In early modern Japan, cultural salons were creative spaces for people of all social levels to jointly pursue painting, poetry and other artistic endeavours, as serious but amateur practitioners. All these artists used a pen or art-name. Individuals were therefore able to socialise and interact broadly through these artistic activities, regardless of official or social status as regulated by the then shongunal government. The idea of communal and collaborative creativity seems to have been especially ingrained around the areas of Kyoto and Osaka. Both these cities had (and have) a distinct character: Kyoto was then the national capital, where the emperor and aristocrats resided; and Osaka was the centre of commerce.
The Rise of Japanese Salons
Until now only a fraction of these technically sophisticated artworks has previously been published in colour. Based in public spaces including restaurants and temples, as well as private homes, these salons were common in late Edo-period Japan around the 19th century. However, the identities of individual participants remain largely unacknowledged and unknown, hence the work to explore salon culture in Japan.
The British Museum holds one of the most significant Kyoto-Osaka collections outside Japan. It features over 100 illustrated book titles, 500 paintings and 3,000 surimono (a type of privately published woodblock print with poems and images). This project aims to digitise these works and transcribe the poem inscriptions, artist names, and other texts into a large online database, along with other paintings and surimono from Kansai University, Osaka, and the Paul Berry private collection in Kyoto. The database for Salon Culture in Japan will be published and maintained by the Art Research Center at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, providing a new portal for early modern Japanese culture with the capacity to absorb similar collections in the future.
Kabuki Prints
A book, Salon Culture in Japan, has been published to illustrate and document the work of this project, edited by Akiko Yano. Andrew Gerstle in his essay Cities and the Performing Arts writes that fans of kabuki in Kyoto and Osaka supported their favourite actors by joining a fan club, designing actor prints, or contributing poems to prints. Osaka’s well-organised fan clubs performed their rituals in the theatre at key moments in the annual calendar and when welcoming the return of actors from tours to Edo. There was extensive amateur activity in ukiyo-e production in Osaka. The longest active passionate fan was Shunkosai Hokushu, (active 1802-1830), thought to be a lumber merchant, but for many other artists there are only a few surviving designs. A striking 1820 example of an actor portrait with a ‘crazy verse’ (kyoka) poem praises the Osaka actor Nakamura Utaemon III (1778-1838), who plays the role of the warrior hero Kato Masakiyo in flamboyant, bold Edo-style make-up. The design is by Hokushu and the poem by one Usokusai (‘Likely a Liar’) Fuminari, a member of the kyoka poetry circle of Akasuki Kanenari (1793-1861).
In the essay Painting and Everyday Life, Timothy Clark writes that as with Dutch still-life painting of the 17th century, there is the sense that many still-life surimono prints made in Japan at this time celebrate an ‘embarrassment of riches’. Yet the generally limited space available alongside the poems encouraged a certain synecdoche in the selection of motifs. Stacked Sake Cups on a Stand is an early 19th-century print by the Osaka artist Niwa Tokei (1760-1822), graced with four kyoka poems and explanatory inscriptions that commemorates a 70th birthday. The shallow sake cups look to be luxuriously crafted in red lacquer with auspicious motifs in gold of pine, plum, and dwarf bamboo and so on, the top one prominently emblazoned with the character of ‘long life’. The relatively modest vignette of stacked cups therefore evokes in the mind of the viewer a much more extensive formal gathering for an important life event.
Creating a database for the project
By analysing the objects and the biographical information of their creators captured in the database, the project for salon culture in Japan is reassessing the contribution of these salons to the vibrancy of Japanese visual arts and culture between 1780 and 1880. Where previous scholarship has focused on known artists, poets, and authors, the project will also examine the cultural participation of unknown ‘ordinary’ people. It will assess their impact on: art and literary production; Japanese society; artistic styles and aesthetics; and the creation of an artistic identity, such as through the use of a pen name.
Revealing and documenting information about members of cultural circles and salons and their influence will provide new insights for scholars of Edo-period social and cultural history, and will transform the contemporary interpretation and presentation of these artworks.
The project has also resulted in a display, City life and Salon Culture in Kyoto and Osaka: 1770–1900, on show in the Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese Galleries, featuring objects from a rich and significant British Museum collection of visual artworks from early modern Kyoto and Osaka studied as part of the project.
Until October 2024, British Museum, britishmuseum.org and britishmuseum.org/research/projects/making-art-together-japan. The second rotation runs from October to March, 2025. For more information contact bm
