Author: lwhelan

Author: Nakamura Tekisai 中村 惕斎 (Japanese, 1629-1702)

Illustrator: Shimokōbe Shūsui 下河辺 拾水 (Japanese, ?- 1798)

Date: [1789]

Medium: Black-white woodblock printed book; ink on paper

Description: volume 4; 23 cm; fukurotoji (pouch binding)

Publisher: [Kyōto皇都(京都): Kyūkōdō 九皐堂]

Call Number: Arthur Tress Collection. Box 69, Item 14.

Gift of Arthur Tress

This item is from the revised and enlarged edition of the very first Japanese illustrated encyclopedia originally published in 1666 (Kanbun 6).  In this edition published in 1789, there are over 1500 entries grouped in 21 categories including astronomy, architecture, geography, occupations, insects, animals and plants, and each entry is written in both kanji and kana.  This particular item is volume 4 of the 21-volume set, and the subject of this volume is “people,” mostly categorized by their occupations.  What is curious about the entries is it mixes the other-worldly figures in with the humans.  It is also notable that foreigners are closely grouped with mythical figures such as the “long legs” and “giants.”

 

Nakamura Tekisai 中村 惕斎 (1629-1702) was a self-taught Neo-Confucian scholar who was sometimes described as a hermit, as he devoted himself to studying a wide range of subjects. As Tekisai writes in the preface of the original edition, he compiled the encyclopedia in hopes to educate and enlighten his own children. His other works include Hime kagami, a women’s didactic book written in Kana, which he also wrote for his young daughter.

Shimokōbe Shūsui 下河辺 拾水 (?-1798) is thought to be Nishikawa Sukenobu’s pupil, and he has illustrated various books in his career, including didactic books, kokkeibon, and illustrated guides.

 

Other impressions

Asian Art Collection, Brooklyn Museum

Japanese Rare Book Collection, National Diet Library, Tōkyō, Japan

Melikian Collection, Arizona State University Library

Waseda University Library

Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard Art Museums

 

Selected reading/bibliography

Armstrong, R, C. (1974). Nakamura Tekisai, Light from the East: Studies in Japanese Confucianism (pp. 78-83).

Ishigami, Aki. (2017). 「訓蒙図彙」考序論―絵入百科事典データベース構築とともに. Proceedings of the Overseas Symposium in Otago: Japanese Studies Down Under: History, Politics, Literature and Art. (pp. 69-78). Kyoto, Japan: International Research Center for Japanese Studies.

 

Posted by Eri Mizukane

February 19, 2020

Artist: Ōnishi Chinnen 大西椿年

Date: 1834

Medium: fukurotoji (pouch binding), woodblock printed; ink and color on paper; paper covers

Publisher: Ōsakaya Genbei, Kobayashi Shinbei

Gift of Arthur Tress, Tress Box 8, Item 2, https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9977502571303681

Other Known Copies: The Pulverer Collection in the Freer Gallery of Art, National Institute of Japanese Literature, The British Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Volkenkunde (Leiden), and New York Public Library

This album is one of Ōnishi Chinnen’s best known works published under his artist name, Sonan. The Sonan gafu is a luxurious book showcasing the skillful hand of Chinnen, one of the most accomplished artists trained under the Shijō school, which was particularly lauded for its elegant portrayals of the natural world. In the Sonan gafu, Chinnen exhibits his artistic range in 25 double-page illustrations that feature everything from botanicals to bucolic boating parties. The variety of subjects covered in this album distinguish the work from Chinnen’s earlier book, Azuma no teburi, which presented illustrations that were centralized around a single theme of modern life in the Eastern capital of Edo.

The subjects of Sonan gafu dwell far from the metropole and their gentle pace of living is evoked immediately in the album’s opening image of a turtle. Subjects of the natural world are interspersed amongst scenes of folklore, making the reading experience of Sonan gafu one of serene pleasure and visual escape. In one scene, Chinnen depicts a handsomely dressed woman on the cusp of painting—her calligraphy brush teasingly grazes an unfurled scroll. The whiteness of the unpainted scroll is contrasted with the ornately patterned fabric of the woman’s costume. Chinnen’s manifold acts of painting in this image—both his and the promise of the woman’s—form layers of meaning and rendering intrinsic to the processes of block-printing that were used to make the image. The resulting interplay between the artist, the image, and the audience is what animates Chinnen’s delicate compositions into lively and engaging subjects.

Selected Reading:

Brown, Louise Norton. Block Printing & Book Illustration in Japan. London: Routledge, 1924, pp. 106.

Hillier, Jack. The Art of the Japanese Book. New York: Sotheby’s Publications, 1987, pp. 768-72.

Keyes, Roger S. Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan (The New York Public Library in association with the University of Washington Press, 2006).

Mitchell, C. H., with the assistance of Osamu Ueda. The Illustrated Books of the Nanga, Maruyama, Shijo and Other Related Schools of Japan. A Biobibliography (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1972).

Toda, Kenji. Descriptive Catalogue of the Japanese and Chinese Illustrated Books in the Ryerson Library of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: 1931; repr., Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2004).

 

Posted by Ann Ho, Fall semester, 2019

Artist: Ōnishi Chinnen 大西椿年

Date: 1819

Medium: fukurotoji (pouch binding), woodblock printed; ink and color on paper; paper covers

Publisher: Osakaya Genbei, Kobayashi Shinbei

Gift of Arthur Tress, Tress Box 22, Item 13, https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9977502751403681

Other Known Copies: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Pulverer Collection in the Freer Gallery of Art, National Institute of Japanese Literature, The British Museum

This e-hon, or picture book, by Ōnishi Chinnen (1791-1851) is bound in pale blue paper covers and decorated with large mica roundels stenciled in silver. Titled Azuma no teburi, this is Chinnen’s best known work, and it chronicles the daily frenzy of urban life in the capital: manual laborers ply their trade, women engage in domestic chores, and a toy-seller hawks his wares near playing children. The scenes are rendered with a graphic, highly gestural line that was distinctive of artists trained under masters of the Shijō school. Chinnen was pupil to both Tani Bunchō and Watanabe Nangaku, who repopularized naturalism in their use of birds and flowers as subjects. Chinnen’s lively strokes add a sense of movement and immediacy to his subjects, as if the scenes were drawn from close proximity. The viewer of Chinnen’s work thus becomes like a voyeur, and enjoys the pleasure of gazing unhurriedly at a scene that would quickly pass in the street. This quality illustrates what Jack Hillier calls the peculiar “limpidity” of Chinnen’s drawings. (Hillier 769)

Chinnen was born to a high-status family and worked as an official checker of government rice warehouses at Kuramae. The scenes of Azuma no teburi are topical to Chinnen’s civic occupation and daily work-route through the city. Each scene spans two pages and is framed by a thin black border. In one scene, the border frame is broken when two children play hanetsuki, a badminton-like sport, and their birdie bounces beyond the border. Here, Chinnen visually communicates the interplay between the boundaries of the game and the boundaries of the artist’s print block. By doing so, he engages the reader in a bit of wordplay in a text that has virtually no words. As such, Azuma no teburi broaches the question of its audience. What sort of 19th c. reading public is assumed by the sociological, civic, whimsical themes of Chinnen’s picture book?

Selected Reading:

Brown, Louise Norton, Block Printing & Book Illustration in Japan. London: Routledge, 1924, pp. 106.

Hillier, Jack. The Art of the Japanese Book. New York: Sotheby’s Publications, 1987, pp. 768-70.

Note: Book cover may have Sorimachi Shigeo’s handwriting

Posted by Ann Ho, Fall semester, 2019

Artist: Ōtsuki Gentaku 大槻玄沢, Banzui, Shigetada.

Title:  Kankai Ibun 環海異聞

Date: ca. 1807

Medium: Handwritten manuscript with hand-painted illustrations; Chinese ink and watercolor paint.

Location: Kislak Center for Special Collections – Arthur Tress Collection. Box 8, Item 9. See link.

See digital images here

Gift of Arthur Tress

Ōtsuki Gentaku’s Kankai Ibun (1807), also referred to as Strange Tales of a Circumnavigation, tells the adventurous story of sixteen Japanese sailors who were shipwrecked on the coast of Russia in 1793. The four surviving sailors stayed in Russia for more than ten years as tutors in the Japanese language and returned to Japan in 1804. Together with Shimura Kōkyō, Gentaku compiled the text for the illustrated travel account based on oral evidence, reporting on the experiences of the Japanese men in the Western world[1]. Originally the manuscript consists of 15 (or occasionally 16) volumes and was produced throughout nineteenth-century Japan[2].

The edition offered here includes 5 double-page and 2 single-page hand-colored illustrations. The same number of illustrations exist in volume 9 and 10 of similar copies[3]. Both volumes depict scenes of the sailors’ stay in St. Petersburg. The existence of stains and water damage that can only be found on one-half of the manuscript, suggests that our edition has been recomposed. Based on visual comparison of the individual illustrations with other existing copies, it can be observed that every illustration has its own individual characteristics in terms of color and specific details. It seems therefore unlikely that the maker has made any use of printing techniques[4].

The manuscript includes among others, illustrations of the launch of a hot air balloon and the sailor’s visit to the giant Globe of Gottorf in the Ethnographical Museum at the Academy of Sciences on Vasiliev Island[5]. In addition, two portraits of Catherine the Great and Tsar Alexander I are included[6]. The colorful illustrations give us a glimpse into the Japanese representations of the East-West encounters, during a persistent period of isolation. More specific, at the end of the Edo period the Japanese perceived the Russians as violent ‘red barbarians’ and enemies[7], which explains the Japanese interest in this particular kind of manuscript that allowed them to learn more about their rivals.

As an influential scholar in the field of both medical as well as Dutch studies (rangaku), the Japanese physician Ōtsuki Gentaku (1757-1827), also known as Banzui or Shigetada, is mainly rewarded for his role in the expansion of Western knowledge in Japan. He is not only recognized for his influential writings on Western science, but also as the founding father of academy in Dutch studies, the Shirandō Academy, opened in 1786[8].

Another impression of this manuscript is in the SOAS Library in London. Other volumes of Gentaku’s Kankai Ibun originating from the beginning until the end of the nineteenth-century can be found in the USC Libraries East Asian Library (Los Angeles), the Alaska State Library & Historical Collections (Juneau), The Melikian Collection in the ASU library (Tempe, Arizona), the Doshisha University (Kyoto) and the Kyoto University Library.

Selected Readings

• Ikuta Michiko, ‘Changing Japanese–Russian Images in the Edo Period’ in Japan and Russia: Three Centuries of Mutual Images, Yulia Mikhailova and M. William Steele (eds.) (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2008), pp. 11–31.
• Margarita Winkel, Discovering different dimensions. Explorations of culture and history in early modern Japan (Leiden: Leiden University, 2004).
• Martin Ramming. “A description of the Gottorp globe in a Japanese manuscript book.” Imago Mundi, Vol. 9 (1952), pp. 103-105.
• Terrence Jackson, ‘Ōtsuki Gentaku: Network Facilitator’ in Network of Knowledge: Western Science and the Tokugawa Information Revolution (University of Hawai’i Press, 2016), pp. 24-40.
• Tsuneharu Gonnami. Images of Foreigners in Edo Period Maps and Prints. Diss. University of British Columbia, 1998.

Posted by Hilda Groen

October 28, 2019

[1] Launch of a hot-air balloon in St Petersburg and portraits of the Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, Alexander I and Elizabeth in SOAS Library, London. http://digital.soas.ac.uk/LOAA005806/00001, accessed on 23 October, 2019.

[2] Japanese castaway manuscripts volume, Kankai Ibun, Exotic Tales Around the Oceans Stock ID #157024, Asia Bookroom. https://www.asiabookroom.com/pages/books/157024/japanese-castaway-manuscript-volume/kankai-ibun-exotic-tales-around-the-oceans, accessed on 23 October, 2019.

[3] The same 5 double-page and 2 single-page hand-colored illustrations appear in volume 9 and 10 out of the 15 volumes in total of the kankai ibun (1807) that is now in the Alaska State Library (see https://vilda.alaska.edu/digital/collection/cdmg21/id/15404/) and the Rare Books Collection of Doshisha University (see https://doors.doshisha.ac.jp/duar/repository/ir/22419/?lang=1 and https://doors.doshisha.ac.jp/duar/repository/ir/22420/?lang=1).

[4] When you compare the different examples that can be found of the illustrations of Catherine the Great and Tsar Alexander I, it can be observed that every portrait has its own distinctive facial features and use of color. See for instance Kankai Ibun (1850) Christie’s Lot 123, 8 – 19 December 2014; Kankai Ibun (1807), Vol.10, Alaska State Library; Kankai Ibun (1807), Vol.10, Rare Books Collection of Doshisha University.

[5] Martin Ramming, ‘A description of the Gottorp globe in a Japanese manuscript book’, Imago Mundi, Vol. 9 (1952), pp. 103-105.

[6] Otsuki Gentaku (text by), Edo period (circa 1850), Lot 123, SALE 5932, Christie’s 8 – 19 December 2014, https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/japanese-art-english-court/otsuki-gentaku-text-by-edo-period-circa-1850-123/13754, accessed on 23 October, 2019.

[7] Ikuta Michiko, ‘Changing Japanese–Russian Images in the Edo Period’ in Japan and Russia: Three Centuries of Mutual Images, Yulia Mikhailova and M. William Steele (eds.) (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2008), p. 25.

[8] Terrence Jackson, ‘Ōtsuki Gentaku: Network Facilitator’ in Network of Knowledge: Western Science and the Tokugawa Information Revolution (University of Hawai’i Press, 2016), pp. 24-40.

Posted by Tim Zhang

Artist: unknown

Title: Takadachi 高館

Date: 1625

Medium: Monochrome moveable type and woodblock printing; ink and color on paper

Publisher: unknown

Gift of: Arthur Tress Collection. Box 69, Item 13, https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9977502838303681

This impression of Takadachi belongs to an early genre of printed books known as tanrokubon. Featuring both printing and hand coloring, tanrokubon are important in the history of the book in Japan as a bridge between hand-painted manuscripts and later fully printed books. The most prominent colors for these books were tan, the bright red-orange featured in this volume, and roku, a deep green, hence the name tanrokubon, or red-green books. The largest market for these books was in the Kan’ei era (1624-1644), but it eventually faded as demand changed.

Takadachi tells the story of the last days of the famous twelfth-century samurai Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159-1189), adapting it for a seventeenth-century audience. Hunted down by the forces of his half-brother Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147-1199), Minamoto no Yoshitsune and his loyal followers make their last stand at Takadachi fortress in the north of Japan. Realizing their inevitable defeat, Yoshitsune and his forces prepare for battle and hold a last feast. When the enemy takes the castle and kills all of Yoshitsune’s retainers, Yoshitsune commits seppuku (ritual suicide) to avoid dishonorable capture. 

Many of these twelfth-century events were regarded as mirroring those of the 1615 Siege of Osaka, when the Toyotomi faction was defeated by the Tokugawa coalition. The authors of Takadachi used the tale of Yoshitsune to draw a parallel with the fate of the Toyotomi. This practice of translation and historical allusion was common throughout the Edo period, as it avoided possible prosecution by shogunal authorities interested in consolidating and controlling the historical narrative.

This book features script produced using movable type instead of woodblocks. Movable type was known in Japan since the late sixteenth century, and movable-type books on political, historical, and literary themes were produced in the first half of the seventeenth century. Movable type, however, came to be used less, due to a variety of reasons, and after the 1640s it was rarely employed. Movable type was reintroduced into the publishing industry during the modernization of the Meiji period (1868-1912).

 

Selected Reading:

Araki, James T. The Ballad-Drama of Medieval Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964.

Asahara Yoshiko, and Kitahara Yasuo, eds. Mai no hon. Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei 59. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1994.

Chance, Linda H. and Julie Nelson Davis. ​​“The Handwritten and the Printed: Issues of Format and Medium in Japanese Premodern Books.” Journal for Manuscripts Studies, 1:1 (2016), 90-115.

Yoshida, Kogorō. Tanrokubon: Rare Books of Seventeenth Century Japan. Translated by Mark A. Harbison. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1984.

Posted by Judith Weston