Imagine that it’s the late 1800′s, your an itinerant salesman, and you see a burgeoning market in small farming villages and also in the post towns along one of the five main traveling routes (the go-kaido), like the famous Tōkaidō road, or the Nakasendō. Now imagine that you need to carry your goods with you. What are you going to use? Luckily there is an answer to this dilemma; you would strap a nice gyosho bako to your back and march out there to prosperity.

Now obviously, depending on what you are selling, these chests could be very cumbersome. So to keep weight down you would choose a light weight wood in their construction, maybe some kiri (paulownia) or some sugi (cedar) would be prudent. And you might want to keep it simple and coat it with just some wiped laquer; its inexpensive and easy to repair. You definitely would also choose to keep the iron work to a minimum, that is, unless you were a metalsmith and needed to show off your best work. In terms of design, you had an infinite number of variations. One door, two doors, hinged or maybe drop-fit, and with as many drawers as necessary. Tall and narrow or short and squat, it’s up to you. Only one question remains, what product are you going to choose to make your destiny manifest?

Pictured is an 1880 circa gyosho bako made from hinoki (cypress) and sugi (cedar). As for the hardware, handles are in the warabite (bracken hand) style and the jomae (lockplates), with double kikuza-tegakejo (floriate button) latches, are nice and utilitarian. Two aspects of this piece I find interesting are the kendan buta (drop fit) doors and the two thicker strips of wood used for adding strength to the back where the straps are attached, I hadn’t seen that before. I don’t know about you, but I think I would hate to strap one of these on my back. That being said, I still think they are great, and historically, important as well. Definitely shows how Japan went from a totally agrarian economy during feudal times, to a more industrious one as the Shogunate’s grasp of the economy began to break down.

There are alot of nice tansu up for auction right now, so I might be posting alot about the ones that I find interesting. Here is one of them, a cha dansu from the Taisho era.

What I like about cha dansu is that some of them have chigai dana (staggered shelves), which I aesthetically love. As a big fan of architecture, I really like the Tokonoma (literally meaning bed-space), a distinct display area that evolved as an aspect of Shoin style architecture during the Muromachi period. The one side of the tokonoma held a hanging scroll and maybe some ikebana (flower arrangement), while the other side consisted of some storage space with built in cabinets and also some chigai dana. Cha dansu borrowed the chigai dana as a way to display some of the tea ceremony materials during the late Edo era.

This piece is constructed with keyaki, sugi, and hinoki, with two sets of hiki-do (sliding doors) and one kendan buta (drop fit door), fairly typical of the style. Another familiar trait is the lack of lockplates. This type of furniture was used during the offering of tea, which was a normal everyday hospitality for guests. If you had a little money, you might possess a cha dansu to add a little class to this polite exchange. What a nice way to display and store all your tea utensils.

You’ve all seen the Geisha running around in the movies with all sorts of ornaments in their hair, well one type are called kanzashi. I’m not an authority, but I might be able to extract some information out of the dark recesses of my grey matter to share with you.

At left we have a Bira bira style Kanzashi made out of tortoise shell. Bira bira means fluttering, which describes the dangling parts of the hair pin, and this type of kanzashi was traditionally worn by a Maiko (apprentice geisha). Kanzashi styles and the placement thereof were indicative of the status of the geisha, so a learned patron could always tell what level of geisha he was being entertained by. At around 42 minutes into the movie, Memoirs of a Geisha, you can see the character, Pumpkin, wearing two kanzashi, which shows that she is a junior Maiko. Also the material of the kanzashi could indicate what time of year it was seasonally. A tortoise shell kanzashi, like this one, was worn in the winter months.

Next up we have a kushi (comb) style kanzashi also made out of tortoise shell. This style is meant to stick in a hair bun and was made wide so that the artist had a lot of room to decorate them. This one is basically a carved relief which allows the natural translucency of the material to show, truth in natural materials being an always desired element in Japanese design. Other types of kushi kanzashi could be made out of other types of shell, or maybe wood, which was laquered and decorated with inlays, or maybe just simply gilded.

As with most of the pictures I post, you can click on them and see the original listing and find more photographs, as well as more information. Enjoy.

You might have noticed that I’ve been a little negligent in my posts lately. So I figured it was about time to get the ball rolling again, and what could be better than a nice Yatate to give that ball a push. Unfortunately, as crafty as the Japanese are, there is no digital version yet available; so I must use my QWERTY keyboard to write this post. I hope you don’t mind.

Traditionally, writing utensuls were separate items, and preparation was a timely process,. You had your brush (fude), and an ink stick (sumi) which you ground upon your ink stone (suzuri) till you got the right consistency. But during the Kamakura era (1185-1333), things changed. Someone figured out that if you put some cotton in a box (sumi tsubo) you could keep wet ink around, like the Western inkwell. Someone also decided that if you made the box longer, you could also store some brushes. Over time the design was modified, the ink box got deeper and the brush area narrowed, giving birth to the Yatate (which also later metamorphed into various forms). Depicted above is the most common form which could simply be stuffed into the obi (sash) for transport.

As a craftsman, I came to know about Yatate because I had the woodworking version, known simply as Sumitsubo. Consisting of an inkwell attached to a spool of string with a pin on the end. You pull the string through the inkwell, attach the pin to the end of a piece of wood and stretch the string across to the other end. With a little tug you snap the string and create a line on your workpiece. Thus you have the Japanese equivalent of the Western chalk line, depicted below. Cool huh?

So the New Year has begun and mine hasn’t exactly been smooth so far. After a nice family vacation in Key West (where, surprise, I didn’t see one Japanese Antique) I returned home to find that I had been let go from my job for no apparent reason and my computer’s power cable was fried. But no need to worry, found a new job immediately, and Apple gladly replaced my power cord for free. Now I am up and running and hope to get some new posts up in the next few days. So if you didn’t forget about this blog, thank you for your patience, and hopefully your New Year has started much less eventful than mine.

Sorry for the goofy pic, I couldn’t help myself when I found it. Talk to you soon.