Fuji Hanjiro: Edo-style kite painting depicting Kintaro (a figure in Japanese folklore) and the warrior Watanabe no Tsuna, 1960s; right, neputa (festival float) kite painting depicting a samurai with a spear, artist and date unknown; opposite page, from left, Hashimoto Teizo: Edo-style kite painting depicting Watanabe no Tsuna and the demon Ibaraki, 1960s; Miwa Yoshihito: Iki Oniyocho kite, circa 1975; Hashimoto Satoshi: Nagoya Koryu kite in the form an abu (horsefly), early 1990s; all from the collection of David M. Kahn
olorful Japanese kites — ranging from minuscule to enormous and painted with fish, birds, dragons, kabuki actors, the Buddha, and heroes from folklore — hang in a new exhibition at the Museum of International Folk Art. On an afternoon 12 days before the opening, exhibit designer Antoine Leriche was busy arranging kite-hanging cables while Jamie Hascall, chief preparator for the Museum of New Mexico, was anchoring tiny kites to a panel. What would he do with the smallest one in the exhibition, a half-inch kite encased in a miniature bottle? Look for it in Tako Kichi: Kite Crazy in Japan. The show opens Sunday, June 9, in the museum’s Bartlett Wing. The vast majority of the kites in the show were made in the past 50 years; antique kites are rarities. “Kites end up in trees,” said New York collector David Kahn. “Some of the older ones in this exhibit have lots of patches. “In Japan there’s a phenomenon where wealthier families have a fireproof kura, a storehouse, and my guess is that some of the older kites were protected in a kura, and periodically all these great things will show up on the antique market because someone opened up the family kura.” More than 300 kites, woodblock prints, and books from Kahn’s collection make up the bulk of the exhibition. There are also items from MOIFA’s collection. In addition, Felicia Katz-Harris, MOIFA’s curator of Asian and Middle Eastern art, borrowed a half dozen 19th-century woodblock prints depicting kite-flying from Colorado kite expert Scott Skinner; miniature kites from the family of a Kyoto kite maker who recently died; and an 1857 print by Utagawa Hiroshige I, which shows carp windsocks flying over a Surugadai landscape, from the New Mexico Museum of Art. Kahn said that Japanese kites are traditionally made of handmade mulberry paper (washi) on frames of bamboo, although cypress wood is used in the far north of
the country. Most kites are rectangular, square, hexagonal, or round. The MOIFA show also has Japanese “centipede kites” hanging overhead. The Japanese have nothing like the American box kite, although a variant of the well-known diamond kite is found in Nagasaki. This type of kite, called hata, was probably first brought to the port by Portuguese and Spanish merchants coming from India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, where the style was common. Some Japanese kites incorporate a sound element — a thin piece of bamboo or wisteria or tape from a cassette — that vibrates when the kite is flown. Another interesting variant is a kite modeled after the yakko. “He was a servant of the samurai and people remember him as a bully,” Katz-Harris said. “Some of the yakko kites have two legs hanging, and they can make the kite glide, but they also make it look like he’s doing a ridiculous dance.” “[The yakko] were the low guys in the samurai household,” Kahn said. “The big lords had to spend every other year in Tokyo, and the yakko footmen, since they were closer to them in class, sort of lorded it over the commoners.” Kahn bought his first Japanese kite when he was 9 years old. He still has four that date from his childhood years, but his focus on collecting started much later, in the mid-1980s. Kite culture in Japan is a far cry from the $15 polyester items typically available in the U.S. “In Japan a new hexagonal rokkaku [fighting kite] goes for from 3,000 to 15,000 yen, so $30 to $150. But one of the things about collecting is that it’s very hard to find this material now. The old-time kite makers have been disappearing and have not been succeeded by younger people carrying on the craft. “Twenty-five years ago you could go into a craft shop such as Bingoya in Tokyo in December and there would be hundreds of hand-painted Japanese kites hanging from the ceiling from all over Japan. This last December I was there, and there were five kites for sale. I couldn’t believe it. continued on Page 30
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