Page 34 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

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cat. 139 of house plans. Though the traditional Japanese home as we imagine it today — devoid of heavy, large
Festival Scenes showing a
procession winding through furniture, with its stored futon, paper-covered sliding panels, and tokonoma alcove — became typical,
daimyo residences in Edo, in the minimal sense of the word, only later in the period, commoner houses then held far more articles
detail from a pair of six-panel
screens; color and gold on paper, than in the past. Koizumi Kazuko writes that "the custom of making bridal furnishings even passed
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each 160 x 350 (63 x 137 / 4), down to ordinary commoners... .Typical items included chests, trunks, hampers, mirrors and mirror
Private Collection, Kyoto
stands, clothes racks, cosmetic cases, and sewing boxes." 36
In order to store these multiplying articles, chests (tansu) in all varieties and shapes became
popular in the eighteenth century: clothes chests, tea chests, apothecary chests, writing boxes, and so
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on. The wealthier commoners, however, needed more than an assortment of chests and ornamental
shelves. Improved fireproof storehouses started to be built in greater numbers to hold goods that were 33
brought out only on certain occasions (allowing Edo plasterers in about 1730 to command fees three
times higher than the high fees of carpenters). 38

F O R M R E F I N E D The combination of a markedly stratified society and an extreme division of labor (which had already
reached a high degree in the late middle ages) made for an ever greater specialization of skills. Some
skills were kept as secret house traditions; others were described in great detail in popular books. This
formalization of practices took place even in fields where we might least expect it, like that of cuisine.
In a delightful discussion of Edo-period cuisine, Nishiyama Matsunosuke describes how tech-
niques for cutting and preparing food, like so many other practices, were eventually ennobled by being
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called an art or "Way" (michi, -do), which changed over time into "secret traditions." The concept comes
close to our expanded use of the term "art," as in the "art of French cooking." Thus a few formal cui-
sine traditions developed from rules and techniques used during the fifteenth century in ceremonies
and banquets, some of them at the shogunal court. Of these, the Shijó school of cuisine became the
most famous during the Tokugawa period. Its "secrets," often starting with legendary tales of noble or
mythical origins, were more about preparation and presentation, the cutting and displaying of food —
again, a matter of vision and division, like the status system — than about recipes in the modern sense.
Form was of paramount importance. These techniques were written down and beautifully illustrated
with colored drawings in three volumes (1642,1649, and 1774), to be used by members of the school.
One finds there, for instance, fifty-five ways to cut and display carp and ten each for sea bass, trout,
wild goose, crane, and pheasant. Nishiyama writes that the third volume "was a response to the
plebeian counteroffensive in cookbook publishing." 40
The formulas, however, were not kept secret after all. Shortly after 1642 a Digest of Secret [Shijó]
Transmissions on Correct Food Preparation and Cutting appeared in print, revealing among other things,
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thirty-six styles of preparing and serving carp. From the second or third decade of the eighteenth cen-
tury cookbooks with marketing-sensitive titles (from Secret Chest of a Myriad Cooking Treasures to Digest
of Chinese-Style Meager Fare) and regular recipes (for soups) started to sell well. The genre went back as
far as the mid-seventeenth century (Tales of Cooking, 1643; and a six-volume Collection of Edo Cuisine,
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1674), which was also about the time the first restaurants opened in Edo. Cuisine, in restaurants and
bookshops, had become a commodity.
What happened in the field of cuisine repeated itself in many Tokugawa-period traditions of
practical knowledge. Similar excesses in refinement developed, such as differentiations related to time,