Embroideries and Curios
national life with its showy and picturesque customs, the buyer must seek the second-hand clothes-shops, the pawn-shops of the land. In the Awata district lives the great dealer who gathers in old kimonos, obis, fukusas, kesas, temple hangings, brocades, and embroideries from the godowns of nobles, commoners, priests, actors, saints, and sinners, to whom ready money is a necessity. Geishas and actors, with the extravagant habits of their kind, are often forced to part with their wardrobes, and the second-hand shops are half filled with beautiful and purely Japanese things which they have sacrificed. When I first beheld “my uncle” of Awata, his was a dark, ill-smelling, old clo’ shop, with two bushy-headed, poorly-dressed attendants. Gilbert and Sullivan unwittingly made his fortune, and the old dealer could not at first understand why the foreign buyers, hitherto indifferent, should suddenly crowd his dingy rooms, empty his godowns, and keep his men busy collecting a new stock. Three years after my first visit there was a large, new building with high-heaped shelves, replacing the dirty old house and its questionable bales tied up in blue cotton, and horribly suggestive of smallpox, cholera, and other contagions. Prices had trebled and were advancing steadily, with far less embarrassment of choice in the stock than formerly.
The gorgeous kimonos of actors and geishas offered at such shops far outnumber those richly-wrought gowns worn by women of rank at holiday times and at the palace, and most of the showy and gorgeously-decorative gowns displayed in western drawing-rooms have questionable histories. Even the stores of No dance costumes have been drawn upon, and choice old brocades are rarer now than good old embroideries. The priest’s kesa, or cloak, a symbolic patchwork of many pieces, and the squares and bits from temple tables, for a long time offered exquisite bits of meshed gold-thread and
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