Vessels of Influence: China and the Birth of Porcelain in Medieval and Early Modern Japan
By Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere
Bristol Classical Press (2012)
ISBN 978-0715634639
Review Sir Hugh Cortazzi
Professor Rousmaniere, research director at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC) in Norwich, has specialized in the study of Japanese ceramics. She has recently completed a new and comprehensive catalogue of Japanese porcelain in the British Museum which is likely to be published early in 2013. This will not only describe the Museum’s Japanese porcelain, but also provide an overview of Japanese porcelain and its history. Nicole Rousmaniere gave the Toshiba lectures in London and Norwich on Japanese porcelain in November 2012. These were copiously illustrated with some rare and fascinating slides. I hope that in due course these lectures and the illustrations which accompanied them will be published.
Vessels of Influence is a scholarly study based on Professor Rousmaniere’s experiences in Japan working with Japanese scholars of ceramics and on a careful study of the relevant literature in Japanese and English. It is informative and will be a valuable source for all who are interested in Japanese ceramics.
The terminology used in describing Japanese ceramics is often confusing. Professor Rousmaniere explains that the English classification system of dividing ceramics into three types – earthenware, stoneware and porcelain – does not translate easily into comparable terms in Japanese. ‘Stoneware is used to refer to a ceramic that has a semi-vitrified body (non-porous) and is fired at the high temperature of at least 1200 degrees centigrade.’ Japanese refer to these wares as tõki or sekki. ‘Porcelain is a fully vitrified ware with a whitish body that is transparent after firing when thinly potted’ at temperatures of between 1250 and 1400 degrees centigrade. In Japanese these wares are termed jiki, but confusingly Japanese often use the term tõjiki [陶磁器] when speaking of vitrified wares.
Nicole Rousmaniere describes the way in which Chinese wares came, largely through the tea ceremony, to hold such an important place in Japanese eyes and thus inspired the development of a Japanese porcelain industry. She notes that Japanese made pots many thousands of years ago and that Japan had plentiful supplies of clay suitable for the making of ceramics including porcelain. Yet porcelain making in Japan really only began some four hundred years ago.
She also reviews the various arguments about the extent to which the development of Japanese porcelain can be attributed to the import of Korean potters into Japan following the Japanese invasion of Korea in the late sixteenth century in what have been called the ‘pottery wars.’ She concludes that while Korean potters played a significant part in the development there were other important factors. With the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate the country was largely at peace and with improved prosperity and better communications there was an increased demand for luxury goods including porcelain from China (China ware as we in the west still often call porcelain). Trade with China, which had continued for centuries although with interruptions, expanded. A major Japanese export was silver and Chinese ceramics were a significant Japanese import. But as the Ming Empire began to collapse Chinese ceramic production declined and exports were interrupted. This created an important incentive for Japanese production of porcelain. Initially Japanese porcelain wares followed closely Chinese designs and for some years often carried Chinese reign marks. As Professor Rousmaniere points out ‘early Japanese porcelain was initially import substitution’ but by the latter part of the seventeenth century it had developed Japanese characteristics and a life of its own.
Japanese porcelain seems to have originated in the Saga area of Kyushu and to have derived from wares produced in Karatsu. It was first fired in the Arita area of Saga in the 1610s and became known as Hizen domain porcelain (Hizen jiki –肥前磁器), but such wares are termed Imari [伊万里] by the Tokyo National Museum and Arita [有田] by the Idemitsu Museum. Kakiemon [柿右衛門] is regarded as a sub-group.
Other domains tried to emulate Saga, but ‘the immensely costly and natural-resource-depleting industry proved difficult to sustain’ and it was not until well into the eighteenth century that porcelain producing kilns developed in other parts of Japan.
Kutani ware [九谷焼], which came to be produced in the Kaga fief around Kanazawa, was produced initially in the Hizen area of Kyushu.
Arita was part of the Nabeshima fief, which attempted in the first part of the seventeenth century to establish a monopoly of porcelain production in thirteen kilns. These were enclosed by two guardhouses and encircled by three mountains. They benefitted from access to supplies of suitable clay in the neighbourhood. The Nabeshima daimyo, who had obligations to the Tokugawa, found that porcelain wares produced in their domain were welcome presents which helped to cement their relations with their feudal overlords. Porcelain produced for presents and other uses by the Nabeshima family form a distinct type of Imari.
Porcelain was an important Japanese export through the Dutch factory at Deshima in Nagasaki bay during the Tokugawa era and remained a significant element in Japanese exports after the ‘re-opening’ of Japan to the West in the middle of the nineteenth century. The differences between Japanese porcelain made for the home market and wares produced for export led to some acrimonious arguments between western experts.
The title Vessels of Influence is justified by the importance given to Chinese ceramics in the development of Japanese ceramic aesthetics, but it does not fully convey the wider purport of this book.
I hope that this interesting and valuable study will be followed not only by illustrated texts of her three lectures and her account of Japanese ceramics inspired by the British museum collection of some 3,500 pieces, but will also lead to another copiously illustrated volume depicting the different types of Japanese porcelain thus helping western collectors to appreciate the differences between Ko-Imari and [古伊万里] Ko-Kutani [古九谷], recognize typical Kakiemon designs and styles, and appreciate the wares produced for use by the Nabeshima daimyo. It would also be helpful in such a book to reproduce examples of the copies which were made in Europe in the eighteenth century of Japanese porcelain. I recall in this context the fine ‘Porcelain for Palaces’ exhibition at the British Museum in the late 1980s in which for instance an original early piece of Kakiemon was shown alongside a piece made in the short-lived Chelsea factory.