Beauty in Detail

Japanese Artistic Dolls

by Ohno Hatsuko

Mori Mika

The exhibition space

The moment I set foot inside the Corfu Museum of Asian Art, I know it’s a venue that’ll enable us to hold the finest exhibition of Ohno Hatsuko dolls. The ground floor of the Museum, which is the Palace of Saint Michael and Saint George, has a high ceiling with an airy, regal feel, and an understated yet stately interior, and the area reserved for the Ohno Hatsuko Doll Exhibition is a sizeable gallery that has been split into two spacious and connected rooms. It’s the most impressive space in which I have ever had the privilege of holding an exhibition.

In June 2013, I travelled to Corfu to install a special exhibition of dolls made by my late mother Ohno Hatsuko at the Corfu Museum of Asian Art. This was to be the tenth show of my mother’s dolls in Europe.

A month or two before, Morohashi Kazuko of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, which was arranging the exhibition, had written to me in Japan, telling me that the Museum would be building custommade cases for the dolls: by the time I arrived a total of five cases, ranging in size, would be set up. She asked me to come up with placement ideas for the dolls, using a diagram sent in an email attachment, since the Greek Ministry of Culture had to confirm all exhibit arrangements ahead of time. To map out the display without seeing the space sounded a bit reckless to me, but I nonetheless grouped the dolls thematically and indicated their placement in the diagram. And now here I was in Corfu to actually place the dolls in their new surroundings. Here, in the largest case in the first room, was where I planned to place the most compelling group, which had the title ‘Beauties.’

‘The director of the museum asked to use this photograph in our Introduction to the Artist,’ Morohashi tells me. ‘What a beautiful lady your mother was.’ Just inside the doorway I see a portrait photograph up on the wall of my mother taken in her youth – indeed, startlingly beautiful. Now a beautiful faded brown, the photograph was taken in 1933, and my mother, who had just started to make dolls, seems surrounded in a sort of mysterious glow. She was working in a Western dress shop in the Ginza district at the time, and she wears an elegant dress with her hair styled in the very latest fashion, looking like a Western actress. The doll she is making – at that time as a hobby – is a French doll inspired by Nakahara Jun’ichi’s illustrations, which are often found in the supplements to women’s magazines of this period. But the dolls we are showing in this exhibition are more traditional ones that my mother made after the war in her middle years, using the time-honoured material of tōso paulownia paste – so there is something of a mismatch. I pause for a split second, then decide nonetheless that since we are starting the exhibition with the ‘Beauties,’ it is fitting that the photograph of the artist to be shown in the same room is also of a beauty.

‘And up there,’ says Morohashi, pointing at the opposite wall, ‘We have some ukiyoe, from the museum’s collection.’ This too, she explains, was the director’s idea. Looking up, I see a series of exquisite woodblock prints of beautiful women by Kitagawa Utamaro, Utagawa Toyokuni and other ukiyoe artists. The Polish film director Andrzej Wajda, I remember, took one look at my mother’s dolls during an exhibition in Poland in 2005 and exclaimed: ‘They are like ukiyoe in three-dimensional form!’

My mother’s dolls were inspired by ukiyoe, and the dolls and the prints resonate well. This first exhibition room is as perfect as I could desire.

In the second room, the remaining four cases face each other. One of the outstanding features of Ohno Hatsuko dolls is their wide range of expression. My mother spent nearly twenty years, from her late forties, trying to attain a level in her art that satisfied her. But ill health took her from this world. Her artistic legacy comprises a mere thirty dolls, which work perfectly in five groups – ‘Beauties,’ ‘Kabuki’, ‘Mature and Elderly Women’, ‘Children’, and ‘Western Dolls.’ Each group will have its own case, and every care must be taken positioning them to attain a perfect harmony in the colours of their robes and the pose, or stance, of each figure. I get down to placing the dolls in the cases, making slight changes in the plans I drew up virtually, to accord with the exigencies of the venue. How easily, how gracefully, the dolls fit in with the quiet surroundings of the museums. They look entirely at home.

My mother’s atelier

‘Over there is the “artist’s atelier”,’ Morohashi adds. On the other side of the second room I see a small alcove that has been made over to look like a traditional Japanese room with sliding doors. I am speechless: the room is an imaginative reconstruction of the place where my mother worked. A compact two-tatami mat space, it contains a small desk, a mirror and a petite chest of drawers made of mulberry wood. One of the drawers has been left half-open, and from it spill pieces of the cottons and silks that my mother used to make her dolls’ robes. I sent a supply of these remnants from Japan. Next to the chest of drawers are some illustrated books that my mother used as references.

‘We were thinking of having a halfcompleted doll placed on the desk,’ Morohashi suggests. Of course – the perfect touch. My mother’s studio was, in fact, a spacious Western-style room. Our house was perched on a tree-covered hill in Meguro, Tokyo, and the garden had a steep drop on the southwest side with a view that was reminiscent of areas such as Hakone or Karuizawa. Wisteria planted on the terrace to protect the terrace from the strong afternoon sun came into magnificent bloom each year, the green leaves casting cool shadows over the rooms inside. The furniture in the house was mostly English since that was my mother’s taste, but I remember an old Venetian glass mirror adorned the wall that belonged to my great-grandfather who owned a trading company in Yokohama in the Meiji era (18681912). My mother had a certain determination in her aesthetic pursuits that made my father, who cared only for business, smile resignedly. Somewhat taken aback by this reconstruction, which bears little resemblance to my mother’s real atelier, I nevertheless tell myself that we are in Greece – and all this is designed to evoke a sense of Japaneseness for visitors. Despite my surprise I am impressed with the ingenuity of the museum staff. I suspect that the idea came from Morohashi, who is a book illustrator and an artist, and who helped organize the Ohno doll exhibition in England through her role at the Sainsbury Institute – clearly, she has brought her experience to bear in this exhibition as well. Next to the atelier is a space for audiovisual displays where images of the dolls and photographs of my mother, including ones I took, will be shown on a looped video. On all the walls I see designs based on the photos done by the museum’s graphic artist that will add to the general effect. The Corfu Museum of Asian Art has packaged this as a special summer exhibition aimed primarily to appeal to visitors to Corfu who come from all over Europe and beyond. I am impressed with the attention to detail with which this museum introduces the dolls, which are, after all, from another culture.

‘The dolls are masterpieces’

My mother was not a well-known doll maker. Though she created many dolls in her lifetime, her signature works are the traditional tōso dolls she learned to make in her middle and later years. She learned tōso doll making from Iesato Michiko, the renowned pupil of the master dollmaker Hori Ryūjo (1897-1984), which makes my mother a costume doll-maker from the ‘Hori Ryūjo School.’ She began learning doll-making formally from Iesato in 1960, though sometime in 1950 she had taken some informal lessons from her in the basics of tōso techniques. Once she began taking formal lessons she progressed by leaps and bounds – she had a natural talent. As I mentioned earlier, she made French dolls in her teens, and many commercial dolls during the war – so she was already skilled in her art by the time she started lessons.

In Japan, sōsaku ningyō, or ‘artistic dolls,’ experienced a boom during the 1960s and 1970s with all kinds of exhibitions, mainly in department stores, showing traditional dolls as well as contemporary and female dolls. The dolls displayed at department stores were for sale, and the dolls that my mother put into such exhibitions on Iesato’s recommendation sold immediately. My mother, who was not prepared to give up her dolls, had to rush out and buy them back. Even though she never became famous, the more she exhibited the more her name acquired a certain cachet among people in the doll making world, due to her dolls’ special aesthetic appeal, her ability to imbue them with a sense of Edo style and a contemporary relevance. At the age of sixteen, she had moved from Osaka to Tokyo with the desire to become a painter and for a while she studied Western painting under the famous artist Okada Saburosuke. Though she did not become a painter, the doll making she took up in her middle age was more than a hobby: it was her chosen medium for artistic expression.

Seeing that I am nearly finished with the installation, Morohashi approaches, mobile in hand, and suggests that we call the director of the museum, Despina Zernioti. This is someone I have yet to meet, and I am delighted. I quickly tidy up the empty boxes, and present the museum assistants with the small gifts I’ve brought with me from Japan. Such gifts always go down well and when I am in Japan I always make a point of keeping my eye out for suitably interesting items.

Director Zernioti arrives, a glamorous woman with large eyes and a dynamic manner. She visited Japan in 2009 to open a special exhibition at the Edo Tokyo Metropolitan Museum featuring works from the Corfu

Museum. The key object of that exhibition was a fan painting by the artist Tōshūsai Sharaku. Its authenticity had been confirmed by a survey involving Japanese art history experts including Professor Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, the Sainsbury Institute’s research director, and Professors Kobayashi Tadashi, currently director of the Okada Museum of Art, Hakone, and Kawai Masatomo, currently director of Chiba City Museum. The discovery of the fan helped resolve a long scholarly dispute about whether Sharaku actually existed, but what amazed Japanese visitors was the number of exceptional pieces of Japanese art that now reside in Greece.

The Sainsbury Institute, which is located in Norwich, England, supports a range of Japanese art research in Europe: I held an exhibition of my mother’s dolls in Norwich in 2012 thanks to its support. I asked then about the possibility of holding a similar exhibition at the Corfu Museum of Asian Art, and the Sainsbury Institute subsequently secured the funding to enable it to happen with the generous support of the Toshiba International Foundation. I have much to thank the Sainsbury Institute for. And two people in particular: Mizutori Mami, the Institute’s executive director, and Morohashi Kazuko, the research and public relations officer.

Zernioti walks through the exhibition rooms, clearly pleased with the displays. ‘Your mother’s dolls are masterpieces!’ she says. ‘Even more beautiful than I imagined.’ I am deeply touched, and thank her. The dolls are always received well by women directors of museums, and the directors I deal with do tend to be women. Of course men are enthusiastic too, but I can’t help suspecting that swords and armour might excite them more. In Europe, I notice, women visitors to museums seem to outnumber the men, though not to the same degree as in Japan. At exhibitions of my mother’s dolls, each an exquisite work of art, the number of visitors usually increases daily. This makes my heart feel easier – It’s a relief if a little financial benefit can accrue to the museums that show my mother’s work. More importantly for me, it helps me to honour my mother’s memory. Look how many new people we are getting to know through these encounters. Can my mother see me with Zernioti now – did she hear her warm words? Mother, the director of this museum said your dolls are ‘masterpieces’… Surely such praise must touch my mother’s soul.

Doll making

‘Her life is her art,’ I would think to myself when I observed my mother absorbed in doll making at her desk. My mother always loved solitude, much preferring her own company to the company of others, wanting nothing other than to spend time making her dolls. Immersing herself in her own world, a place where she needed nothing else, and nothing else existed – a special space where she could express every emotion and thought – and even, perhaps, create a new self. The dolls would spring forth from her hands, perfectly idealized, graceful creatures shaped in the form of human beings. Her creations varied over the years – the earlier ones young, beautiful, delicate women, the later ones older, more mature women of compassion, women with a certain quietness and contemplative grace. And perhaps these creations came easily to my mother. The little figures already existed in her imagination and just needed to be brought to life through a process of dialogue with her own soul. Quietly, discreetly, they took shape on her desk, to stand there shyly in the light. An artist who enjoyed silence, who sought to create works of art that could communicate in a way that was beyond words, telling limitless stories… That is who my mother Ohno Hatsuko was. As I write these words, countless memories of her flood my thoughts.

But strange to say, when my mother finished a doll, she would simply wrap it in paper, put it in a box, and store it away in a closet. Only rarely did she take a doll out of its box to show to friends or visitors. When I asked her why this was, she replied that she wasn’t making her dolls in order to show them off to people or to get compliments. When she did exhibit, she would do so quite reluctantly, at the fervent pleading of her teacher Iesato. The only exhibitions in which my mother took an interest were the traditional Japanese crafts exhibitions, which were of a different order to the usual department store exhibitions. ‘I did not make my dolls so they could be objects of commerce,’ she would say, and on reflection I understand her qualms.

Corfu Museum of Asian Art

Director Zernioti takes us on a guided tour of the Museum. The group includes eight friends who have travelled with me from Japan, as well as Mizutori Mami, executive director of the Sainsbury Institute, who has just arrived from the UK. Corfu is an island of superb natural beauty situated at the mouth of the Adriatic Sea. It is associated with the legend of the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa in Homer’s Odyssey, and has a rich history. The historic old town of Corfu city was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007. The Museum of Asian Art is hard to miss as it is housed in a magnificent building atop a small hill in the heart of the old town. The frontage boasts a Doric colonnade and grand archways which form a passageway along one whole side of the building. In one of those archways hangs a huge banner announcing our exhibition – I saw it on my way up to the museum. The palace originally served as the residence of the Lord High Commissioner but was also home to the Ionian Senate in the early nineteenth century, when Corfu was under British rule. While its stone exterior has weathered to a greyish tone, its interior remains grand and beautiful, with tasteful furniture and fittings. It has been a venue for several important official diplomatic events, including a summit meeting of the EU and a meeting of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee.

Zernioti explains, as she takes us up the ornate staircase in the grand entrance hall, that the main art collections are on the first floor, but some of the rooms are being refurbished and are therefore closed to visitors. The first floor comprises a single large circular parquet-floored room, the Rotunda, with adjoining rooms. Every feature in the rooms is superbly well preserved. The collection includes works from Japan, China, Korea, Nepal, Tibet, Pakistan and India. But at its heart, as Zernioti explains, is the collection named after Gregorios Manos, the man who first provided many thousands of artefacts for the museum, mainly Japanese and Chinese works of art. This is the first and only national museum in Greece dedicated to East Asian art. Each and every one of the artefacts is catalogued, and the display environments are fitted with equipment carefully monitoring temperature and humidity. The collection speaks of the highest standards.

Folding screens, prints, ceramics, lacquerware, inrō… Ukiyoe prints are especially abundant, with examples from the early, mid and late Edo period. Particularly noteworthy are two sets of folding screens: one by Kanō Katsunobu and Kanō Okinobu, the other by Kanō Sanraku. The range and quality are breathtaking. The ceramics include superb examples of Kokutani, Nabeshima, and Kakiemon ware, as well as pieces by Nonomura Ninsei and Ogata Kanzan. The lacquer ware is also exquisite.

We get a sneak preview of a new Japanese tearoom that is currently being installed, though the dimness prevents us from seeing it in much detail. Zernioti tells us that she is determined to create an authentic Japanese space, since Japanese objects have an intimate relation with their environment. Ideally, her wish would be to build a Japanese garden as well, but that will probably be impossible. At the end of the tour we get a special viewing of one of two paintings that have been confirmed as the work of Sharaku, recently miraculously discovered here. The painting seems less than overwhelming to my untrained eye. The Chinese art collection in the museum, however, is truly striking – the evident respect shown to Chinese civilisation only to be expected, perhaps, in Greece, the fountainhead of art in Europe. Even without seeing the completed renovations, we are left in no doubt that the Corfu Museum is one of the top museums in Europe dedicated to Asian Art.

Once we finish the tour, we stroll into the old town for lunch – a lively affair, with my eight friends from Japan, the two members of the Sainsbury Institute, Zernioti and myself. Corfu’s traditional cuisine is Mediterranean with a strong Italian flavour due to historical ties with Venice. Sitting around a table cluttered with dishes of octopus and prawns, we delight in our first taste of the local flavours. After lunch I return for a short while to the hotel, to rest. Installing dolls is very mentally taxing. In just a few hours I will be giving my presentation on the doll culture of Japan. As I relax in my quiet hotel room, the portrait of Gregorios Manos that we saw in the museum floats up in my mind.

Gregorios Manos

Gregorios Manos, a prodigious art collector, was the man who was the inspiration behind the founding of the Corfu Museum. Born into an aristocratic family, he worked as a diplomat, and was the Greek Ambassador to Austria. All his life he collected art from Japan and China, never marrying and spending his entire fortune on collecting. Donating his entire collection to the Greek State, he asked the government in return to establish a museum of Asian art in Greece – insisting that the beautiful Palace of Saint Michael and Saint George be opened as a museum, and requesting that he become the first director and live in one wing. He died penniless.

What is interesting about Manos is that he never set foot in Asia despite his obsession with Asian art. He obtained his objects at auctions and from dealers such as Siegfried and Michael Bing and Hayashi Tadamasa in Vienna and Paris over several decades at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth century. At the start of the Meiji period in Japan, there was little industry to speak of, but ironically what generated foreign-currency income were art objects, including vernacular items, produced during the flowering of culture in the Edo period (1615-1868). Ceramics, lacquerware, folding screens, metal sculptures, textiles, and accessories such as inrō and netsuke were all the rage in the West. Owning objects of art and knowing about the culture of Japan was a mark of high culture in Europe at this time – a curious idea to consider, perhaps, as a contemporary

The different expressions of Hatsune

Japanese. Though the Bing brothers and Hayashi Tadamasa were busy selling Japanese art works, they also tried to teach Europeans how to appreciate the artistic value of the objects.

As a person of culture Manos mixed with art dealers as a matter of course, but he must also have had a particularly strong personal attachment to these beautiful objects that came from a faraway place that he never visited. Greece was a country that occupied a peripheral position in Europe and it only joined the ranks of nations in the mid nineteenth century (rather like Japan, which did so just a little later), even though ancient Greek civilization had shed its light over all European culture. Perhaps Manos was inspired to create an art museum out of the desire to contribute to the cultural progress of his country by introducing artefacts from a completely different culture to his own. After Manos donated his collection to the museum, it received gifts from numerous philanthropists to become what it is today.

Sacred pilgrimage

I began my own journey in art after reaching the age of sixty. Inspired by my mother’s dolls, I have been travelling, like a pilgrim, to the sacred places of Asian art in Europe, to pay my respects to all the great treasures from Japan that sit in dignified silence inside glass cases. In such silence I seem to find myself surrounded by words – sometimes the words of museum directors and curators, sometimes the words of collectors who have long since passed away – all lovers and devotees of Japanese art, passionately collecting, exhibiting, protecting and conserving, like monks or saints who dedicate themselves to serving a chapel of beauty. My encounters with these people always leave me with a deep feeling of admiration. They purify me. And perhaps, ultimately, these pilgrimages I make bring me closer to my mother.

Nowadays, I feel as if I can understand why she was so unwilling to show her dolls. She wanted them to be shown only to people who could understand their beauty, who could truly distinguish between the genuine and the spurious. And surely in these places, these museums, there are people who can understand what she was about. Perhaps this is why her dolls seem to fit in these places so quietly and easily. Here I feel the same kind of calmness and quiet that used to exist in my mother’s atelier all those years ago. My mother must have dreamt of showing her work, she must have wanted to hold a solo exhibition, she must have wanted to show what exactly was unique about her artistry.

What stopped her were doubts about whether she had sufficient numbers of dolls, a sense of uncertainty about the originality of her art – and there may also have been a certain complexity of feeling regarding Noguchi Sono’o, the only contemporary artist she saw as a rival. But while Noguchi imbued her dolls with a sense of karumi, or lightness, prized by artists and poets in Edo times, Ohno gave her dolls iki, an elegance and stylishness associated particularly with the ‘floating world’ of Edo, as well as a refined contemporary feeling. There is something subtle and understated in Ohno Hatsuko dolls, like the jiuta-mai of the renowned traditional Japanese dancer Takehara Han. Both Noguchi and Ohno pursued a highly concise, rigorous mode of expression, which brooked no compromise. Even when seen from the back, the dolls had to project a vision of beauty –the line of the neck and the back collar being particularly important. Ohno’s deep passion for dolls continually pushed her to create, but her efforts were tragically cut short by illness. There is a certain poignancy in her story.

Preparations for the opening night

I awake to find it is evening – time has rushed by. Tonight an opening reception is being held at the Museum, prior to the doll exhibition opening tomorrow, and I will be giving a talk on ‘The history of Japanese doll culture and the Artistic Doll Movement.’ When I arrive at the museum, one of my friends, Torii Akane, fifth Grand Master of the Senshinryū school of flower arrangement, has just finished arranging flowers in the grand entrance hall. She bewails the lack of suitably imposing foliage at the local florists, but the arrangement she has created in a large Shigaraki vase that she brought with her from Japan sets off the surroundings admirably. A slender young lady, Torii speaks several languages.

In one of the other rooms is another friend, Uchino Michiko, from the Urasenke tea school: she is concentrating on preparations for performing a tea ceremony, which is also to be offered to visitors. To my delight, the museum has decided to place a pair of magnificent, gold folding screens from its collection behind the place where Uchino will conduct the tea ceremony. The screens will add to the atmosphere and provide a splendid backdrop to Uchino’s graceful pale pink kimono. The sense of excitement is palpable. The aim is to introduce Japanese culture through dolls, tea and flowers.

My other friends have also returned to the museum: on our short flight to Corfu yesterday, we saw a feature article in the inflight magazine on the doll exhibition at the Corfu Museum of Asian Art, and so we have high hopes for a large audience. I am so grateful to these friends for their moral support. Mizutori and Morohashi are in a meeting with the museum staff. The evening will begin with an introduction from Zernioti, to be followed by a short speech by Mizutori. Torii will give a talk on the practice of flower arrangement, my presentation on dolls will follow, and Uchino will then conduct her tea ceremony. To accommodate the setting, she will prepare tea for participants sitting at a table rather than on the tatami. I am introduced to Morohashi’s husband, Dr. Ralph Paprzycki who will take photographs of the evening’s events.

Dolls as artistic expression

Japan is the only country in the world where doll making is an officially recognized art. Recognition for dolls started with the Artistic Doll Movement, which arose early in the Showa period (1926-1989). This is what I usually open with in my lectures. The aim of the Artistic Doll Movement was to change people’s attitudes to dolls by both a qualitative improvement in doll making practice and more social recognition for doll makers as artists. Specifically, the aim was to get dolls included in the applied arts category of the official, state-controlled Teiten, or ‘Imperial Exhibition,’ an annual event that was hosted by the Imperial Academy of Art and under the remit of the then Ministry of Education. In 1936 these efforts yielded success, and doll making was acknowledged both nationally and socially as an art form. However, in the West dolls tend to be regarded simply as toys, and only rarely become the subject of academic research, for example on cultural history. It is this difference that provides me with my starting point. My central question is usually ‘Are Dolls Art?’ My hope is that the combination of actually seeing my mother’s dolls and the information I give in my presentation will change people’s assumptions. Dolls, like sculptures, involve modelling media into a human form. Both dolls and sculpture had their origins in sacred contexts but over the centuries they evolved into other things: objects of appreciation by adults, and toys and playthings to be used by children. In ancient Greece, sculpture became the object of aesthetic appreciation, a way of thinking that spread all over Europe. This resulted in sculptures coming to occupy pride of place, along with painting, in art. In Japan, Buddhist sculptures were objects of religious veneration, and weren’t appreciated as art. What developed instead, rather uniquely, was a culture of appreciation of dolls. The magnificent sculptures of the Western civilization are the result of cultures accustomed to working with stone. One might compare these sculptures to hardy fruits grown on rock-solid soil. In contrast, in Japan, our dolls grew out of something more organic –more delicate and plant-like. Our dolls are like fine little flowers, growing in amongst the trees and rushes we use to make our tea-houses, tatami mats and sliding paper doors.

The history of dolls and hitogata

The history of dolls in Japan goes back to prehistoric times with the curious figurines known as dogū and haniwa. However, the direct ancestors to dolls as we know them now are the hitogata, which appeared in roughly the fifth century. Hitogata were objects resembling human figures designed to serve as substitutes for gods or for humans. Many major shrines in Japan still hold rituals on certain festival days involving paper hitogata, which are distributed to worshippers in order for them to metaphorically transfer any ailments or impurity on to them. The hitogata are then thrown in the sea or into a river. A white-robed Shinto priest conducts a purification rite, places the hitogata on to a special boat, and takes it to the water’s edge and releases it. The idea is that the hitogata shields and protects human beings from illness and other calamities. Hitogata can also serve as a physical manifestation of a local kami, or god, and they are often placed at the top of a festival float as the central figure of worship. The photos of hitogata which I show in my PowerPoint slide show never fail to amaze my audience. In Japan many ancient traditions involving the use of hitogata are still being practiced today.

In the Heian period (794-1185) hitogata started to figure in children’s games and amusements, and they gradually metamorphosed into toys or playthings. It was in the Kamakura period (1185-1333) that people start to refer to these playthings as ningyō (literally ‘human shape’), the word that is used for ‘dolls’ today, and their forms gradually became more refined. In the Muromachi period (1333-1615), official records show that dolls were used in courtly and shogunal ritual ceremonies held at various points in the year, and also to entertain guests, to demonstrate their social importance. However, it was in the mid- and late- Edo period (1615-1868), just about three hundred years ago, that dolls experienced their greatest rise in popularity.

Sekku dolls in Edo-period Japan

The culture of Edo is commonly associated with kabuki and ukiyoe woodblock prints, but dolls figured very prominently as well. This is mainly due to the fact that two of the five official seasonal festival holidays, or sekku, that were laid down by the Edo government – the Tango no sekku and the Hina no sekku (now Boy’s’ Day and Girls’ Day, respectively) – were doll-related. The sekku festivals were held at the change of a season and involved making offerings to the gods associated with a particular season and praying for good health and prosperity. On the festival days, farmers would take the day off work in the fields. Dolls served an important role in the rituals that took place in these festivals, as well as in rice harvest festivities. While kabuki and ukiyoe were forms of entertainment enjoyed by adults, festivals featuring dolls could be enjoyed by the entire family, with children and adults participating. People visited the homes of their friends and neighbours to view their dolls, special sweets would be given to children, and the adults would give each other poems – it would be one big social occasion. But importantly, even though these two sekku festivals were ones in which people prayed for the health and happiness of their offspring, the dolls that featured in them were not children’s toys, but were made especially for the occasion, solely for appreciation and display. The reason why Japan developed a culture of doll making specifically for visual enjoyment is largely due to the role that dolls played as visual objects in these sekku festivals.

In my presentation, I show a great number of images of dolls from the Edo period. The popularity of dolls at this time accelerated the development of doll making: doll makers and vendors formed professional groups, and certain towns and cities became famous for doll making. As the industry flourished, dolls made in Edo and Kyoto were distributed nationwide. People’s taste became more refined, and more and more dolls of high aesthetic value were created. All levels of society, from the Imperial family to farmers started to celebrate the seasonal festivals with displays of dolls. Hina dolls were an especially important part of a young woman’s dowry and symbolised the bride’s family wealth and social class – the miniature furniture and accessories accompanying the dolls supposedly mimicking actual counterparts and showing the wealth of her family. With time, these displays became even more elaborate, and the authorities had to issue edicts forbidding such unnecessary extravagance. All this gives us an idea of the rich cultural traditions of the townspeople in the Edo period. Dolls were one of the special delights arising out of the peaceful flowering of the arts at this time.

Pre-modern dolls and the Artistic Doll Movement

The twentieth century saw the rise of the Artistic Doll Movement and the recognition of dolls as an art form. The growing importance of dolls was related to the emergence of new social classes in the Meiji era, which led to more types of dolls being produced. However, these new dolls were commercial objects. What really contributed to the growing recognition of dolls’ artistic importance was the participation in the movement by numerous artists and recognised cultural figures.

At the start of the Meiji era, the waves of Western ideas on art that flooded Japan led to painting and sculpture being accorded official recognition as ‘fine arts,’ and, a little later, other crafts as ‘decorative arts.’ A system of submitting works to the Imperial Exhibitions gradually came into place. However, dolls and doll making were left out of this system – and the reason for this was that dolls were not considered a proper form of art in the West. The Japanese art establishment was basically copying the West. However, this dissatisfied many members of the intelligentsia who could appreciate dolls, and they lent their voices to the Artistic Doll Movement. This in turn stimulated numerous doll masters, artists, craftsmen, and amateur enthusiasts to try their hand at making all kinds of new dolls. The question of whether dolls and doll making should be recognised as an art form became a topic of discussion among cultural critics, artists and intellectuals, and was also taken up by the mass media.

Defining Artistic Doll

The renowned doll maker Inotani Shunpō outlined some of the most important principles of doll making in a booklet he published in 1935. ‘The art of making dolls,’ Inotani wrote, is no different from painting or sculpture. The dolls must act as intermediaries that communicate the objective and subjective idealism held by the artist to the viewers. The dolls must have artistic aesthetic elements. Further, they must have original expression rather than merely being imitations of past examples. While art can be a copy of or an idealized form of nature, it must go through the lens of the individual. A work that is without discernable individuality is worthless. In addition, the dolls must have their own unique attributes.

The dolls must possess a unique emotional condition that the viewers should be able to experience. And finally, while the practice of making dolls should exemplify classical aesthetic beauty, the dolls must also adopt contemporary ideologies and be relevant in a modern context. When we respect these aspects of artistic dolls, we find their true significance.

Inotani made the additional observation:

‘Meaningful art contributes to the prosperity of a nation, while bad art deprives a nation.’ The statement reflects the high expectations that Japanese people had of doll culture in the prewar period. This is how passionately people at the time thought about dolls.

Criticisms of Artistic Doll

The question of whethr or not to acknowledge dolls as art was, however, a fraught one. The Edo period had already seen the production of some outstandingly beautiful dolls. Costumes made from the very finest cloth, beautifully and carefully created heads – every feature about the dolls had to be of the most superb quality, capable of pleasing the most discerning clients, who included members of the Imperial family, aristocrats, shoguns, daimyo and hugely wealthy merchants who wanted to decorate their homes with exquisite objects. But such dolls often seemed strikingly otherworldly, even frightening, to modern sensibilities. Some people argued that the associations of dolls with folk belief and children’s pastimes made them unsuitable objects for modern, intellectual appreciation. Additionally, the face and costume of the dolls were often rendered in a very cursory fashion, as in traditional Japanese painting, with the body a flat, two-dimensional form. The lack of any noticeable anatomical characteristics led to the criticism that the dolls lacked individuality. Further, whereas in traditional doll making different parts of the dolls – the head, the clothing – would be made separately by different craftsmen, modern doll making assumed that a single individual would make the entire doll. For a single artist to work on a doll from start to finish, following his or her own conception, required a complete change in mental attitude. This, combined with the change in expectations about what the dolls should express – something non-human, or something human – required a huge leap of the imagination.

Demonstrating One’s Strength

Emerging attitudes

But in recent years expectations surrounding dolls have relaxed. People have begun to look for a whole array of other meanings and possibilities in them. Some people see dolls as reflecting two opposing ideas at the same time – life and death, light and shadow, while some people see dolls as occupying a space between stillness and movement, and others claim to enjoy the ‘afterglow’ that they exude. Some see dolls as conveying a sense of a single moment within eternity, others as conveying eternity within a single moment, still others see dolls as bringing a poetic breeze into people’s lives, and so on. They really seem to inspire a whole range of ideas and reactions. The most observant enthusiasts point out that doll making requires a keen sensitivity to and awareness of human nature.

It is also, they say, a total art form, one that requires the artist to use a multiplicity of different artistic skills, and a variety of quite different media. Sometimes it is pictorial. Sometimes sculptural; sometimes it involves craftwork, sometimes costume design. This is what sets doll making apart from other decorative arts, and what give it its special appeal.

So what do the doll makers themselves say?

The sculptor Hirata Gōyō, who was also a doll maker, commented that ‘Dolls are not just things that convey or portray something else. They should have meaning in and of themselves.’

The doll maker and poet of the Araragi school

Kagoshima Juzō compared dolls to literature. The largely self-taught doll maker Hori Ryūjo famously said that ‘dolls have souls (kokoro)’ – and by this she meant the contemporary notion of ‘soul’, rather than the idea of ‘spirit’ as in black magic and similar practices. Noguchi Sono’o, another student of Hori’s, said that when she made dolls it was because she wanted to ‘write poems – poems about pain, sorrow and sadness.’ The doll and puppet maker Tsujimura Jūsaburo put it well when he said: ‘Even though the dolls live in darkness, a world where they are unable to hear, speak or see, they still spin their illusions.’ Such creative ideas have provided the impetus for all kinds of totally new dolls being created in the modern age.

Dolls are sometimes compared to sculptures, which can be either still and introspective, or dynamic and expressive. With sculptures, the proportions tend to be intellectualized, all excess pared away. What gives a work its particular rhythm is its overall balance and harmony, and the correct expression of muscular tension and ease, which also suggests something of the model’s state of mind. With dolls, on the other hand, the expression is in the fine details – the way the hair lies, the folds in the cloth of the doll’s robe, the movement in the fingertips – which add to the sense of beauty and presence. One might say that sculptures are a strong, masculine form of art, while dolls express something altogether lighter and more feminine – like nymphs resting briefly by a lake. Dolls are the epitome of omomuki, a sensitive, elegant, graceful aesthetic that has been nurtured in Japan from olden times.

While the ancient Greeks expressed an idealised human form in marble, contemporary Japanese use dolls to portray a range of sensibilities in materials such as wood, cloth and paper. The need for a range of emotions is probably what sets contemporary dolls apart from traditional dolls. But sculptures and dolls have progressed on completely different vectors – which is why dolls have a particular, unique beauty that cannot be expressed in any other form of art.

The dolls of Ohno Hatsuko

My mother Ohno Hatsuko was a doll maker who emphasized the tatazumai of dolls. Tatazumai is a difficult word to translate into English, but it implies an outer form that is imbued with ambience, or ‘atmosphere.’ For example, a sense of stillness that still speaks of movement, or rhythm. This rhythm is what gives the dolls their life pulse. The facial expression is kept to a minimum, the eyes and nose limited to the merest of strokes, allowing the sheer presence of the dolls to speak. If the artist succeeds, the doll comes alive, conveying a particular emotion, or a particular instant of human drama. Dolls can fall in love, they dote on children, they find joy in the changes of the seasons, or they can simply sit there in meditation… In their little forms resides a beauty that is more than physical: it is spiritual. My mother used to tell me that it was for this reason that she loved making her dolls.

So, are dolls art? In my presentation, I show a series of artistic dolls ranging from ones made in the modern period to the contemporary period. The audience seems surprised and fascinated by their sheer variety, and how different the modern dolls seem in comparison to the traditional ones. When I finish my talk, they show their great appreciation with enthusiastic applause. It seems that many people have yet to discover that Japanese dolls are not simply pretty and exotic decorative figures, but a unique form of art that is capable of conveying a whole range of human ideas and emotions.

At the end of my presentation, people in the audience make their way to the gallery to go and look at the dolls. I watch quietly as the visitors file in to the rooms. Each doll presents itself for observation, lit under a spot light. The people gaze at the dolls with warm, serious expressions on their faces. I catch sight of a shadow flitting across the glass cases. My mother, perhaps... Quietly, discreetly, without saying a word, I take my leave of the exhibition gallery.

略歴