Chapter III: Fans of the Far East (2)

The code regulating all the details of court ceremonial is absolute, and always observed; the use of ivory for the Shaku is confined to the highest ranks, or the most important ceremonial; no noble could use an ivory Shaku on any occasion. The various usages connected with the fan are subjected to similar restrictions.

Ladies carried in place of the Shaku the Hi-ogi.

A fan of special make and design is used by the Empress, and its use is forbidden to any subject. The blades are twenty-three in number, connected with a white silk ribbon. The decoration is confined to the chrysanthemum, pine, orange blossom, plum, or Camellia Japonica. The ribbon rosettes or loops, affixed to the top of the outer blades, are arranged in keeping with the particular flower which is represented on the fan; these have seven long streamers, four feet long, of different colours. The rivet also is of a particular kind—_paper string_.[50]

Chūkei are fans borne by priests and nobles; these have a re-divergence at the ends, and date from the period of the introduction of the folding-fan; they are often painted with the most consummate skill, reflecting the best traditions of Japanese art. Many of these paintings exist; in most cases the leaves have been removed from the sticks and mounted as pictures.

Fabulous stories are extant recounting the marvellous accomplishment of the painters of the earlier epochs; amongst these is an account of Tadahira, who is said to have painted upon a fan a cuckoo which uttered its characteristic note whenever the fan was opened, and of Tsunenori, who drew a lion so life-like that other beasts fled from it.

The leading schools of Japanese painting are the Buddhist, Yamato-Tosa. Chinese, Sesshiu Kano, Matahei (popular), Korin, Shijō (naturalistic), and Ukiyo; each of these has well-marked characteristics preserved even to the present day.

The art of Japan was to a great extent founded upon, and is in certain directions a development of, that of the older civilisation of China. The earliest artist, therefore, recorded in Japanese annals, is a Chinese, Nanriu by name, of royal descent, who came to Japan about the end of the fifth century; but of this master, and of his immediate successors, there are no known examples.

It was in the succeeding century, upon the introduction of Buddhism into Japan, that we find the first establishment of a school of Japanese art, initiated by the Chinese and Coreans, and dedicated to the mural decoration of Buddhistic temples.

From the sixth to the ninth centuries, the history of Japanese painting is more or less clouded in doubt, and the first great artist who emerges from the general obscurity is Kanaoka (ninth century), although the few examples extant which are attributed to this painter are doubted by the best experts.

The Yamato-Tosa school, though the direct outcome of the study of Chinese methods, was essentially Japanese and naturalistic in character, and was founded by Kasuga Motomitsu in the latter part of the tenth century.

In the thirteenth century Tsunetaka, son of Kasuga Mitsunaga, assumed the name of Tosa and gave to the Yamato school the name it has since retained.

An important movement set in at the beginning of the fifteenth century, no less than a Chinese renaissance. For centuries Chinese influence had been waning, and the national style of Yamato and Tosa had held the field.

Japanese:

Mr Wilson Crewdson.]

Sesshiu, the remarkable painter who founded the school bearing his name, was of the noble family of Ota, and was born in 1440. At the age of twelve or thirteen he was intended for the Church and placed under the instruction of the abbot of the temple of Hōfukuji. Sesshiu’s sympathies, however, were all in the direction of the fine arts, he neglected religious training, and a story is told of him—one of those extraordinary legends familiar in Chinese and Japanese annals—that upon one occasion, when bound to a pillar as punishment for some misconduct, he beguiled the weary hours of waiting by drawing rats upon the floor, using his toes for pencil and his tears for ink (!), the representation being so life-like as to alarm his janitor. Some versions of the story affirm that, upon the approach of the priest, the rats scampered away.

At the age of forty he visited China, the fountain-head, but was surprised to find that he had more to teach than to learn.

The fan of Hotei and the children, probably by Kanō Shō-yei, 1591, may be accepted as one of the finest examples of a painted fan of the Kanō school, the last of the three branches of the fifteenth-century revival of Chinese teaching. The school was founded by Masanobu, a painter of landscape, born _c._ 1423 and died 1520, its actual head, however, being Motonobu, his son, born 1476.

Hotei (Master Linen-sack), the god of prosperity, was a Chinese priest of the tenth century, famous for his fatness and his love of children. He could sleep in the snow, never washed himself, and had the power of infallibly predicting future events. The legends attached to his name are very similar to those narrated of many Taoist Rishis, but his claim to a position as Divinity appears to be due to the view enunciated in the _Butsu-Zō dzu-i_ and other works, that he was an incarnation of Miroku Bosatsu Mâitrêya, the Messiah of the Buddhists, in which capacity his image has long been worshipped in Chinese temples. He is usually represented with a fan of the pear-shaped gourd type, and carries a cloth bag as a trap for little boys and girls, who are enticed inside to see the wonderful things it is supposed to contain, and then imprisoned until they can beg their way out. These ‘Precious Things’ include the Lucky Rain Coat, the Sacred Key, the Inexhaustible Purse, etc.[51]

Innumerable pictures of Hotei by Japanese artists are in existence, some dating from the fifteenth century.

The charmingly poetic view of the Tamagawa River, with the tea-plant in blossom, and flying cuckoo (Hoto-Togisu), is probably by Kanō San Raku, 1633. Both these fans are accompanied by a Japanese certificate of authenticity.

Autograph, motto, and inscription fans are referred to in another part of this work.[52] The practice of inscribing sacred texts upon fans, obtained during the latter part of the eleventh and beginning of the twelfth century, the period ‘when the Buddhist religion was openly professed by the wealthy and warmly supported by the luxurious.’ Fragments of Buddhist sûtras written on fans and fan leaves exist at the temples at Yamato, Ôsaka, the Imperial Museum Tôkyô, and elsewhere. These are copied from the ‘Lotus of the True Law,’ or other Mahâyâna texts of a like nature. The fans, though differing somewhat in size, are all alike in paper, pigments, and style of painting, and evidently had a common origin; they are overlaid with gold-leaf and dusted with fine sand; upon this a thin wash of red or black pigment is applied. The sacred text is written in ink, over a painting, usually a figure-subject and bearing no reference to the text; the faces sketched in a curious convention known as Hikimé Kagihana (eye with a line, the nose with a key), in which the eye is represented by a straight line and the nose with a somewhat acute angle. This convention has been traced to Kasuga Takayoshi (beginning of the twelfth century), who painted a number of picture rolls illustrating the tales of the Genii.

Japanese:

Mr Wilson Crewdson.]

Mr L.C.R.Messel.

Mr. W Harding Smith.

Mr W.L.Behrens.]

A fan leaf owned by the Temple of Saikyôji, Sakamoto, Omi, is illustrated in _Selected Relics of Japanese Art_, S. Tajima. A hi-ogi, with figures and pine-tree, in the Shinto Temple, Itsukushima-Jinsha Aki, is illustrated in the same work: this latter, doubtless, is a production of the Taira era, possibly a dedication to the temple from a scion of the Taira family, and painted by a daughter of Taira Kiyomori, the premier, 1167-1180, the writer of the ‘Lotus of the True Law.’

A similar combination of painting and writing obtained later, and was practised by Kôyetsu Hon-Ami, the predecessor of Kôrin Ogata, the reputed founder of the Korin school. This artist was a skilful writer of Chinese ideographs, in which art he was one of the ‘Three Pens’ of his time, being the founder of the Kôyetsu school of caligraphy.[53]

A fine example of Kôyetsu in the possession of Baron Ryûichi Kuki is reproduced in Mr. Tajima’s work. This is painted on a gold ground, and represents a rabbit in a flowered field. The fan is divided in two parts, the writing, which is by the artist, being on the gilt portion. Kôyetsu died at Kyoto in 1637, aged eighty-two.

The Ukiyoyé school included most of the makers of colour prints; two of the more famous of them, Masanobu Kiato, and Hokusai Katsushika, born in the same year, 1760, also painted fans. The former opened a shop at Ginza for the sale of smokers’ implements and medicine, and sold besides folding-fans and long panels upon which poems were written; both of these he ornamented with sketches; they became renowned far and wide, and from their sale he derived large profit.

A fan leaf by Hokusai, a masterly sketch of the head and shoulders of a ‘Beauty,’ is illustrated in Tajima’s work, as also several fans painted with courtesans, by an almost equally celebrated maker of colour prints, Kunisada.

Battle- or war-fans are of two kinds—the flat, rigid screen (uchiwa) which is the earliest, and the folding (ogi). In both, iron is the material of which it is mainly composed. The first named is sometimes formed completely of metal (iron and brass), is of considerable weight, and is used by officers both for direction, offence and defence, _i.e._ as baton, weapon, and shield.

This sometimes assumes a circular form, and is occasionally inlaid with the more precious metals; more often, however, it resembles the pear- or gourd-shaped screen. In the centre example illustrated, belonging to Mr. W. Harding Smith, the handle is of lacquered wood, the ornaments at its extremities, together with the rim of the fan blade, of bronze gilt; it bears an inscription on the obverse in Japanese, and on the reverse in Chinese, as follows:—

Japanese script.

‘Kisei ai shozaru jun-kwan
no hashi naki-ga gotoshi.’

‘Wrong and right (or odd and even) happen for ever,
impartially, like the revolving ball.’

This may, possibly, be rendered by the following:—

‘Defeat and victory succeed each other
by a turn of Fortune’s wheel.’

Chinese script.

‘Sono toki-koto kazé no gotoku
Sono shizuka-nuru koto hayashi no gotoshi.’

‘Its sharpness is as the wind, its softness
as the grave.’

The fan in the possession of Mr. W. L. Behrens is ornamented with two dragons in low relief, the motto ‘Tenka tai hei’ (international peace).

In the folding battle-fan, the stick is of wrought iron, the branches varying from ten to fourteen in number; in many military fans, the stick is of bamboo, painted black, the guards of iron, often arrow-shaped, and richly inlaid with silver.[54]

The decoration of the mount, of thick paper, consists of the sun, moon, or north star, usually in red, but also in gold, on a black or coloured ground. An unusual example, illustrated, has a gold sun on the one side, and a silver crescent moon and nine golden planets on the reverse; the ground being light, the guards of yellow bronze, ‘seutoku.’

The fine fan in the possession of Mr. L. C. R. Messel has on the obverse a golden sun with two flying birds, and on the reverse a silver sun with similar birds.

The sun _motif_ is occasionally abandoned in favour of a figure-subject. M. Ph. Burty exhibited at Liverpool in 1877 a fan that belonged to a commander-in-chief; the leaf, of stout buff paper covered with silk tissue, is painted in india ink with the Seven Sages in the Forest of Bamboru. The brins are of plain whalebone, the panaches of oxidised iron, elaborately inlaid with scroll-work and crests in silver, the latter being of the powerful family of Nai-To. Another fan from the same collection belonged also to an officer of high rank. The brins are of bronze gilt, the panaches of polished iron, shaped like slips of bamboo, and chased with lions and flowers. On the inside of one panache is an inscription in inlaid gold, stating that the ironwork was made by U. Da-Kane-Signe; the leaf of glistening paper.

The most characteristic war-fans are, however, those having the simple red sun, with no superfluous decoration, the initial purpose of these instruments being that of a signal. They constantly appear in representations of battle-scenes, the general on his war-horse in the heat of battle brandishing in his right hand the fan, the symbol of his authority and command. In Hokusai’s painting of ‘Tamétomo and the Demons’ (British Museum, No. 1747), the hero is grasping a huge bow in his right hand, and waving the folding battle-fan in his left.

In a print by Kuniyoshi (_c._ 1820) of the battle of Kawanakajima between Uyesugi Kenshin and Takeda Shingen (fifteenth century), a sword-cut is parried by the war-fan.

In a representation of the same battle by Yoshitora, a dismounted general is directing with a war-fan an attack by spearmen.

In the colour print by Hiroshige II. of Yoshitsune and Benkei, the war-fan also appears.

In the print by Shunsui of Atsumori and Kumagai, the hero, mounted, is plunging into the sea followed closely by his adversary Kumagai, also mounted, brandishing the war-fan as a signal and challenge.[55] Two of the many stories or legends relating to the war-fan may be given.—The first refers to Nasu no Yoichi, an archer, whose clan took the fan as their crest,[56] in allusion to his performance at the battle of Yashima in 1185. ‘When the Taira were driven from Kyoto by the Minamoto in 1182, the Empress Ni no Ama flew with the child-emperor Antoku, to the shrine of Itsukumisha, where thirty pink fans, bearing the design of the sun disc (Hi no Maru) were kept. The head-priest gave one to Antoku, saying that it contained in the red disc the Kami of the dead Emperor Takakura (1169-1180), and would cause arrows to recoil upon the enemy. The fan was accordingly attached to a mast of the Taira ship, on which a court lady is always depicted, and a challenge sent to Minamoto no Yoshitsune, which was accepted by one of his archers, Nasu no Yoichi, who on horseback rode in the waves, and with a well-directed arrow broke the rivet which held the leaves together, and thus shattered the fan.’

Mr. W. Harding Smith.

Mr. L. C. R. Messel.]

The second tells of Araki, a Samurai whom Oda Nobunaga wished to kill, summoning him to audience, placing himself in such a position that the neck of the Samurai came in line with the sliding panels separating the audience chamber from the daimio’s room, intending to have the _shoji_ slammed together as the man knelt, and thus decapitate him. Araki, suspecting the trap, promptly laid his iron fan in the groove, jamming the shutters, and thus saving himself.[57]

The Ha uchiwa (jin sen) is a camp-fan originally introduced from China in the seventh century and made of the feathers of the eagle, pheasant, or peacock, the handle usually lacquered red, black, or blue; the interesting example illustrated is formed of eagles’ feathers fixed in a horn handle.

Dancing-fans (Mai ogi) were introduced at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The brins are ten in number, the mount of thick paper, usually bearing a family crest. One of the earliest of these fans is to be seen in the painting of a dancer by Matabei (born 1578), in the Morrison collection (reproduced in _Painting in the Far East_, Laurence Binyon), the decoration of the mount consisting of a few scattered leaves.

The fan is the most usual accompaniment of the dance, and is generally seen in the hands of the Kagura dancers or of the performers with the Shishi mask. The fan dance, which is more nearly allied to jugglery than to the dance, is said to commemorate the performance of Uzume while alluring the Sun Goddess Amaterasu from the cavern, whither she once retired, plunging the world into temporary darkness by her absence. In this, the fan represents the leaves of the pine-tree, the performer balancing a number on his forehead, nose, mouth, hands and feet.

Tea-fans (Rikiu ogi) are for use at the tea ceremonies celebrated in honour of tea in every province on the first day of the first month, and commemorating the curing of the Emperor Murakami, 947-967 A.D., of a disease against which the physicians were powerless. The Emperor recovered after drinking an offering of tea made to the Goddess Kwanyin. The code, that formerly was of a gorgeous description, was modified later by Sen-no Rikiu, from whom the fan set apart as cake tray or saucer derives its name. The Rikiu fan is of the simplest possible construction, having only three sticks, the decoration also being of a simple character. It is used for handing round little cakes, and for no other purpose, fanning being strictly tabooed during such a dignified proceeding.[58]

The giant closing fans (Mita ogi) were used in the processions at Ise in honour of the Sun Goddess, the traditional originator of the Japanese dynasty. These were six or seven feet long, five men being appointed to carry one of this huge magnitude.

Water-fans (Mizu uchiwa), for kitchen use, date from the eighteenth century. These are of bamboo split into segments, covered with stout paper, and varnished or lightly lacquered so as to allow of the fan being dipped in water, thus securing extra coolness by evaporation. They are often decorated with figures and other subjects, the varnish subsequently applied being of a rich warm brown.

Roll-up fans (Maki uchiwa) are circular, the paper stiffened with thin strips of bamboo; the handle is of bamboo cut through with a slit to allow the circular fan, which is set on a pivot, to have free play. When open, the strips of the bamboo foundation are horizontal, thus securing rigidity; when not in use, the position of the strips may be reversed, and the disc rolled round the stick and tied.

Mr. W. Tomkinson.]

Of modern fans, those of ivory and tortoise-shell, carved or decorated with lacquer and inlay, are, for the most part, made for exportation, and are often of extreme beauty. The excellent example in the Victoria and Albert Museum is decorated with circular medallions in gold lacquer of various shades, portions being carved in relief. It is finely inlaid in places with mother of pearl; signed by Taishin (a pupil of Zesshin), and dated 1884. An example, equally fine, is given from the collection of Mr. M. Tomkinson. This is decorated with a view of Fuji san, or Fuji-no-yama (peerless mountain); those born within its watch are considered most happy and fortunate beings.

‘Great Fujiyama, tow’ring to the sky!
A treasure art thou giv’n to mortal man,
A god-protector watching o’er Japan—
On thee for ever let me feast mine eye.’[59]

Of the cheaper hand-screens exported in large quantities to Europe, the simplest form is that of a dried palm leaf cut to the required shape, and bound round the edge, the stem forming the handle. The most common variety is made by splitting bamboo into thin strips that are spread out radially, fastened with thin cord, and covered with paper; these are decorated with designs displaying high qualities of arrangement and graphic skill, and are printed in that process of chromoxylography which, if not actually invented by the Japanese, has been carried by them to its highest point of excellence. A more elaborate hand-screen is also exported, the covering of silk, painted.

It will be readily understood, that the fan, entering as it does so closely into the daily life of the Japanese, should also form the subject of many games. Two characteristic instances may be cited. The ‘fan and cup’ game was particularly favoured by court nobles and ladies. A company met by the river, each member launching on the water a fan prepared with varnish or lacquer to ensure buoyancy and to prevent absorption of moisture. The game consisted in the composition of a verse or couplet of poetry during the time the fans were at the mercy of wind and wave, and before they regained terra-firma. Tea-cups were also used, this last being illustrated in a Chinese makimono by Hwei-chi Ku-Yuen, British Museum, 276.

In the ogi otoshi or fan target game, a target called ‘cho,’ made somewhat in the form of a butterfly, is placed on a low table or pedestal on the floor. A fan is thrown from a given distance with a sudden and peculiar turn of the wrist, causing it to reverse itself in its passage through the air and strike the target with the rivet end. This game is played by two people facing the target at opposite ends. Bells are attached to the outer edge of the ‘cho,’ that sound when a successful hit has been accomplished.[60]

No notice, however brief, of the fans of Japan would be complete without some reference to the constant employment of the fan form as a decorative _motif_ in Japanese design, one of the many evidences of the important place the fan holds in the affections of the people. Lacquered tea-trays assume the shape of the fan; inkstands take the form of a closed fan, the ink-well at the rivet end, the body of the fan forming a case for pens;[61] while in diapered patterns, borders, and other decoration, both flat and in relief, the fan motif is constantly made use of. The interesting series of fan-shaped panels illustrative of Japanese history, by an unknown artist of the Yamato Tosa school, seventeenth century, British Museum, 305-324, are excellent instances of the use of the fan form in flat decoration, these being probably removed from an old screen. Three kakémonos in the collection of Mr. R. Phené Spiers are each finely painted with four full-sized fans, decorated with various lilies, drawn with that consummate skill and knowledge of plant form which would appear to be the peculiar heritage of the sons of Dai Nippon.

Mr L. C. R. Messel.]

Hide Fan, Nigeria.

British Museum.]