empire in the sense that he has no particular home but rather he has the whole world for a home instead. Interestingly though, Kim is not a ‘eurasian’ child, he is specifically of European descent; but nevertheless he perhaps represents the cross-cultural unity which, Kipling perhaps suggests, we should all be seeking.

For whoso will, from Pride released,

Contemning neither man nor beast,

May hear the Soul of all the East

About him at Kamakura.

Kipling visited Kamakura in 1892.  In From Sea To Sea (1899), he rather poetically described the place as “Kamakura by the tumbling Pacific, where the great god Buddha sits and equably hears the centuries and the seas murmur in his ears.” My Rough Guide is less romantic and rather more dismissive, but I’m with Kipling – I think the place is sublime. I’ve visited the Great Buddha, the 大仏 ‘Daibutsu’, several times and it is true that it attracts a huge number of visitors, particularly on holidays and weekends when the weather is fine; but there’s something to the serenity of the statue which seems to transcend the noisy throng of people. If anything they bring a sense of life which sets the Buddha in a human context, as you clearly sense that the Buddha is truly loved. Maybe it’s something about his pose, or the calm set of his face, as well as his sheer size and his surprising age. 

Completed in 1252 and built under the orders of Minamoto Yoritomo (1147-1199), founder of the Kamakura Shogunate, the Daibutsu is made entirely of bronze. There is a little side door beneath the stone pedestal through which you can actually climb inside the statue. Two large louvers in the statue’s back allow light and air inside, and here you can better appreciate how the Buddha is constructed of multiple sections which have been fused together. Outside the seams have been burnished so that the surface appears smooth, continuous and unbroken. The Great Buddha was originally covered in gold leaf, traces of which can still be seen if you look carefully. Originally the Daibutsu was housed within a temple building, probably rather like the Great Buddha of Tōdai-ji at Nara (built in 1709), but a series of earthquakes and tsunamis over time repeatedly destroyed the temple yet always leaving the Great Buddha remaining seemingly unmoved. A celestial hint perhaps that the Diabutsu wanted to remain sitting out in the open, hence since 1498 he has sat in calm meditation beneath the slow rotation of the stars and the sun.

My first encounter with the Daibutsu was actually in Tokyo when I came across this rather weighty statuette on an antiques market stall by Shinobazu Pond in October 2003. Made of moulded red resin he sits 23.5 cm high, 14 cm wide, and 10 cm deep. On Christmas Day of that year I made my first visit to Kamakura, but on that occasion I never actually reached the Daibutsu. I spent the day getting there, leaving the train at Kita-Kamakura and making my way, down the valley on foot, visiting the Zen temples that line this route. But I took too long doing so and by the time I reached Kamakura itself – the Daibutsu was closed. Instead, the spiritual end to my journey found me sitting alone on the beach, watching the sunset whilst attempting to eat sushi without it being stolen by enormous dive-bombing kites!

A few years later though, I returned to see the Daibutsu properly; this time buying the small silver Buddha as a souvenir (4.5 cm high, 3.5 cm wide, 2.5 cm deep). The little silver Buddha still sits by my desk, acting as a salient reminder of the importance of contemplation and serenity; and hopefully acting as a totemic brake on the absurdly frantic pace of the modern world with all its impossible demands.

I also have a magnificent old book, entitled Wonders of the World, which was published in the early 1920s (worthy of a future Waymarks article of its own), which has an impression of the Daibutsu embossed onto its spine. Inside, under one of several entries for places in Japan, the book marvels at the science and statistics of the Daibutsu: “A description of it seems nearly sacrilegious when brought down to measures and weights. Its height is forty-nine feet and circumference ninety-seven feet two inches. The length of the face is eight feet five inches, and in the huge forehead is set a silver boss thirty pounds in weight and fifteen inches in diameter. The eyes, fashioned in pure gold, look out from lids three feet eleven inches long, whilst the ears and nose have dimensions of six feet six inches and three feet nine inches respectively. The mouth is three feet two inches from corner to corner, and on the head are eight hundred and thirty curls, nine inches high each.”  

It’s curious to note that this secular emphasis on the scientific and the statistical is paralleled at the Big Buddha on Lantau Island in Hong Kong, which was built much more recently. When I visited in 2007 there was a very assertive display of information panels in the rooms underneath the Big Buddha which proudly outlined the technical feat of construction which the huge monument embodied, also emphasising the political point that it was one of the last major beneficent civic projects completed during Hong Kong’s period of British colonial administration (which only ended in 1997), but said almost nothing about the Buddha or the religious tenets of Buddhism which such an image is usually meant to convey. This seemed like quite an oversight to me. But making this observation at the time very much put me in mind of Kipling and Kamakura. I think Kipling might well have reflected the same. An act of faith can certainly produce as well as transcend a technical marvel, but is the technical feat a more transcendent universal which crosses or unifies a cultural and temporal divide?
 

A tourist-show, a legend told,

A rusting bulk of bronze and gold,
So much, and scarce so much, ye hold
The meaning of Kamakura?

But when the morning prayer is prayed,
Think, ere ye pass to strife and trade,
Is God in human image made
No nearer than Kamakura?

Related Reading on Waymarks:

Reflections on Travel & Research

Peter Hopkirk –Historian of “The Great Game”

Wonders of the World

Tian Tan – the Big Buddha of Lantau

A Visit to the Kilns of Arita - Japan

Souvenir Series #10

This year marks the 400^th anniversary of the birth of a remarkable tradition of specialist ceramic art in Japan. Porcelain production began centuries earlier in Korea and China, but the transfer of skills from these two regions to the ceramic artisans of Arita, on the southern island of Kyushu, soon lead to a flourishing development in Japan. By the 1640s porcelain wares from Arita were being exported to Southeast Asia, and later in that century they began to reach as far afield as Europe by means of trade through the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-indische Compagnie, or VOC). The porcelain produced in Arita was called ‘Hizen’ or ‘Imari’ ware (伊万里焼) because it was largely shipped from the port of Imari in the former Hizen Province of northwest Kyushu.

This type of porcelain, with its distinctive patterns and designs, had a profound influence on the potteries of the West. Indeed, writing in 1882, Christopher Dresser, a noted commercial and industrial designer from Britain who toured Japan, commented that: “This ware has been so much copied in Europe that I cannot divest myself of the feeling that it lacks an Eastern aspect. But this feeling arises from the fact that patterns which characterise Arita wares have been familiar to me from childhood, and I must confess that, viewed from an art point of view, it is to me the least satisfactory of all Japanese wares.”

Dresser was travelling in Japan at the time of the ‘Satsuma Rebellion’ and so never visited Arita himself, a fact which might perhaps have also coloured his view. Dresser was treated as an honoured guest by the Emperor and toured extensively throughout central Honshu. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic Movement, and as such his work had a profound influence back in England where the ‘Anglo-Japanese style’ affected modern trends in the decorative arts and architecture during the last half of the 19^th century. Dresser's dismissal notwithstanding, Arita itself remains to this day a celebrated and vibrant producer of highly sought-after and much coveted porcelain and other ceramic wares.

My Imaemon Iro Nabeshima Dish

In the Spring of 2004, whilst I was working at the Fukuoka Bijutsukan, I spent a gloriously sunny day, with the famous cherry blossoms in full bloom, exploring Arita with a curator friend who specialises in Japanese ceramics. Because of this connection I was lucky enough to see behind the scenes and learn firsthand how Arita wares are created. We visited two kilns, both of which had been established 400 years ago with the distinctive skills of ceramic production at each being handed down through the generations, from father to son. 

My Gagyu Sake Flask & Two Sake Cups

Arita lends itself both geologically and topographically to the production of porcelain. Porcelain stone was first discovered here around 1610, it is also a region of densely wooded, sloping mountains with fast flowing streams, thus providing the perfect combination of resources – porcelain stone as raw material, water for processing those materials, abundant wood for fuel supply, and the natural inclines needed to build the linked-chamber, climbing-style of kilns (noborigama 登り窯) required for creating and firing such ceramics.

The first kiln we visited was that of Imaizumi Imaemon XIII (1926-2001). Imaizumi learnt the porcelain with overglaze enamel technique in the Nabeshima style from his fater, Imaizumi Imaemon XII (1897-1975). This technique, known as iro-e jiki (色絵陶器) refers to the application of polychrome enamels to the surface of a ceramic vessel at different stages in its firing process. Colours such as red, yellow and green are painted with a brush onto an already glazed and fired surface which is then fired again at a lower temperature. The temperature of the re-firing is dependent on the chemical composition of the enamel colour, hence polychrome wares can be re-fired several times before they are finished. Such techniques are likely to have come to Japan from China. It was fascinating to see the care with which these enamels are painted onto the ceramics by hand, and how the colours applied transform from dull grey-green hues into bright reds and vivid greens or luminous blues after firing. Seeing inside the enormous kilns was fascinating too. Arita kilns are built utilising the steep incline of the surrounding hills which helps to regulate different temperatures as required at various points in the long stretch of the kiln. Imaizumi Imaemon XIII was designated a ‘Living National Treasure’ in 1989, and, at the time I visited, had only recently been succeeded by his son, Imaizumi Imaemon XIV (born 1963), who is continuing the Imaemon tradition. 

The Imaemon Kiln

Since the post-war recovery period of the 1950s Japan has had a system in place for recognizing certain artists and crafts-persons as ‘holders’ (hojisha 保持者) of ‘important intangible cultural property’ (jūyō mukei bunkazai 重要無形文化財). In this sense the Japanese Government seeks to support a particular craft skill, such as those found in making ceramics, textiles, lacquer, metalwork (with the exception of swordsmiths), or wood and bamboo crafts, by recognising the artist as its officially designated holder. Perhaps naturally enough, over time this concept has more popularly become associated with the individual artist rather than their particular art per se – and, as such, they are now more commonly referred to as ‘Living National Treasures’ (ningen kokuhō 人間国宝). These individuals are held in high esteem throughout Japan and much cherished in their local areas. By the time they are chosen they are often already in their fifties or sixties or older. They receive a modest stipend from the government in order to maintain their traditions and to help them pass on their skills to the subsequent generation. Yet such traditions in Japan are far from preserved in aspic. Just as the ‘Living National Treasures’ are individual people who grow and age with time so too do the crafts and techniques which they nurture during their tenure of that designation. That sense of tradition (dentō 伝統) in Japan is very much characterised by what Japan’s most famous poet, Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), described as a process of ‘constancy and change’ (fueki ryūkō 不易流行). Change is the dynamic by which tradition is kept vibrant, and constancy (or continuity) is the means by which that renewal is harmonised and made most natural. Transition occurs organically through transmission, the old continually becomes something new without jarring with what has gone before.

Gagyu Gama (臥牛窯 or Gagyu Kiln) was the second kiln I visited. Yokoishi Gagyu is similarly designated an ‘Intangible Cultural Asset’ or a ‘Living Cultural Treasure’, a title bestowed by the Nagasaki Prefectural Government in 1975. He is the thirteenth master of the Gagyu kiln, which was also founded around 400 years ago. The curious name, “Gagyu,” is said to have been derived from a visual aspect of the kiln – which the feudal lord of the Hirado clan, Chinshin (Shigenobu) Matsuura, thought looked like an ox lying down on the ground (the literal meaning of the term, 臥牛 gagyu), and so the name stuck! … The Gagyu workshop practises the ‘hakeme’ (刷毛目) technique, using a red clay rich in iron which once thrown is then overlaid with thick coatings of a white slip laid by ‘hake’ (刷毛) or wide flat brushes to create a unique variety of striations. The Gagyu kiln is now the only kiln in Japan to produce ‘Utsutsugawa-Yaki’ (現川焼) wares with the hakeme technique. And Gagyu Sensei himself was a warm and welcoming host with large hands which he took pride in showing me were remarkably softened and smoothed by years of working with the soft clay – a real genuine labour of love, as he described it.

In Japan such arts and crafts are deeply cherished. A visit to any city or large town in Japan will invariably find a number of exhibitions being held devoted to one or more of these areas. Likewise, it’s possible to buy these arts and crafts works in many different outlets – I’ve seen Gagyu Sensei’s works on sale in the big department stores in Tokyo, and Imaizumi Imaemon XIV’s works can be found in a number of very prestigious museums worldwide (including the V&A and the British Museum). Television programmes, newspapers and magazines regularly focus upon the works of such ‘Living National Treasures.’ There have been strong connections with the arts and crafts movements of the West too, notably Bernard Leach’s collaborations with Yanagi Muneyoshi and Hamada Shōji in the ‘Mingei’ (Folk Crafts) movement in the early 20^th century, yet the arts and crafts movements are perhaps cherished and nurtured in Japan to an extent and in a manner which is unlike anywhere else in the world. It’s truly a vital part of the Japanese way of life and their outlook on the world and our place within it – it’s both an awareness and an appreciation. Pervading all things and everything we do is that fluid yet timeless essence of continuity and change.

My Imaemon Iro Nabeshima dish is: 16.9 cm diameter, 2.8 cms depth. My Gagyu sake flask and cups are: 10.7 cms height; 6.1 cms max. diameter (flask); 4 cms height, 5.5 cms max. diameter (each cup, x2); single Gagyu sake cup with blue floral design: 5.1 cm height, 5.1 cm max diameter.

~

An exhibition at the British Museum (Room 3, Asahi Shimbun Displays) titled Made in Japan: 400 Years of Kakiemon Porcelain from June 23^rd to August 31^st 2016 examines the work of another ‘Living National Treasure’ from Arita working in the Iro-e technique.

Large Bowl with Azalea decoration, made by Sakaida Kakiemon XIV (British Museum)

References & Further Reading:

‘Living Treasure’, by Tim Clark (The British Museum Magazine, Number 58, Autumn 2007)

Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan, by Nicole Rousmaniere [ed.] (London: The British Museum Press, 2007)

‘A Parade of Colours’, by Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere (The British Museum Magazine, Issue 78, Spring/Summer 2014)

‘Red onto Porcelain’, by Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere (The British Museum Magazine, Issue 84, Spring/Summer 2016)

Traditional Arts and Crafts of Japan, by Christopher Dresser (New York: Dover Publications, 1994) [First published as Japan: Its Architecture, Art, and Art Manufactures (London: Green & Co., 1882)]

A History of the World in 100 Objects, by Neil MacGregor (London: Allen Lane, 2010) - Object 79: Kakiemon Elephants (see here)

Korean “Onggi” – Traditional Earthenware

Health & Safety at Work – Handling Japanese Swords