Color woodblock print (left) by Hironobu, “Katsuma Gengobei in the play Godairiki,” mid-19th century, featuring a netsuke and an inrō. Detail at right. From the collection of Norman L. Sandfield.
It’s a sartorial tale as old as time: I need to carry some stuff, and I’m not wearing any pockets.
People are always navigating the gap between form and function, evolving the ways in which our clothing can be both practical and representative of who we are as a person. And it was no different during the Edo period in Japan, between the early 17th and late 19th centuries. Before Japan’s “opening” to the West and an influx of Western-style clothing into the country, Japanese men traditionally wore kimonos with fine cloth sashes that tied in the back. During this period, it was customary for men to carry a number of personal belongings with them: moneybags, tobacco pouches, lacquered cases for medicines or other items known as inrō.
But kimonos had no pockets, so those items were typically hung from the cloth sash around the waist by a silk cord. To prevent the cord from slipping and causing the sagemono—the “hanging things”—to fall, a toggle or netsuke was tied through the opposite end of the cord. The netsuke caught itself on the top of the sash, preventing the sagemono from slipping. It was a simple, practical solution that opened up a whole world of possibility: netsuke designs would come to reflect a seemingly endless variety of religious, social, cultural, and economic ideas, attached to the hip of its proud wearer.
Examples of netsuke (left to right): Inrō showing flowering cherry branches seen through a bamboo blind, 19th century; back of a netsuke, showing the holes through which the cord was threaded and the artist’s signature; two men playing Go inside a persimmon, 19th century.
Artists typically made netsuke from wood or ivory, but more exotic materials could also be used if a buyer so wished, including antler, tusk, bone, ebony, or amber. The subject of the carving varied—Buddhist and Daoist deities, beasts and demons from legend, mythical heroes, animals, birds, plants, fruits. One delicate netsuke, just under two inches tall, depicts two men playing Go, a chess-like board game, while sitting inside a tiny persimmon.
Some netsuke spoke to the conservative ideals of Japan’s ruling elite, and still others depicted the humorous, sometimes lewd tastes of an up-and-coming class of wealthy commoners. The iconography represented tells you something about the kind of people who were having them made and who was buying them. Netsuke are adorable, aww!-inducing little knick-knacks that also happen to offer valuable historical and cultural insight.
How to showcase netsuke?
And yet, museums struggle with how to display netsuke in a way that protects them but also fully reveals their uniqueness, their intricacies, their astounding small details that are truly a wonder to behold. How, for example, could Mia possibly display a netsuke featuring Shōki, a legendary demon hunter, who has trapped a demon under a hat? When Shōki is sitting on a shelf, he looks like a scowling guy sitting on a big bowl. But lift him up, and you see the delightful detail beneath the bowl: a bare-chested, grumbly demon squished inside. If you aren’t seeing the demon, are you really seeing the netsuke?
It was a problem that Aaron Rio, Mia’s Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Curator of Japanese and Korean Art, had to consider when he began thinking about a display of 19th century Japanese fashion. “We have over five hundred netsuke in our collection,” Rio said. “It’s our job as the people’s museum to make our collection available to the public.” One way to do that, Rio argues, is to try to recreate the experience of having and handling a netsuke. “People love netsuke. They love looking at them, even if they’re just sitting on a shelf. But the distance we keep between ourselves and the art is totally unnatural; we can try to minimize that gap in experience as much as possible.”
So what’s a curator to do when he gets an idea and wants to know what’s possible? Rio brought his idea to a “dream team” of Mia staff—an educator, a content strategist, photographers, a technology guru, and an exhibition designer—and before long the ideas started pouring in. Charles Walbridge and Daniel Dennehy, Lead Collections Photographer and Senior Photographer at Mia, started experimenting with a handheld 3D scanner called the Artec Space Spider: a device whose name more suggests an extraterrestrial mega-robot more than it does a small, light-emitting device that Charles playfully calls a “USB iron.” In fact, its name comes from the fact that it was initially designed for use on the space station. Their goal was to test the scanner on lots of netsuke to find out if it was better suited to small items than other 3D scanning methods they’d tried.
Charles Walbridge and Dan Dennehy use the Artec Space Spider to scan a netsuke.
The scanner in action
The Artec Space Spider, which really does look like an iron, has cameras on its face and LED “structured light” scanners that project patterns of light onto an object. When those patterns bounce off the surface of an object and are reflected back into the camera, the software reads how the patterned light warped around the object and uses those triangulated coordinates to “map” the object visually. As Charles slowly rotated a small netsuke featuring a skeleton beating a large skull like a drum, the Artec Space Spider mapped its surface.
“You have to make pew pew noises while you use this scanner,” Charles said, and he pew pew!-ed while the 3D scanner flashed pulses of light.
Netsuke aren’t easy to scan because they’re so small and yet so detailed. And preliminary results with the Artec scanner are mixed: according to Charles and Dan, it is great at quickly capturing the geometry of an object, but less good at reading surfaces and color. “We care a lot about surface, texture, and color properties. We want to create a digital surrogate of the object,” Dennehy said.
Does that mean the Artec Space Spider 3D scanning experiment was a loss? No way. The more we experiment, the more we learn about best practices for truly fully documenting an object. “You’re mapping this thing in extreme detail. It’s a chance for someone to really understand the volume, shape, the full everything of the object,” Dennehy said. “Let’s say all these objects disappeared. If we’ve captured down to the minutest detail everything about it that we possibly can, we can in some ways protect them.” We can, in a sense, preserve an object’s ghost.
A skeleton beating a skull, from the 19th century.
It is on this point that the philosophies of curator and photographer merge: we have all these world treasures, and it’s our job as a museum to share as many of them as we can in as many ways as we can. The possibilities of what Mia might do with a precise 3D rendering of its netsuke collection are almost endless.
“We are getting as close as we’ll ever get to making it so that the public can ‘touch’ works in our collection. You can see the object, but you could also have a 3D printed version that you can touch, turn over, handle, feel, and see in new ways–as close as possible to the experience these objects were meant to create,” Rio said. “There’s a reason there are so many things to discover in netsuke! They were meant to be 3D objects, not hidden away on a shelf behind glass.”
As Mia continues to explore the world of possibilities that 3D technology opens up, you can look forward to experiencing the surprise and delight of holding a copy of a netsuke in your own hands someday.