Kakemono

Nagoya is a manufacturing town with a quarter of a million of inhabitants. It is full of porcelain and fan factories, cloisonné works and cotton mills. It is the centre of the celebrated potteries of Seto, and is famous for its embroideries and its silks. It is bigger than Nottingham or Hull, and is almost as large as Dublin. Nagoya is both Staffordshire and Bradford—and yet a city clean and still. A town of sunny streets and pure fresh air, whose sky is blue and clear, whose trees are green. Its 250,000 inhabitants are mostly factory hands—and there is neither dirt nor din. The golden dolphins on its castle’s roof are three hundred years old, and they glitter in the sunshine like new-fired gold.

On the edge of the growing rice-fields the porcelain factory lies. Its doors are open to the sun; and in the corner of the low, white room, where the workmen sit cross-legged like Buddhas, each beside his potter’s wheel, a yellow vase of purple iris stands.

The room is still and fresh and clean. The whirr of the turning wheel is soft as the drowsing of a bee. There is no hurry as there is no idleness. And each worker, as he moulds his clay, looks towards the purple iris in the yellow vase.

The cloisonné works are built in the heart of the city, in the middle of a busy street, where blue-clad coolies continually load and unload the wide coster-barrows which are the waggons of Japan. The hum of working life is in the air, and the wide road which stretches without division of pavement across from side to side, is thronged. Business men in grey kimono and foreign hats go out and in; the loaded barrows drawn by the blue-clad coolies pass up and down; fast-running kurumaya steer in and out among the foot-passengers and the traffic. And the occasional collision is followed by mutual bows and polite Gomen nasai (“I beg your honourable pardon”), on the part of either coolie or kurumaya.

Nagoya factories and cotton mills are hard at work.

The gateway of the cloisonné works leads down a wooden passage into a tiny court, a garden set round with the workshops of the factory. And such a garden. It is not larger than the front lawn of a suburban villa, but the skill of a Japanese gardener has planted a whole mountain side with forests of pine and bamboo, has spanned with an arching bridge the stone-grey stream at the mountain’s foot. From inside the tiny matted rooms, no bigger than bathing-boxes, which shut in three sides of the garden, the illusion is complete. And the shade and coolness of the real trees and water, of the imaginary forest and stream, brings a sense of calmness and repose, of quiet peace and beauty, to all the many workers of the factory. It is a living landscape growing unspoiled in the heart of a workshop in the centre of a manufacturing city.

Each on his mat in the clean, bare, matted rooms the workmen sit, the rice-paper shōji pushed open to the mountain stream, and the forest of pine and bamboo. In the first room sit workers outlining the design on the bare metal vase with metal wires, silver wires on silver vases, copper wires on copper vases. And each design is different, and many of the men are old. In the second room the bare metal vases are getting a coat of coloured paste, and now the design stands out rough as a cave-man’s drawing. Here the workers are younger, while boys fill in the body of the vase. In the third and fourth rooms the matted floor at the back is replaced by a large hearthstone, and a round earthen oven; in this the vases are baked, passed back to the men and boys to recoat with the coloured paste, and then rebaked, recoated and rebaked many times, until at last the vase is handed over to the workers in the last rooms. It has lost all trace of design by now; the metal wires are no longer visible; the colours have bubbled over in all directions, the vase is an unmeaning mosaic of a thousand shades. Then the workmen, sitting on their heels on the kneeling-cushions in their clean, bare, matted rooms, tiny as bathing-boxes, polish, polish, polish, sometimes for a whole year, until the worker’s hand wears down the hard smooth surface and the design shows through clean and true once more. The workmen here are grey and old.

But the oldest of all sat by himself in a little room just opposite the arching bridge which crossed the mountain stream. He wore a pair of quaint horn spectacles, and his face was the face of an Eastern sage. He sat with his tools before him fixing silver wires on to a silver vase, with a certainty and a rapidity beyond his fellows; and all that is most beautiful and most difficult in the cloisonné works of Nagoya comes from his hands. The old man pushed back his horn spectacles as I stopped before the open shōji, and his eyes rested on the still picture of the garden with a smile.

I, too, turned to look at the row of tiny paper rooms stretching out like arms on either hand, at the living landscape lying in their midst, at the blue sky above, and at the old face beneath the horn spectacles. I did not wonder at the peace which lay upon it, nor at the exquisite beauty of the finished vase standing on the matting beside him. For the garden was still as a cloister, though the cloister was a workshop for cloisonné ware in the manufacturing town of Nagoya.