Spectacular Accumulation: Material Culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Samurai Sociability by Morgan Pitelka (review)

The cover of this book shows a Yoshitoshi print, full of the lurid aniline purples and crimsons beloved of early Meiji print artists, in which Tokugawa Ieyasu is depicted examining a severed head. The head is that of Kimura Shigenari, a warrior leader who fought on the Toyotomi side at the siege of Osaka castle in the summer of 1615 and lost his life in battle. Since he had been one of the leading warriors on the Toyotomi side, his head had the honor of being inspected by Ieyasu himself and naturally also had a part in the NHK Taiga-dorama “Tokugawa Ieyasu” in 1983. Thus, the cover neatly introduces two of the themes of this book, Ieyasu and, more improbably, severed heads.

The year 2016 was the 400th anniversary of the death of Ieyasu, an occasion that has been marked by, among other events, a symposium at Durham University in England at which the author of this book expanded upon some of its themes. He is at pains to emphasize here that this is not a biography of Ieyasu, and yet it seems that this is going to be the only Ieyasu publication this anniversary year. So we will have to wait longer for a more sustained treatment of Ieyasu and his times, one to put alongside the fine studies of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi by Jeroen Lamers and Mary Elizabeth Berry.¹ As Morgan Pitelka points out, both A. L. Sadler’s biography of 1937 and Conrad Totman’s slim volume of 1983 leave a lot to be desired.² Nevertheless, Ieyasu fans should not despair, for he provides us here with an intriguing and unusual study of Ieyasu and his times.

Instead of a biography of Ieyasu, then, Pitelka gives us a study of one of the cultural characteristics of the age, and one which Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu, we learn, were in turn particularly adept at exploiting: “spectacular accumulation.” This term, borrowed from Simon Schama, serves the useful purpose of focusing on the activity of collecting rather than the objects collected and avoiding a bias toward “art,” hence the reference to “material culture” in the title. Pitelka argues that “spectacular accumulation” was not simply a matter of collecting but rather a means of expressing and demonstrating political power and conducting relations with allies, rivals, and peers, and that accounts for the “sociability” in the title.

The material culture of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that Pitelka dissects in this book mostly consists of objects such as tea caddies, falcons, and severed heads. At first sight they make a very peculiar combination, but he convincingly demonstrates their importance to Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu and emphasizes the similar ways in which they served symbolic or political functions. The objects (Pitelka finds it hard to escape the discourse of art history and sometimes refers to them as “works of art”) matter to their owners, they have names, they have provenance. They are mostly continental by origin—predominantly tea caddies and paintings from China, but there was also a vogue for Korean tea bowls—and they tended to pass from famous hand to famous hand. So much were they sought after and valued that in the aftermath of the fall of Osaka castle in 1615 Ieyasu ordered the smoldering remains to be searched for some of Hideyoshi’s prize possessions: among them was the Song-dynasty tea caddy known as “Tsukumo nasu” which was found shattered into many small pieces and which, X-rays reproduced in this book show, was expertly and invisibly repaired to join Ieyasu’s collection. Objects like this did not serve merely to gratify the collector’s love of loot but, as Pitelka shows, were an important part of the political process. They were donated by former foes as peace offerings, offered up as protection money by Sakai merchants, and bestowed upon allies and subordinates as rewards for loyalty and pledges...