Findlen’s collection is a seminal work in material culture studies, but since its publication, Pitelka has turned his article into a monograph published by the University of Hawaii Press. Once I get around to it, I’ll update this post.

Morgan Pitelka, “The Tokugawa Storehouse: Ieyasu’s Encounters with Things,” in Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500-1800 (Routledge, 2012)

As Walter Benjamin argued, the bricolage artifacts of modernity represent a “City of Mirrors,” one “that both brought people together as the crowd and permanently isolated them as bourgeois individuals,” Pitelka suggests the objects of Ieyasu Tokugawa’s storehouse are indicative of the cultural landscape of premodern Japan.[1] The shogun was a discriminating accumulator of things, object that “functioned not merely as markers of status or objects of fetishism, but as actors in networks of information and influence.”[2] Pitelka focuses on three possessions from Ieyasu’s catalog, each representative of a category of objects, each representative of an insight into the social landscape of Japan at the turn of the 17^th century.

The arquebus first arrived in Japan in the hands of Portuguese traders in the year of Ieyasu’s birth, 1543. Its slow adoption into the conflict between feuding warlords proved useful in Ieyasu’s later bid for power. Japanese smiths constructed firearms according to the Portuguese model but developed them to meet their own requirements and utilize local materials. It was one of these guns, made by Noda Kiyotaka in 1611, which became a treasure of the Tokugawa.

And in the storehouse, alongside the cutting edge weapon technology of the 16^th century, was prominently placed the cutting edge of a thousand years of Japanese warriors, a twelfth century short sword. This sword, named Ebina Kokaji, is representative for Pitelka of the thousands that were used as gifts between allies within feudal society. Giving swords (horses, women, rice, etc.) was a practice that cemented allegiances between rulers within a highly factionalized political environment. Thusly, Ieyasu, secured support of neighboring warlords during critical periods within his ascendancy.

Lastly, a Ming tea bowl serves to debunk certain long standing assertions regarding cultural exchange between China and Japan during the period. Not only did goods and ideas flow, but characteristics of Chinese (and Korean) culture were actively sought out by the young Ieyasu. Pitelka writes, “The Tokugawa storehouse thus contained material and visual culture from China, part of Ieyasu’s broad attempt to draw on what I have elsewhere called the institutional authority of Chinese civilization, but also an actual library of classic Chinese texts that became the foundation for shogunal policy and scholarship.”[3]

Ieyasu’s collection was crafted within an environment that influenced how he chose and valued his acquisitions. When he died, these items became part of a spiderweb of new discourses surrounding the meaning of things. Pitelka concludes, “The objects collected by Ieyasu over the course of his life and carefully distributed to his descendants and shrines after his death therefore continued to compel and shape the actions of Japan’s elites more than a century after he was buried.”[4] Objects, maybe not unlike their owners, undergo multiple reincarnations. Some are relegated to obscurity, valuelessness, and others are reconstructed in an attempt to navigate complex social and cultural landscapes.

[1] Pitelka, 297.

[2] Pitelka, 298. “Rather than seeing material culture as the product of a few exceptional historical subjects, or even as the result of a particular set of social or cultural conditions, we can integrate things into the overlapping collectives – the web of relations, performances, and practices – that make up history.”

[3] Pitelka, 310.

[4] Pitelka, 312.