Page 42 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

these parties identity and status markers, including personal names, were left behind, and members
donned geimei, literally "performance/skill/art names," as they took on a different persona. One person
could thus "play" a number of personas, adopting a different name in each cultural practice as if
changing a kimono. One encounters this phenomenon across many art forms of commoners, in the
circles specializing in the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, no dance, and so on. It is hard to think of
an art form that once was the preserve of the nobility and the upper warrior strata that was not dif-
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fused and taken over by commoners. The phenomenon includes court music, for Sorai played the shô,
an instrument used in a gagaku court music ensemble, but he unceremoniously confided to a friend
that "the sound of his playing the shó terrified his cat." 66
The play with form takes place in other art traditions as well. One easily detects a certain 41
lightheartedness about function and frame. Kimono (kosode) can function as room decorations when,
hung on clothes racks, they display their panoramic designs, which in themselves seem to disregard
frame. Many kimono scenes strike across the surface, as it were, seemingly with total disregard of
the vestment's sleeve, shoulder, back, or front. The design wraps around and flows over the material
contours, very much like a tattoo plays with the body form. Both present themselves as playful forms
of disrespect for frame. Likewise in the satirical booklets illustration and text are not separated by

clear boundaries; textual stalactites drip into the scenes that mount up into the writing.
Dishes are intended to function as containers, to hold things, and when aesthetically deco-
rated, they become art objects to be admired. Some Japanese artisans succeeded in eliciting not only
admiration but also a smile by cleverly confounding the container with what is contained. The content
is already in the container in a Nabeshima ware example on which a white radish is elegantly drawn
(cat. 18), its form seeking to merge with the form of the dish. And the container becomes the content
in the Utsutsugawa ware plate that nearly disappears into a melon shape (cat. 34). Here, as in Nori-
naga's theory of the kami, the object absorbs the referent.

P O P U L A R A N D Many of the activities discussed above fall within the category of folk art or performative arts. Gei or
F I N E A R T geinó is the Japanese term that expresses this best, for it emphasizes "skills." In the early Tokugawa
period performers, or geisha, were predominantly nonstatus people (hinin), many of whom combined
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their "art" with some form of mendicancy and various degrees of piety or trickery (cat. 237). As
alluded to earlier, such practices were often referred to as a "Way," a term meant to give them a spiri-
tual seriousness, generational depth, and social dignity and thus separate them from purely mundane
pursuits such as plain begging.
The various Ways and their aura may create the impression that the art field in Tokugawa Japan
was extraordinarily vast. Yet it was perhaps not as encompassing then as we might think today. For
example — to limit the discussion to pictorial traditions — ukiyoe, or pictures from the "floating world"
of entertainment and leisure, might appear to be the most representative art of the time, but this was
not the case. These single-sheet woodblock prints were sold cheaply, like posters, and were thought of
not as art but as eye-popping advertisements for actors, courtesans, and other popular themes. At
the same time, Nanga — literally "southern pictures," after a Chinese style of the Song period — would
likewise not have been considered as genuine art by painters of the Kano school associated with the
shogunate, but the genre was also called Bunjinga, "literati painting," an indication of cultural ambition,