Title: The Multiple Modalities of the Copy in Traditional Japanese Crafts
Abstract: Although occupying an important place within Japanese craft traditions, since the late nineteenth century copying has operated within a complex and unstable web of meanings that have invested the practice with overwhelmingly negative connotations. This stigmatization has much to do with over-determined dichotomies that developed between the “arts” (bijutsu) and “crafts,” (kōgei). Most of all, however, the copy has become burdened with pejorative connotations because of its association with modern methods of mass reproduction that have cut off its analysis from the creative impulses that once stimulated and validated replication. This brief essay moves beyond these frameworks to examine the multiple modalities of copying and the copy in Japanese crafts within the historical and cultural contexts of their production, use and display. It throws light on the complex, contradictory, and changing roles of the copy in transmitting the techniques, styles and values of traditional Japanese crafts from three interrelated perspectives: Buddhist belief, tea culture (chanoyu) and Japanese Cultural Properties legislation.