Meiji Kyoto Textile Art and Takashimaya

By the middle of the nineteenth century certain types of Japanese artifacts, such as porcelain and lacquerware, had already become known outside Japan. Textile goods, clothing or otherwise, by contrast, were latecomers to the catalogue of Japanese exports to the West. Researchers have noted that the opening of Japan to foreign trade in the late 1850s entailed a dramatic increase in the production and export of silk. But it was raw silk thread and silkworm-egg cards that Europeans were keen to import from Japan in the initial two decades of this trade. Rolls of woven silk fabric were then in little demand as trade goods. Nevertheless, varieties of goods made of silk, for daily use or for gifts, began to be sold at treaty ports. Among these were noncostume textiles that were made specifically for the Western market and for Western tourists as objects of art or interior decoration. From the 1870s such items became an increasingly important part of Japan's export trade.

The ornamental textiles that Westerners bought as "things Japanese" were not used in the ordinary residences of Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. Instead, they were the product of a late nineteenth-century effort to adapt traditional textile skills to the production of goods more marketable in the West. To cite a few, folding screens, which had been welcomed in Europe for several centuries and readily used in Western interior space, were now decorated not with a brush and pigment or ink but with needlework and sold as shishū byōbu (embroidered screens). A squarish piece of cloth embellished with a dyed and/or needlework design, the traditional ceremonial gift-cover known as fukusa, would find a new life in Paris, where it was even hung on the wall like a framed painting and appreciated as a work of fine art. Yūzen-zome, a traditional technique of fixing painted designs on kimono fabric, was applied to make cut-velvet wall-hangings.¹

The immense quantity of textile goods exported from the 1870s through the first half of the twentieth century consisted to a substantial extent of relatively low-cost items. The subject of this article, however, is a different type of goods: the high-quality pieces that were produced in Kyoto for a quarter century from the 1880s to the 1910s (that is, the second half of the Meiji period, 1868-1912). As was true of export goods in general, even outstanding examples of this second category typically do not bear the name or signature of their maker or designer and only rarely carry a company label. Some nonetheless involved collaboration with leading artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Exemplifying the skills and virtuosity of the traditional Kyoto textile industry, such pieces might take two to three years of joint work by a number of artisans specializing in different techniques. What happened to pieces of this sort after they were shipped abroad has been little explored, and most of the examples that survive in Japan today are "leftovers," unsold and left in the hands of the makers or exhibition sponsors. Not surprisingly, Meiji textile-art objects have been little studied by art historians, as once was the fate of late nineteenth-century Japanese export porcelain and lacquerware.²

Although far from comprehensive, documentation on Meiji art textiles is no less rich than for most other genres of nineteenth-century Japanese export crafts. From such documentation, including contemporaneous periodicals, newspapers, and exhibition catalogues, as well as secondary sources, we find that the production of art textiles of outstanding workmanship thrived in the second half of Meiji, with many Kyoto painters contributing to its rise. Large-sized specimens were exhibited at world fairs and used by Japanese authorities as choice gifts for important diplomatic occasions. Competition between three textile firms enlivened this development. The heads of these firms, by whom the businesses themselves are usually remembered, were Nishimura Sōzaemon of Chisō (a commissioner/wholesaler), Kawashima Jinbei of Kawashima Orimono (a weaving firm), and Iida Shinshichi of Takashimaya (a retailer/commissioner and later department store).³ This golden age [End Page 38...