Sengoku is not a place you would find in any usual Tokyo guidebook. The nondescript metro stop is crammed with commuters passing through to Sugamo. But take exit A2, turn right, and walk ten minutes in a straight line, and you will find the Paper Nao shop, opened by owner Naoaki Sakamoto in 1984. Much of the initial stock was given as a gift, and in his book about paper, Sakamoto recounts the generosity of three paper makers who allowed him to take a lot of initial stock on good faith.
In a city where buildings seem to change as often as fashion, the shop is one example of attention to detail designed to last. The inside shelves and stairwell are handmade by a craftsman from Nagano. There are papers of many sizes, colors, and textures gathered from across Japan. Often traveling extensively to remote regions of Asia and the world, Sakamoto san has a deep knowledge and appreciation for the craft of paper. His answer when asked why he is in the paper business is succinct and genuine: “Paper gives me peace.”
I wonder how many businesspeople can say the same thing about goods they sell. The separation of the maker and the receiver, or even the maker and the mediator, is something that is no longer strange. Yet we often want to know the origins of our purchases, or at the very least what they stand for as a brand. Ours is a post-industrial world with an inherited attachment to objects; as the twinges of economic recession pinch, people are returning to the desire to buy things that have been made with more than a buck in mind.
There is a longing for the human touch, for authenticity and affordable utility.This balance was celebrated just over 80 years ago by the champion of the Japanese folk movement, Yanagi Soetsu (Muneyoshi). His definition of folk craft, known as the Mingei theory, declared the best examples of craft to be those that were anonymous. The less the personality was there, the more the true beauty could be seen. Folk artists were categorized according to how little known they were, producing affordable and available functional items from specific regions. By this definition of craft, the paper-makers selling at Paper Nao are a dying breed. They work using ancient techniques and often remain anonymous. People buy their goods because of their quality, but the techniques they use require extensive knowledge and are not fast.
For artists with a capital A, working in mediums defined as “neo-craft” (using techniques and materials that require skill, dexterity, and a lot of practice), the question becomes less one of function versus form, obscurity versus fame, and more about how the work speaks to a viewer. The recent show “Stitch by Stitch,” at the Tokyo Metropolitan Tein Art Museum, featured contemporary needlework pieces by Japanese artists that were both sensuous and intelligent. Materials were being explored to reveal something new, put together to not only delight our faculty for appreciation of decoration, but to get us questioning our expectations of gender roles and the notion of beauty. They simultaneously set up questions but could also be described as decorative. This is “craft” where the artist’s personality or ideas are not rejected, but celebrated.
As a student in Oxford, I used to love visiting the Ashmolean and the Pitt Rivers Museums. Glass cabinets were lined with exquisitely carved, painted, and sometimes strange objects whose functions seemed to belong as much to the world of mythology as to any contemporary world of daily use – relics of a former world. But these relics of today are things which have become irrelevant and disconnected. We reject them in favor of something new. And as the speed of new production increases, we exist in a space of dislocation.
William Morris, father of the British craft movement, deeply lamented the loss of the joy of creation, or as he writes, the “pleasure in labor.” This is what links a craftsman and an artist, and what has been taken away for many. In the U.K., an increasing number of artists are aligning themselves to the slow movement. The movement crosses boundaries – between farming, arts, conservation, and food consumption. Aiming to highlight the value of traditional techniques and local produce, its ethos nurtures a sense of connection between consumer and buyer. For the person making neo-craft, objects become a way to cause people to stop for a moment. Artist Amy Houghton, who specializes in animation and porcelain, participated in the touring show “Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution,” curated by CRAFTSPACE and Helen Carnac. She writes that objects, specifically antiques:
…create a physical connection to the past, and because they are outside our sphere of objects that have a ‘use value,’ they offer a pause in the fast pace of contemporary life, as well as a connection to a different pace of time associated with a nostalgic past. Antiques can offer a connection to a feeling of reality in a culture of manipulated imagery.
Neo-craft work engages us with the object in a way that we easily forget when we “use” it. Handmade things require attention, and sometimes reverence – a reverence not only for the object, but also for the care that has been taken to make it. The slow movement as a whole seeks to highlight our tendency towards a habitual lack of attention.
But technology is not the enemy. Search the Internet and you will come across a new breed of D.I.Y. makers, independent designers who are selling pieces to shops and online. Deanne Tonkin – co-creator of online store Tokyomade – champions the clothes and wares of independent Tokyo-based designers. Deanne said in an interview that she was inspired to set up the web site after attending Tokyo’s Design Festa and seeing how many things the rest of the world didn’t have access to. Here, craft finds its feet in the technological world. It is a different facet of a worldwide awareness that consumerism cannot be sustained at its current levels.
In a multi-platform, cross-continent society, perhaps craft should not be only valued for its ability to preserve history, but also for its role in the mediation of relationships. Both Morris and Soetsu speak to us of the value of the characteristic of skill. Neo-craft can happily sit between labels and mediums as a bastion of the individual’s attempt not to impose a personal vision on an already-saturated world, but to rediscover the dignity of labor that is for love. It is an embodied art that slows us down and grounds us in what is. Let’s hope, as consumers of the arts as well as crafted objects, that we can do more than hoard. Let’s learn to see the process of exchange as an ongoing conversation with each other.