Book review

Abstract

This book opens with a powerful statement: ‘Craft culture is dynamic, and the passage of time has led to both change and resistance to it’ (p. 7). As Guth explains in the introduction, craft in Japan has been categorized as ‘tradition’: something unchanged from the past, made of Japanese materials and by hand, and by male master artisans. The dichotomy that forms between those created by renowned masters in the city and those with anonymous craftsmen in the countryside is a repeated theme. Generally, the history of each craft is told individually, using a linear approach that takes technological advancement as its given premise, and the interplay amongst the different genres and the more complex demography of various technologies are often overlooked. The modern Japanese term for craft, k ogei, is bound up with the problems mentioned above. Guth challenges these myths. By discussing the division of labour amongst the makers (men and women), the experiments on natural resources for new materials, progress in developing new tools, and the dissemination of information, she introduces a craft culture that is more diverse and dynamic than what has previously been thought. The point made clear in her introduction is that this book is not only about craft culture as it was in the early modern period. Instead, it is about how we, as the modern observers, should look at craft culture in the period in question, with a wider inter-regional and trans-regional scope, and with more emphasis on knowledge production and dissemination. Setting the time frame of the period between 1580 and 1860s as early modern is a strategy for opening the period in question to comparison amongst other regions (p. 13). To achieve this goal, three parts support this book: the first part is a detailed technical description of objects and their making process, followed by the second part that analyses the production and dissemination of knowledge in the period in question through media (mainly printed books and images), and lastly the third part that addresses the issue of how we should unpack such knowledge both in objects and in media with careful attention to tacit knowledge of materials and physiological experiences, and to social structures of the early modern period that are not expressed in words. The book is comprised of five chapters. Chapter One, ‘Natural Resources,’ questions the stereotype that the craft industry went hand in hand with the Japanese love of nature. What the early