Japanese & Oriental Ceramic. Hazel H. Gorham
The foregoing comprise about all the dishes used for eating from, to which must be added bottles and covered utensils for storing food. The Japanese way of living admits of only the useful, trivial ornamental objects find no place in a room where custom decrees that a long narrow hanging picture, a stylized arrangement of the season's flowers and an appropriate ornament are sufficient.
Individual serving at a formal meal, showing the use of zen (trays) and the many different sizes and shapes of the dishes. Note the soup bowl of lacquer and rice bowl of porcelain.
So little is known of Japan and the way its people live that it may be well here to rapidly sketch in the surroundings to which Japanese ceramic wares are native. Picture to yourself a room whose prevailing colour is the creamy brown of unfinished wood, one or more whole side open to a garden, floor completely covered with thick soft straw mats and with no sign of furniture of any sort except a couple of golden brown, flat, square cushions. In such surroundings the Japanese love of irregularly shaped pottery dishes is understandable, as also the soft dark glazes and bold designs of cups and dishes which contrast so beautifully with the fine straw of the mats. When a meal is to be served small black lacquer trays are set before each guest, these serve as tables. On every tray will be five small dishes, no two alike, each differing from the others in size, shape and colouring. As the meal progresses the emptied dishes are replaced by others, each one an artistic achievement in which the food served and the design and colour on the dish are in perfect harmony, a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach. It will be noted that food is always served in individual servings carefully prepared in the kitchen, general serving dishes or platters are seldom used. A round plate about the size of an American lunch plate with the edge upturned was fashionable for the serving of fried fish during the Meiji Period (1868 to 1912). These are on sale everywhere and range from crudely drawn designs on commonplace ware to exquisitely designed and executed wares worthy of being placed in a museum.
The Chinese on the contrary furnish their houses with tables and chairs as the Europeans do and serve their food in great central serving dishes from which both host and guests make their own selections with their own eating tools. At a Chinese feast two quite small round dishes are set before each guest, one to hold the food transferred from the central serving dish and one for the food rejected from the mouth during the course of the meal, these are usually made of pewter or silver. Both Chinese and Japanese use chopsticks instead of knives and forks. And it should not be overlooked that neither Chinese nor Japanese make use of the traditional European dinner plate. Such plates, although they may be seen on sale everywhere and certainly are decorated in Oriental style, still are not fundamentally Chinese or Japanese but were made for export and sale to the peoples of countries whose eating habits are quite different. These plates are found in two styles: one, a rather deep dish with the edge fluted or scalloped and more or less sharply upturned, these were sometimes made for the use of the Japanese in Japan: another, plates with a wide flange or brim somewhat like our old-fashioned soup plates, these were made for export only.
Three forms of the very popular sho chiku bai, pine plum and bamboo combination.
Top left; A very common form found as center design on Old Imari sometsuke (under-the-glaze blue and white; of poor quality porcelain.
Top right; Another development of pine plum and bamboo, part of the design on a sometsuke bowl of good quality porcelain at out a hundred years ago.
Bottom; So-called Kakiyemon development of this design, in colours enan eled on the surface in combination with under-the-glaze blue.
Biscuit and Glaze:—
However, a more certain way of determining the country or origin of a piece is the consideration of the paste or biscuit from which it is made, together with the glaze and the manner in which it is applied. To the feel, there is a very perceptible difference between Japanese and Chinese porcelains. Chinese porcelain wares are light and thin and the glaze is hard and smooth, the edges of a bowl or plate are thin, almost sharp. Japanese wares are thicker and heavier, the glaze is somehow different from the Chinese, almost soft and the edges are thick and rounded. Chinese wares, especially old pieces, show signs of wear on the edges where the enamel (or glaze) chips off in a very characteristic manner, giving the edges a moth-eaten appearance called in Japanese mushi kui. Frequently it can be seen by the difference in colour that the glaze at the edge of a bowl is thinner than on the body of the bowl, as though the glaze had pulled away from the edge. This is not to be confused with certain old Chinese wares which have unglazed rims due to the practice of firing the articles upside-down. The glaze on Japanese wares, perhaps because of the more rounded edges, breaks rather than chips off, that is, the glaze seems more incorporated into the paste and a part of it
On Chinese porcelains the footrim is often beveled rather than square cut having been ground into shape after firing; or shows signs of the sand or gravel on which it was placed in the kiln for firing. Japanese porcelains have a square cut footrim, fully covered with the glaze as clean and perfect as the bowl edge itself. In the kiln the Japanese wares are placed on several small cones or pyramids for firing and the marks of these supports can frequently be seen inside the footrim. Often small radial lines inside the footrim, converging toward the center are found on Chinese wares. But these lines are not an infallible guide because they were reproduced in Japanese wares also.
The glaze on Chinese pottery frequently stops short of the bottom of the object, but a small dab of glaze is put inside the footrim; often there are evidences of the sandy floor of the kiln. An outstanding feature of Japanese pottery is the very considerable amount of unglazed surface exposed, it is part of the decorative scheme and neither the footrim nor inside the rim are glazed and there are no signs of kiln sand or grit.
While the Japanese prefer the thicker and more rugged forms of porcelain wares they have produced and are today producing articles of egg-shell thinness, hard and fine and so translucent as to be almost transparent
There is one class of Japanese ceramics that is so essentially Japanese that there is little question as to their origin—the wares known as raku yaki. These are discussed in detail elsewhere.
Potters' marks and Seals:—
In China centuries ago these marks may have been reliable and have furnished information as to when and where or by whom a thing was made but they are useful now only as showing that the article could not have been made before the time indicated. In China as in Japan certain potters achieved fame because of their ability to exactly reproduce famous old pieces and they in their turn were reproduced (or counterfeited). The game has been going on for centuries in China. About 1664 Chinese merchants shipped to Europe a boat-load of porcelain wares all marked with the seal mark of Cheng Hua, an emperor who reigned from 1465 to 1487. Later when Japanese potters began making porcelains they copied the kiln marks exactly as they copied the designs. But just as the Japanese potter imparted an elusive something to the Chinese designs that distinguish them from the originals so in copying the Chinese characters making up the seal marks they gave them an unmistakable Japanese flavour, and this sometimes furnishes the first clue to a falsification which might otherwise have defied detection.
More modern Japanese pieces may be identified by individual seal marks but here again trouble enters for the student because of certain practices such as follows: a master potter sometimes put his personal seal on all articles made in his kiln; or a potter signed his productions with any number of different names or with the name of an artist whom he admired; frequently the successors of a famous potter have used that potter's seal for generations; most baffling of all is the accepted custom of signing the original artist's name to a reproduction of his work made perhaps many years after his death.
Nevertheless, the potter's marks and seals on the various wares are most interesting and as Ming dynasty marks are found on Japanese wares and indeed are still being reproduced daily it is well to learn a little about them, if only to relieve the harrassed