Little Crowds

Thank you for your comments, and I did appreciate my brief trip to Suffolk! I'll visit everyone's blogs shortly.

Now, back to Japan.  There are some great museums there, (although I wished more of them had English labels) and I did want to take you along to the Edo Tokyo Museum, which tells the story of olden days Tokyo.  It is spacious and easy to wander around but it is full of crowds - tiny crowds, mostly. That is, crowds of tiny model people.  Or, intricate drawings on a huge scale of crowds and crowds of people, each one meticulously drawn, indeed, but very small.

I love models, and so I spent a lot of time marvelling at the degree of craftsmanship in the displays.   Here's part of a festival.  I don't know what sort of festival, because I can't read Japanese and I felt a bit guilty asking our friend Eiko to translate ceaselessly.

Other models showed entire buildings and complexes of buildings - shops, houses, temple compounds.  I liked this model department store of a hundred years ago. Inside are people buying goods spread out on low tables.  Something about the lighting reminded me of trudging down one of those narrow little streets on a dark winter's evening. 

For me, the most fascinating model showed the city as it used to be - in sanitised form, no doubt, because no ancient city was that clean, and this was a very clean model!     I was so impressed that each tiny figure thronging the city's streets reminded me of an individual going about their life.    

Below you see a couple of women women chatting as they do their washing, almost unnoticed in a back garden - I've enlarged this image, which was part of a vastly larger scene. 

And here, a small crowd gathers to watch an entertainment in the street. I particularly like the lion.



There are many fine two dimensional works, too.  I think that in both Japan and China, certain rulers liked making giant drawings or paintings of their entire kingdom as a sort of birds eye view, showing everyone and everything.  There are several large beautiful screens in the museum, showing everyday Edo Tokyo in painstaking and accurate detail.  I wish it was possible to show these images in close up.  There's so much to see but this section of one screen gives you a slight idea of the artistic layout, colour and detail of the screens.

I also thought this crowd looked pretty good - it is a painting of fire fighters.  It seems that the old city was so vulnerable to fire that eventually it was decreed that streams of water must criss cross the place at close intervals and fire fighting was given top priority.   

So this is people going to a fire. The white whirling thing is a kind of banner called a matoi.  There was a real matoi in the exhibition, so extraordinarily heavy that I thought it must have been more exhausting carrying the matoi than fighting the fire! But then someone said that it was really only taken to a high place to show the distant firefighters the location of the fire.  Now, matoi are sometimes used for ceremonies.   

A few of the models were life sized, as you see from the size of these visitors posing for their pictures at the front of the Noh Theatr with splendidly dressed models.  There was a tiny working model showing a Noh play in action, but I couldn't get close enough to photograph it - it was surrounded by huge crowds of schoolchildren! 

Actually, sometimes I felt as if I had walked into one of the models.  This is a reconstruction of the bridge which used to lead into the old city, in the exact size and style.  Suddenly I felt rather like one of those tiny model figures myself.  I think it was the large expanse of black echoing space all around, as though I'd shrunk to table size.

There were also crowds of real people at the museum, most of them going around in groups.  I liked this cheerful group of schoolgirls trying out a Japanese style sedan chair. 

And talking of small people,  I forgot to put the little person below in my last post. As I said, the Edo Tokyo museum is in the same area as the sumo wrestlers,  and this little sumo wrestler must be popular because it seems that many people have rubbed his tummy, and worn away all the patina!