The Sainsbury Institute’s July Third Thursday Lecture was a very special talk, and the first for quite a while to be held at the beautiful Norwich Cathedral, just across the Close from the Institute. For this lecture, we were joined by Dr. Akiko Yano, the Mitsubishi Corporation Curator for the Japanese Collections in the Asia Department of the British Museum. Dr Yano recently curated a display in the Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese Galleries at the British Museum titled City life and Salon Culture in Kyoto and Osaka, 1770–1900. Alongside the display and wider research project, Dr Yano published Salon Culture in Japan: Making Art, 1750–1900 earlier this year through British Museum Press, which includes many examples from the museum’s own precious collection.
Since attending the talk in Norwich, I was fortunate to be able to travel to the British Museum to see the display in-person, and I have included some of my own images below. I would encourage anyone who is able to visit the display themselves!
During her talk, Dr Yano transported her audience on a journey across the city of tradition and education, Kyoto, and the economic port city of Osaka, enlightening us to the lively salon culture of the late Edo and early Meiji period. As Dr Yano explained, salon culture is understood as the practice of sharing artistic, literary and scholarly culture, and a cornerstone to her research was the ways in which salon culture cut across social hierarchies at a time where class was clearly distinguished through education, dialect, and dress in a ‘vertically-formatted society’ such as feudal Japan. She quoted Eiko Ikegami, who asserts that in the salon environment, “boundaries become temporarily negated”, allowing for new forms of communication and artistic production. Dr Yano also emphasised that her research examined both professional individuals such as artists and writers, but also amateurs – an original aspect of research into Japan’s salon culture. Many of the artworks shown include contributions by amateurs and people that have no traditional background in painting or art. For some, a salon may have been their first opportunity to participate in an artistic setting.
It is important to note too that ‘salon’ is a European term with no equivalent term in Japanese. Although there are words such as za, ren, kumi and sha that are similar and have been used in the past to discuss cultural spaces, Dr Yano argues ‘salon’ is the most accurate for describing the gatherings and cultural activities that she was researching.
Dr Yano’s decision to focus on Kyoto and Osaka was a result of the particular artistic schools and cultural practices that thrived here. Both were centres of commerce in Japan and were also heavily-populated with many different types of people. Education flourished and literacy rates grew as high as 60 per cent for men, and 40 per cent for women. This was far above the national average of the time because of their need to read to participate in commercial trade. Haiku became particularly popular in Osaka and Kyoto, and in-keeping with a core theme of Dr Yano’s research, an accessible practice across class, gender and education. There were established haiku circles and networks that, while majority male, also included female poets. Dr Yano shared the example of the illustrated books Banka jinmeiroku which depict Haiku written by people from many different backgrounds; haiku by samurai, farmers, merchants, even pairs of fathers and sons and husbands and wives were included. It was truly a unifying activity.
Oftentimes, poetry created during these group gatherings would involve poets sharing a scroll and painting materials. This shared art production is known as gassaku. Painting materials were simple, and paintings were completed together throughout the gathering, but each artist’s style or technique remains distinctive on the page. For example, a gassaku of rabbits was collaborated on by eight artists of the Shijo school. The harmony between the subjects of the scroll suggest that they were painted at the same time.
I would like to highlight some artworks that I found especially enchanting from Yano’s lecture. The first is a hanging scroll gassaku, depicting 64 hanging jewels painted by 64 different people ranging from professional artists such as Tomioka Tessai as well as musicians, a publisher, a tea maker, and a fishmonger. The jewels or hojū are all of varying sizes, colours and style, and are spread across two hanging scrolls. Yano spoke about how this demonstrates that during these gatherings, it was not important how good of an artist you were, but that each attendee is active in its creation, no longer only an onlooker in its production. She said that these moments were an ‘escape from societal scriptures’ and an opportunity to freely and creatively engage with others.
There is also the surprising piece attributed to King George V (formerly Prince George) who participated in gassaku while in Japan in 1881. Encouraged to paint something during his visit, he made some black spots with ink on paper, and the artist Beisen Kubota drew inspiration from this and transformed them into fireflies. I was also captivated by a tiger drawn by Maruyama Okyo, who believed in painting from reality. Unlike other drawings of animals shown in the display which are surrounded by empty space, this tiger feels dangerously close, filling up the edges of the scroll and peering through at the viewer. I thought it was an unusual and provocative piece, definitely one of my favourites that Yano shared.
These gatherings had become an essential part of an artist’s life, and there was an expectation that successful artists would contribute illustrations to literary works or pictographic illustrations, and collaborate with artists of other mediums. For a long time in Japanese art there has been a strong relationship between image and text, and the collaborations shown in Yano’s talk showcase this perfectly. Below is a surimono entitled ‘Sunset hibiscus and begonia’ drawn by Matsumara Keibun, in collaboration with twelve haikus on the seasonal theme of late summer/autumn, and is used on the cover of Yano’s most recent book.
There were excellent questions asked by the audience in the Q&A session after the main talk, many of which asked about the possible new directions for research. Yano brought up a database that has been created to house relevant information, and she hopes that it can lead to future research into censorship and class. She emphasised that while we have these surviving visual works depicting salon culture, there is still a lot unknown because information on these events was never formally recorded. It is also unknown where these gatherings would typically take place, although there is some evidence that calligraphy parties would be hosted by Kyoto restaurants. The final question was on whether salon culture still exists today, or if it has ended. Yano explained that salons persisted through the Meiji Restoration in 1868 but that salon culture as it was in the late Edo period ended by the early twentieth century.
Thank you to Akiko Yano for this absolutely fascinating lecture on such an interesting part of Japan’s artistic production and collaborative art landscape. The special display on Japan’s salon culture is showing in rooms 92-94 of the Japanese galleries in the BM, and has free entry. The display has two rotations, first between 6th April – 6th October 2024, and then 12th October – 30th March where there will be major object changes, so go twice if you can!
You can purchase Akiko Yano’s book Salon Culture in Japan: Making Art, 1750–1900 through the British Museum’s shop either in-person or online.
Emma Donington-Kiey
Digitisation Team Leader at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and MA graduate of Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies, UEA.