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2. Anomie and Innovation in Kyoto: Ceramic Professionals, Amateurs, and Consumers
- University of Hawai'i Press
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c h a p t e r t w o The procedure of beauty, which is to resist the real while conferring unity upon it, is also the procedure of rebellion.—Albert Camus, “Creation and Revolution,” The Rebel Anomie and Innovation in Kyoto Ceramic Professionals, Amateurs, and Consumers The first half of the seventeenth century was a bittersweet period for Kyoto elites, a diaphanous moment of anomie amidst a growing storm of regulation . After a century of conflict that greatly disrupted the lives of city residents , Kyoto’s landscape had been successfully rebuilt by Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598). Markets were thriving and the population was increasing, but the city was no longer the center of politics. After 1600 the Tokugawa house extended its rule of the eastern domains to the entire archipelago, and established a warrior bureaucracy five hundred kilometers away in Edo.1 Resentment and disapproval were productively transformed into a kind of transgressive creativity , however, and Kyoto soon experienced a renaissance fueled by the fusion of new cultural activities with the fruits of the city’s (imagined) imperial Pitelka02 41 7/22/05 9:39:44 AM 42 | handmade culture past. The earliest reliable documentary traces of Raku ceramic production date from this period, revealing that major shifts were also occurring in the world of tea ceramics. The production and consumption of Raku ceramics in the first half of the seventeenth century underwent a significant transformation. Particularly important is the collaboration of professional potters and tea-practitioner consumers , stimulated by the Kyoto cultural renaissance. Three professional potters led this development: Skei, a potter who may have worked with Chjir; Jkei, believed to be the successor to Chjir; and Jkei’s son Nonk, considered the most innovative of the lineage that later came to be known as the Raku potters. Consumers also entered into the studio to make whimsical works for their own pleasure, seen in the activities of two prominent tea practitioners and amateur potters, Oda Uraku and Hon’ami Ketsu. It was also during this period that several influential tea masters began to use Raku ceramics, laying the foundation for future expansion in the popularity of the wares. The Kyoto Renaissance The Tokugawa firmly consolidated their control of Japan in the first four decades of the seventeenth century. In the granting of the title of shogun to Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616) in 1603, the defeat of the Toyotomi at Osaka castle in 1615 and the issuance of Laws for the Military Houses and Laws Governing the Imperial Court and Nobility in the same year and the establishment of the system of mandatory alternate attendance two decades later, the containment of the Shimabara Uprising of 1637–1638 and the exclusion of the majority of foreign trade the following year, we see a gradual extension of centralized control. Tokugawa authority was exercised through the threat and use of force. It was also manifested in the creation and maintenance of status categories, which served to map and regulate society, allowing both flexibility and rigidity in the management of social groups.2 Finally, the Tokugawa exercised their right to rule through the construction and control of national and domainal boundaries. One of the most problematic coordinates on this diagram of Tokugawa authority , in terms of the exercise of force, status, and geography, was Kyoto, home to the emperor and his court.3 The first half of the century witnessed the gradual erosion of Kyoto’s centrality and the increasing political irrelevance of its citizens. This transition caused confusion and disaffection among many Pitelka02 42 7/22/05 9:39:45 AM [44.210.240.31] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:46 GMT) Anomie and Innovation in Kyoto | 43 members of the Kyoto elite. The resulting state of anomie can be seen in a host of transgressive tendencies that manifested not as criminal behavior but as cultural innovation. The notion of anomie, articulated by Émile Durkheim and expanded by Robert Merton, is defined as a state of normlessness, chaos, and confusion that can lead to crime, deviancy, and transgression. Durkheim argues that anomie is caused by rapid economic change, while Merton describes it as a result of a gap between culturally defined goals and means. In the context of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Japan, the cultures of “the low overthrow the high” (gekokuj), unconventional youths (kabukimono), and increasing numbers of masterless samurai (rnin) reveal a comparable aimlessness...