Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons, and Tea Practitioners in Japan

6. Inventing Modern Identity: The Collapse of Warrior Patronage, the Rise of Individualism and Nationalism

c h a p t e r s i x Inventing Modern Identity The Collapse of Warrior Patronage, the Rise of Individualism and Nationalism Members of the warrior status group1 had been patrons of tea in Japan since its evolution in the fifteenth century into a ritualized practice combining performative beverage consumption and art connoisseurship.2 Sixteenth-century warrior leaders such as Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi raised the profile of tea by employing influential tea masters, sponsoring large tea gatherings , and adopting tea practice as an essential political and social tool. The Tokugawa regime continued this policy after 1600, employing tea masters under different shoguns and making tea a fundamental practice of the bureaucratic warrior elite.3 Some of the most zealous warrior tea practitioners emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as domainal To transcend and seek release from my individuality—this is the starting point for my creative endeavors . . . An abyss opens before one as the fragmented stirrings of consciousness lead one towards the creative act—an abyss before which words about to be uttered freeze, before which the overlapping layers of consciousness expire without finding expression. How many times have I pondered bitterly that I should have remained silent.—Raku Kichizaemon XV, Raku: A Dynasty of Japanese Ceramists Pitelka06 133 7/22/05 9:42:02 AM 134 | handmade culture lords used tea to express new visions of social and political change, or created utopian cultural landscapes in response to a host of national and domainal difficulties. Matsudaira Fumai (also Harusato; 1751–1818) and Ii Naosuke (1815–1860), for example, wrote voluminously on the propriety and potential benefits of tea practice. Like the Sen iemoto, Raku potters also worked directly for warrior patrons during this period, such as Ryny (1756–1834) and his successor, Tanny (1795–1854), who participated in the construction of “garden kilns” for influential domainal lords. The collapse of warrior patronage after the restoration of the Meiji emperor in 1868, however, threatened the survival of tea culture and Raku ceramics. By the early nineteenth century, the Sen tea organizations and the network of craft workshops they supported had become dependent on the hierarchy of warrior power. The fall of the Tokugawa regime and the disintegration of the early modern status system under the Meiji Restoration thus destroyed the substructure of the tea iemoto; it was not until the appearance of a new class of patrons in the late nineteenth century that tea reemerged as a viable cultural practice. Domainal Lords and Tea: Matsudaira Fumai and Ii Naosuke By the eighteenth century, tea culture was firmly established in many domains across Japan, not only among elite commoners but also among domainal lords and their retainers. Sendai, Tsuchiura, Owari, Tokushima, Matsushiro, Kaga, Hikone, Kii, Himeji, Hagi, Hirado, and Satsuma all had strong traditions of domainal lord tea patronage.4 Although the wealth of these lords varied greatly, they commanded resources far beyond those of regular tea practitioners and so could accumulate large collections of tea utensils. For many domainal lord tea practitioners, collecting and cataloguing tea utensils seems to have been as gratifying as the actual practices of the tea gathering. One of the domainal lords most active in tea in the eighteenth century was Matsudaira Fumai.5 Fumai became lord of the Matsue domain, Izumo province (present-day Shimane prefecture) at the age of seventeen, during a time of great crisis for the ruling warrior elite. Like many domains across the archipelago , Matsue was struggling under increasing debts and a failing domainal economy following a series of natural disasters and famines, made worse by heavy demands from the Tokugawa government.6 Fumai instituted a host of Pitelka06 134 7/22/05 9:42:04 AM Inventing Modern Identity | 135 financial incentives and reforms focusing on increasing agricultural output and paper production. An amusing—though probably apocryphal—story recounts that after years of financial reforms, Fumai asked to be shown the official domainal coffers. He discovered that they were filled with money, and he used this wealth to acquire his large collection of tea utensils. Like many members of the warrior elite, Fumai trained in the Ensh school of tea as a youth but later became interested in the Sekish school.7 By the age of nineteen Fumai was convinced that tea was a subject worthy of serious study. In 1770 he set down...