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Tokonoma (床の間)

[A tokonoma is] "an alcove in the guest room of a Japanese-style house. It is a place of honor where a hanging picture scroll and a vase of arranged flowers, or an artistic ornament, are displayed. It originally developed from the private altar in a Buddhist's house where a low table with candles, an incense burner, and flowers were placed before a Buddhist scroll painting hung on the wall (Kamakura-Muromachi period). But today tokonoma is generally used for aesthetic purposes and to enjoy tranquility of mind."

-- A Cultural Dictionary of Japan, Edited by Momoo Yamaguchi & Setsuko Kojima, The Japan Times, Ltd., 1979

These are pictures of tokonoma.

The hanging scroll (kakejiku) in this tokonoma is of a Japanese-style (yamato-e) landscape. Traditional kakejiku are sumi-e or calligraphy on high quality washi. A months-long process preserves the painting and incorporates it into the rest of the scroll made mostly of fabric. It is capable of being rolled up for storage without being damaged.

The item on the wall in this tokonoma is not a hanging scroll, though it is still sometimes called a kakejiku. Instead, it is a shikishikaki, a holder for a shikishi. A shikishi is rice paper (washi) mounted on a cardboard base roughly a foot square. An artist writes calligraphy or paints a picture directly on the shikishi. A shikishi can easily be removed from the shikishikake and replaced with another.

This is a magnolia flower painting of mine from years ago on a shikishi. The pencil shows the scale. The magnolia is a late spring, early summer flower.

Summer: The Bamboo Season

As was pointed out in Lesson Module 3, the seasons are very important in Japanese culture. Very frequently, the objects, especially the calligraphy or pictures displayed in a tokonoma, have a seasonal theme. A kakejiku or shikishi may display a poem or other calligraphy that has at least a word connected with a season. Paintings (sumi-e) frequently depict plants or other images connected with a season. It is common for Japanese families to change tokonoma displays as the seasons change. This might be quarterly, but monthly is common, too. Since bamboo is a summer plant, it would be among the great number of images appropriate  for display during the summer months.

Seasonal themes in artwork aren't limited to paintings that can fit into a tokonoma. They are common elements of much of Japanese art such as in the examples below.

Some paintings incorporate all of the seasons in a single composition as in the following picture on a 6-fold screen (byōbu), one of a pair, by Mitsunobu Tosa (1434 – 1525) the founder of the prestigious Tosa school of artists specializing in Japanese-style painting (yamato-e) versus Chinese-style painting. The leaves in this painting are all done in kaijihō style, the leaf type used in this week's demonstration painting.

The next painting is by Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849) who was most famous for his ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints) series, 36 Views of Mt. Fuji. After that series was finished, he was commissioned to do more, and Hokusai added 8 for a total of 44 prints in the series. Hokusai painted far more than woodblock prints, however. The following bamboo painting is attributed to him.

Hokusai did another series of Mt. Fuji pictures which were published together in a 3-volume book titled 100 Views of Mt. Fuji (1834 – 1835). This is one of the pictures from the book, Mt. Fuji as seen through a bamboo grove, printed across a 2-page spread.

The following painting is by another artist most famous for his ukiyo-e prints, especially his The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, Utagawa Hiroshige, also known as Andō Hiroshige (1797 – 1858). The Tōkaidō was the government road linking Edo (today named Tōkyo) where the Tokugawa Shōguns were headquartered and Kyōtō where the imperial court and the Emperor resided. This painting by Hiroshige is not part of that series.

This final bamboo painting (early 18th century) on a 6-fold byōbu is by Ogata Kōrin (1658 – 1716), the person for whom the Rinpa school of art is named. Kōrin was awarded the honorific title of hokkyō (Bridge of the Dharma), the third highest rank awarded to Buddhist artists.