Page 57 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

play (asobi). The use of parody grew more pronounced in the Edo period and may be seen in such
works as the helmet in the shape of a upside-down red lacquer bowl (cat. 55) or Itó Jakuchü's
Vegetable parinirvana, or "Death of the Buddha" (cat. 121), in which the artist substituted a radish for
the Buddha and various vegetables of the grieving mourners to achieve the desired effect.
In sum, kazari, depending on the time and the context, has many connotations, ranging
from Buddhist paradise imagery to individual political machinations. Several basic precepts do apply,
however: kazari is completed through the viewer's (or user's) active participation or knowledge; it
evokes meaning beyond what is depicted; it involves play, parody, or spirituality; and it appeals to
more than just the sense of sight.
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T H E B E G I N N I N G S A new design style emerged in Japan to accommodate the taste of a samurai elite that began to domi-
O F E D O S T Y L E nate the political arena in the late sixteenth century and gained influence under the Tokugawa regime
in the early seventeenth century. The style involved an interplay between ground and motif. Preferred
motifs, which were generally isolated from a narrative context, had either auspicious or culturally
assigned meanings. For example, an empty ox-drawn carriage on the cover of a lacquer box (cat. 6)
refers to the imperial court and the late tenth- or early eleventh-century literary classic Tale ofGenji,
while a geometric ground and lotus leaf painted on a Kokutani-style dish (cat. 9) promote both
good fortune and a sense of exoticism, generated by the Chinese derivation of the patterns and the
Buddhist connotations of the lotus leaf. These two objects date to roughly the same period and may
be understood on various levels, though prior knowledge is necessary to perceive the full meaning.
This type of decoration combined designs based on Chinese taste in the medieval period (fearamono-
sufei) with motifs reflecting a "love of the exotic" (ikoku-shumi) to create a style that could be com-
prehended by a broad section of the population.
During the Edo period demand increased in most craft industries, prompted in part by the
large-scale building projects begun by Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) with the construction of Azuchi
Castle on the shore of Lake Biwa near Kyoto. Nobunaga commissioned the Kano master Eitoku to
decorate the entire interior of Azuchi in 1576, which took the painter and his workshop over three years
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to complete. Nobunaga and his elaborate castle both survived only a few years after construction,
but a fifty-year period of castle building was launched, stimulating an ever-growing need for paintings,
carvings, and objects to fill the grand spaces. As a result techniques were simplified and streamlined
to facilitate larger output. The urbanization that accompanied and literally surrounded these castles
required plentiful resources, both human and material. Many castle towns, such as Eclo and Osaka,
became important urban centers in the later 17005, with permanent markets and systematized
economies that employed monetary systems instead of barter.
The newly empowered merchant classes, including samurai and daimyo, all vied to establish
themselves within three arenas: their local castle town, their domain, and the country as a whole.
For the Tokugawa enterprise to succeed, it was essential to invent a mutually understandable visual
vocabulary to display status and identity within this restructured society. This code could be manipu-
lated to support a certain ideology, such as the use of Chinese symbolism to enforce Neo-Confucian
policy, or it could be used to include and exclude others from the group. The symbols would have to
be based on previously acknowledged ones, reconfigured to define a new power elite.