5/18/24: Osaka-Kurashiki's Lofty Labor Idealism & Kojima Jeans Street!

 

Steven and I caught the bullet train from Osaka to Yokohama and then the smaller JR Line to Kurashiki, our stop for the next couple of days. Fortunately, the absence of announcements of upcoming stops in English didn't throw us for a loop but it was unusual for Japan's normally easy transportation system for foreigners.

Steven and I were happy we’d booked reservations at the historic Kurashiki Ivy Square, the birthplace of Kurashiki Spinning Works which was constructed in 1889. Its saw-toothed pattern roof, semi-circular windows, and red brick walls reflected the typical English architecture in Kurashiki at the end of the 19th century. After its factory operations came to an end in 1945, the building lay dormant until it was converted into a hotel in 1974.

A five-minute walk from the hotel's front door led us to Kurashiki's Bikan District, the historic area.

We were immediately struck by how gorgeous the car-free streets were with the succession of beautifully preserved merchant houses or machiya, many now converted to one-of-a-kind shops, boutiques, quirky museums, art galleries, and restaurants. The black-and-white buildings date from 1603 to 1868, Kurashiki's Edo Period heyday, when the city was an important regional trade hub for rice, the country's most important commodity. 

Large quantities of rice from the surrounding area were brought into Kurashiki and stored in storehouses before being transported to Osaka and Edo, present-day Tokyo. "Because of the city's importance in the rice trade, Kurashiki was put under the direct control of the shogunate, and the city was even named after its many storehouses or kura."

I was almost instantly smitten with Kurashiki and the best was still yet to come!

The much more attractive back way to the hotel led us past the complex of red-brick buildings that were now shops and great photo ops.

The Meiji Period government actively promoted the country's spinning industry to modernize Japanese industry. With cotton being cultivated in the Kurashiki area, the opportunity was open for a spinning company, and Koshiro Ohara took a chance and founded Kurabo Industries, a pioneer in Japan's textile industry, in 1888. Its subsequent success was intertwined tightly with Kurashiki itself. 

Kurabo Memorial Hall, the location of the company's storehouse for raw cotton, opened in 1969 to celebrate Kurabo's 80th anniversary. The museum hosted the G7 Labor and Employment Ministers when they convened in Osaka.

The Two and Three Mark became Kurabo's emblem, representing the belief that even if they became the best at something, they should still work hard as though they were in second or third place and still striving to become number one.

Fires were a matter of life and death for spinning companies during the Meiji Era so Kurabo imported a steam engine pump in 1897 to fight fires and organized a team of firefighters.

The Crighton from the Platt Brothers in England was an opening and picking machine that removed debris from cotton in 1906. 

During the Taisho Period from 1912-1926, Kurabo introduced innovative measures for the well-being of employees. When Kurabo's second president, Magosaburo Ohara, expanded the business, he enacted his theory of labor idealism to implement a range of policies to improve his employees' lot as well as local communities one after another. Labor idealism was the concept that labor had to be more humane and followed the principle that if the employees weren't happy, the company wouldn't prosper. As a result, everything was on the table, so to speak, for the benefit of the people he employed: capital, the economy, technology, and industry. He was convinced that higher employee productivity would be a result of providing better living and labor conditions than found at other companies. Some of the increased profits could then be rolled into improved conditions for workers, making a virtual cycle.

Ohara was an extraordinarily forward-looking company boss building detached dormitories and being responsible for Kurashiki Labor Science Institute's design of spirometers to measure workers' lung capacity and air analyzing instruments to monitor the cleanliness of the air inside a spinning factory.

Something well worth remembering as we move through life.

In a period in which most mill workers in Japan didn't even have an elementary education, Kurabo management concluded that if they were to increase the caliber of their workers, their first step was to augment their education. To that end, a workers' education department was established at the Head Office Mill in Kurashiki to provide basic education to the workers who needed it. An elementary school was opened in the mill's employee lodgings and students spent two years learning morals, math, composition, English, drafting, calligraphy, and other subjects.

A Kurabo School graduation certificate: 

The earliest form of the efforts to have happy employees as part of business management included family home-like detached dormitories where workers had their own living spaces and communal kitchen, sewing room, school, clinic, bathroom, and laundry room.

The clinic attached to Kurabo's employee lodgings:

After studying traditional weaving techniques at Kurabo, Toshiko Taira, a now-deceased Living National Treasure, revived Okinawan Basho-Fu textiles when she returned to her hometown.

Shiko Munakata's paintings on the sliding doors were in the factory's decorum room in 1944. 

From the Mid-Showa Period beginning in 1945 until the present day, Kurabo actively diversified its business from textiles into chemical products, engineering, electronics, food, real estate, and other areas. That coincided with Japan's high economic growth and the company's centennial.

Before we left Kurabo, Steven had a blast collecting sand and pouring it into a funnel that moved in concentric circles as it slowly dripped sand making different shapes each time on the sand table.

The Ivy Square lived up to its name with the profusion of ivy everywhere! During the Heian Period from 794 to 1185, sap was taken from the trunk of this ivy in early spring and boiled down to create a sweet syrup called tsuta. Valued as a sweetener before sugar, tsuta was mentioned in important literary works and historical texts. The evergreen fuyuzuta ivy was planted during the early Showa Period to prevent factory rooms from becoming too hot as sunlight streamed in from the west. 

One of the old factory buildings had been converted into a large souvenir shop.

Another Western-style building adjacent to the hotel:

Another Kurashiki charm was its weeping willow-lined idyllic canal with still more machiya on both sides. The brilliant blue sky, the trees shading part of the canal, the small boats taking people for short cruises, and the stone bridges that cross over the water made for an unbelievably picturesque scene.

Kurashiki aka Venice of the North and the stone Nakabashi Bridge:

The buildings in Bikan were characterized by their whitewashed walls with black trim, lattice windows, and tiled roofs in what's described as typical Kurashiki architectural style. Their beauty was unmistakable!  

Along the canals, built to allow boats and barges to navigate between the city's storehouses and the nearby port, were many of the original storehouses that were so central to the city's identity. Recognizable by their white walls and black tiles, the former storehouses have been converted into cafes, boutiques, souvenir shops, and museums. On the other side of the canal stood the former 18th-century rice granary that had been converted in 1948 into the Kurashiki Museum of Folkcraft, the country's second. Before the museum's founding, people thought that only 'real' artists created beauty and that the daily objects of everyday life or mingei were only utilitarian and not objects of beauty. 

The attractive hooked chair mats would have looked right at home in regions of Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee.  

Steven had been quite happy to wait for me by the canal as I perused the museum's collection. As we'd found in temple after temple in Kyoto, there were no English-language signs to let me and other foreign tourists know what I/we were looking at. It would have been a far more interesting collection if the items had been described with their names, uses, and dates. 

However, the gift shop had some lovely woven items like small table runners and coasters, both of which I'm a sucker for when we travel so all was not lost!

VERY narrow lanes were quite common as we wandered through more of Bikan.

From the moment we'd stepped foot in Bikan that morning, it was impossible to miss the constant presence of denim stores and cute souvenirs made from denim. That was because Kojima, a small city 17km south of Kurashiki, was the birthplace of Japanese denim even though Kurashiki seemed to have appropriate that honor. In a narrow alley called Kojima Jeans Street, young people were scarfing up what looked like good-quality jeans like there was no tomorrow!  If you're not a big fan of all things navy, Kurashiki may not be your thing as even Kurashiki's sweets and snacks were denim blue.

I much preferred the gold leaf ice cream cone from earlier in the trip to the blue ice cream I couldn't wait to try on Denim Street! The blue color came from ai or Japanese indigo, a plant used to color Japanese denim and was totally edible! I think I'll continue to wear denim and not eat it. Luckily, Steven didn't mind when I foisted the cone off on him. 

Tickets were already sold out for that day's cruises so we sweated peanuts until the following morning hoping we'd be lucky enough to grab two of the highly coveted tickets for a reserved cruise along the canal.

The Kurashiki Archeological Museum was opened in the former rice storehouse built in the Edo Period. 

Peeking behind the trees on the other side of the canal was the Ohara Museum of Art, the first Western art museum in Japan. 

The Old Ohara House had been home to a family of merchants and landowners that had been active since the late Edo Period including the president of Kurabo Industries. Decorated in the unique Kurashiki style of latticework windows and whitewashed walls, it was designated as an Important National Cultural Property.

 

The Ohara Art Museum opened 94 years ago in 1930 in Kurashiki by businessman Magosaburo Ohara as Japan’s first private art museum that mainly exhibited Western art. Ohara, who served as the head of Kurabo Industries, was also a collector focusing on collecting Japanese art. Japanese painter Kojima Torakiro received financial support during the 1920s from Ohara to travel to Europe and select Western art pieces at his discretion for the museum. Can you imagine being given carte blanche to travel the world and a free checkbook to stock an art museum? What a plum job! The museum's collection also featured works by the Great Masters as well as plenty of Japanese art and ancient Oriental artifacts. 

I read that the state of Western art influenced artistic expression all over the world and Japanese art was no exception. From the Meiji era onward, many Japanese artists studied the culture of the West and its different values with "passionate yearning." It was amid this excitement that the Ohara Museum of Art in Kurashiki was founded in the 1930s and became the first museum in Japan with permanent displays of Western art. By placing Western art, Egyptian, and West Asian antiques collected by Kojima on public view, the museum was, from its beginning, a modern place where different cultures mingled. 

Though nude paintings in Western art had been a major theme since ancient times, Western representation of the nude wasn't introduced to Japan until the end of the Meiji era. With no history of nude painting in Japan, it caused an uproar. That changed by 1915 when there was no longer harsh criticism of showing a nude painting in public. It was delightful to come across this elegant portrait of female nudes by Foujita Tsughara whose works we'd first admired at a museum in Hakone near the beginning of the trip.

While being influenced by Renoir, Japanese artist Mitsutani Kunishiro "strengthened his identity as a Japanese painter" and created Scarlet Rug, a nude painting based on Oriental aesthetics. 

The museum is probably best known for El Greco's Annunciation but we unfortunately didn't see it when we visited in May.

Named either Brown Eyes or Girl with a White Cap by Henri Matisse:

The museum's tea room and formal Japanese Garden were delightful areas to relax in.  

The Crafts Gallery: 

The cloth print depicted scenes of Yakima Village in 1954. 

The kimono that dated from 1943 contained scenes of a paper- making village and was made from stencil-dyed cotton. It's worth clicking on the photo to make it bigger so you can see the details.

In the Asian Gallery was a Buddha Image with Two Attendants that dated from 365-534.

The museum went on and on and on!

We didn't see the appeal of the nearby former city hall that had been converted into the Kurashiki Museum of Art.

We were, however, amused by the city's sewer covers!

The water lilies in the pond by Ivy Square were a donation by the Ohara Museum of Art which replanted them from Monet's studio in Giverny, France. They complemented his Waterlilies painting at the museum that I hadn't taken a photo of.

If you're ever lucky enough to find yourself in Kurashiki, make sure to stop in at this great little pizza restaurant we found just outside the Bilkan district. You'll be glad you did!

Shots from flower-bedecked streets on our way to a grocery store that night:

Seeing Bikan and the Ivy Square area bathed in soft lights around the canal made for some pretty romantic scenery. 

Next post: Window shopping and the Love Boat in delightful Kurashiki!

Posted on July 26th, 2024 from very smoky Denver thanks to the horrific fires in western Canada and the the US Northwest. I hope you and your loved ones are not suffering from the smoke. Please be sure to take care of yourself and each other.