Page 14 - Christies March 15 2017 Fujita Museum

For the elite new collector (the new daimyo, as Christine Guth calls such men), Chinese tea wares
were highly sought after. The Fujita family, for example, paid ¥200,000 for a globular Chinese tea
caddy once owned by the seventeenth-century calligrapher Shōkadō Shōjō, a gigantic increase over
the ¥2,000 it brought when the Sakai family bought it in 1871. (For the purpose of comparison, in
the 1870s, the monthly salary of high government oficials averaged between ¥350 and ¥500. (See
Christine M. E. Guth, Art, Tea and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle [Princeton University
Press, 1993], p. 134.) A master of the tea ceremony, Takahashi Sōan (1861–1937), observed that
Fujita would never ask the price of an object he was ofered. Dealers arrived daily with their wares
and spread them out in front of their client, “from whose mouth only two responses emerged: ‘I will
take it’ or ‘ I don’t need it.’ (For more about Sōan and Fujita, see Kumakura Isao, “Chigusa from the
17th Century to 1929,” in Louise Allison Cort and Andrew M. Watsky, eds., Chigusa and the Art of Tea
[Freer|Sackler, 2014], p. 184.)

In 1912, desperately ill, Fujita bid from his hospital bed on a tiny, Ming-dynasty ceramic incense
container, a fne example of Kochi ware, yellow with brown and green markings. It had passed through
the hands of the Inaba family in Yodo and the Ikushima family in Kobe. Fujita had his loyal agent Toda
Rochō (Yashichi, 1867–1930) bidding for him at this dealers’ auction. The frst bid was ¥73,000. Fujita
countered by immediately jumping to ¥90,000—the winning bid. Ten days later, he died. Ironically,
the incense container is in the auspicious shape of a tortoise, symbol of longevity (see Maeno
Eri, “ ‘Korekutaa—Fujita Densaburō no shimbigan’ ni yosete” [On the subject of ‘Collector: Fujita
Densaburō’s aesthetic sense’] Tosetsu 704 [Nov. 2011], pp. 23–24).

Opening ceremony of the Fujita Museum of Art, 1954. Pagoda from the Kodai-in Temple on
藤田美術館開館剪綵。 Mount Koya, relocated by Fujita Heitarō
to the garden of the Fujita Museum.
Fujita spent a fortune on tea utensils, had several rooms designed for the tea ceremony and diligently
studied tea, frst with Mushakojisenke and then with Omotesenke teachers. However, the chanoyu 藤田美術館内的佛塔，請自高野山光臺院。
historian Kumakura Isao discovered that Fujita was not a typical man of tea. Surprisingly, he rarely
hosted tea gatherings at his home, claiming that he had not yet assembled the full range of utensils
necessary for a tea event. Perhaps he felt himself to be inadequate as a practitioner.

In Japan, it is customary for collectors to work through only one, sometimes two, dealers, who have
exclusive access to them. Fujita Denzaburō worked with two fabled local dealerships. Until World
War II, the Fujita family acquired Chinese art exclusively through Yamanaka & Company and relied
on Tanimatsuya, or Toda Gallery, for Japanese art and tea wares. Both of these dealerships had their
headquarters in Osaka.

Tanimatsuya was founded around 1700, and the Toda family was soon appointed the oficial tea
utensil store (Goyo dogusho) to Matudaira Fumai (1751–1818), the head of the Matsue clan and a
renowned man of tea. Rogin (b. 1843), the eighth head of the Toda family, saw the collapse of the
tea market in the fnal years of the Tokugawa regime, when daimyo patronage ended, but he soon
rejuvenated the business. He adopted Rochō in 1879 from the Toda branch family in Kyoto and trained
him as the ninth head of Tanimatsuya. Together, they developed their business through the period
of Japan’s modernization, from Meiji into the early Shōwa era, working hard to build the great Fujita
family collection on a scale that would be unthinkable today.

12 IMPORTANT CHINESE ART FROM THE FUJITA MUSEUM