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Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture—Part 2 |
< Back Ninagawa Noritane and Antiquarians in the Early Meiji Period Hiroyuki Suzuki Tokyo Gakugei University Edward Sylvester Morse (1838-1925), first visiting Japan in 1877 for his marine-biological research on brachiopods, kept a diary during his stay of 1877, 1878-79, and 1882-83 in Japan, and the diary was later compiled into the two volumes of Japan Day by Day, published in Boston 1917. This paper examines the characteristics and various activities of typical antiquarians in the early Meiji period as seen through the keen eyes of the biologist, whose observations make the diary vivid and attractive reading. Morse expressed astonishment in the diary when he found that Japan was home to numerous collectors of various kinds of objects such as pottery, porcelain, coins, swords, kakemono (paintings), pieces of brocade, stone implements, roofing tiles, armor, and shells and corals. Ninagawa Noritane (1835-1882), with whom Morse had become acquainted in early 1879 and introduced in the diary as a celebrated antiquarian, epitomized the antiquarians of the day. He also referred to Ninagawa’s book on the various kinds of pottery in Japan, which was illustrated with lithographic plates, and he inferred the high quality of the plates because although they were colored by hand, they conveyed the characteristics of the pottery far better than the most perfect chromolithographs in French and English publications on similar subjects. The book he mentioned was a series of volumes entitled Kwan-ko-dzu-setsu: tôki-no-bu, or in French, Notice historique et descriptive sur les arts et industries Japonais: art céramique. Ninagawa began the publication in 1876 and had published five volumes by the time that Morse mentioned it in his diary of 1879. With a small booklet of the full text translated into French attached to each original volume, the series was exported to Western countries by H. Ahrens & Co., a German trading company in Tsukiji, Tokyo, and became famous among people who were interested in Japanese pottery. Morse also described his own experience of a night when he was invited to a gathering of game-like play, where works of pottery were circulated one by one among the participants, who were asked to identify the production site of each work. Interestingly, Morse proudly wrote that his response was quicker and his rate of giving the correct answer higher than any other participant in the game. The things which attracted the diarist’s attention to and stimulated his sense of wonder for his antiquarian contemporaries clearly demonstrated the vital aspects of their activities: collecting objects, an activity which did not contradict the serious study of the items in their collections; compiling and publishing illustrated books, in which objects from their collections were reproduced along with minute descriptions of them; and organizing or joining a circle of individuals who shared the same interests, where members held regular meetings to study their collections and sometimes organized special shows to display them. All these characteristics belonged to Edo tradition which was shared by people such as antiquarians, honzôka (botanists), and rôsekika (mineralogists), who, interested in concrete objects both natural and man-made, collected and studied them according to their interests. Therefore their activities were doomed to the status of perishing traditions in the course of time, as gradually and steadily as bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment) permeated the social and cultural life of the early Meiji people. Compared to members of the older generations such as Itô Keisuke (1803-1901), an eminent botanist, and Matsuura Takeshirô (1818-1888), a notable antiquarian, for example, both of whom Morse met and mentioned in his diary, Ninagawa was an antiquarian of a new type who was conscious of and sensible to the changing paradigms brought by the introduction of cultural and material resources from the West. The situation led to a paradigm change from an affinitive dichotomy of ko (past or gu in Chinese) and kon (present or jin) to a current, antagonistic dichotomy of shin (the new or xin) and kyû (the old or jiu). The more recent new-and-old paradigm attributed positive meanings to the former with the connotation of curiousness but negative meanings to the latter with that of mediocrity and triviality. Ninagawa made efforts to overturn the asymmetrical values of the recent paradigm and applied new reproduction technologies such as photography and lithography when compiling illustrated books. In spite of the various new attempts undertaken by some antiquarians, the judgment of history told them to resign from the official and public world into a personal and private space of taste, far from the modern academic world of disciplines newly emerging in late 1870s and established during late 1880s and 1890s. But the antiquarian way of thinking about concrete objects, I believe, still holds a viable position from which the modern disciplines are criticized, particularly those which are so closely related to the materiality of their objects as in the case of art history. |
