Thus, in December 1933 a second branch of Takumi was opened in Ginza in the heart of Tokyo | Kikuchi Yuko, Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory: Cultural Nationalism and Oriental Orientalism , New York, Routledge Curzon, 2004, p |
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Across the street, his home has been preserved and is open to visitors on Wednesdays and Saturdays | Given the importance of these establishments and their influence on consumer tastes, it seems almost certain that the Folk Crafts Movement would have been perceived more generally at that time as a decorative arts movement for the wealthy rather than a marginal intellectual or avant-garde aesthetic movement |
On the one hand there are those who make their judgments based on the factual world, and on the other, those who, by looking at the objects directly, search for their true value, in other words their beauty.
17Don't take photos, I was attempting to take a shot of the stairs from the second floor not exhibits | I was rudely told this by a middle aged visitor, I questioned her showing her what I had in English she ran to the office to inform the staff |
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I write this as a huge fan of Japanese folk arts and traditional architecture | Without the support of the consumers who flocked en mass to Takumi and the department store Takashimaya, the aesthetic dogma developed by Yanagi and his associates would certainly never have gone beyond the circle of intellectuals to which he belonged |
I guess I expected there to be english information since the web site has decent english info.
2, Yanagi Muneyoshi no sekai | Imagine presenting a teabowl to a customer |
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30 The Folk Crafts Movement is today too often reduced to a handful of names whose importance is admittedly indisputable Kawai, Hamada, Yanagi , but whose efforts are perhaps the least representative of mingei activism during the immediate pre-war years | Folk craft studies inevitably take tangible objects as their subject; whilst in folklore studies objects serve as complementary material |
10 Thus while for reasons that I hope to explain, the Folk Crafts Movement and folklore studies are often studied by specialists hailing from different disciplines, and while the term mingei is traditionally associated with Japanese decorative arts, it must be conceded that Yanagi himself wished to establish a link between his movement and scholarly ambitions such as those of Yanagita and his disciples.
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