Masami Yamada is Curator in the Asia Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum with particular responsibility for Japanese lacquerware, netsuke and ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Before joining the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2018, she spent seven years in the Japanese Art Department at Bonhams Auctioneers where she handled Japanese decorative arts of a wide range of materials. Her current research area extends to Japanese contemporary crafts and design.

Welcoming us at the museum, where she takes us to the Toshiba Gallery of Japanese art, she discusses her role as a curator, the scope of the collection and also presents two groups of objects recently acquired by the V&A.

During the interview, Masami presents some objects that recently entered the museum’s collection. First, she introduces examples of kiriko (Japanese cut-glass) dating from the 1930s, which was the golden age of this type of production.

Cut glass was introduced to Japan during the early nineteenth century. The roots of cut-glass production in Tokyo had an important connection with the UK. Although cut glass first appeared in the city of Edo (present-day Tokyo) in the 1830s, it was not until the 1880s that it was developed into an intricate and sophisticated craft under the direction of a British glass-cutting engineer, Emmanuel Hauptmann. Hauptmann was hired by the Japanese government for the Shinagawa Glass Factory which adopted Western-style manufacturing technology.

This collection of kiriko cut-glass tumblers, donated by a private collector in Japan, provides opportunities to explore Asian Art Deco from the early Showa period (1926-89) when Japan’s traditional art and aesthetics interacted with European life and culture.

Weblink to the V&A’s Explore the Collections
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/search/?q=tumbler%20japan%201930s&page=1&page_size=15

The second group of objects presented by Masami consists of a seamless copper tea kettle, accompanied by a set of making samples and tools, by Gyokusendō, a family-run workshop that was founded in in Tsubame City in Niigata Prefecture in 1816. Gyokusendō is specialised in hand-hammered tsuiki copperware (tsui means hammer and ki means to raise).

To create this three-dimensional vessel a sheet of copper is raised into a form through repeated hammer strikes. Even the kettle’s spout is made from one single sheet of copper, this detail being the ultimate expression of the company’s artisan skills. Along with the tea kettle, which was made in 2021, the museum acquired seven making samples that show different stages of the hand-hammering process. Completing this set are two tools that have been used by the artisans. The latter employ dozens of making tools and the museum acquired two of the most representative, an iron stake and an iron hammer. The traditional tsuiki metalworking technique of Gyokusendō is designated an Intangible Cultural Property by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs.

Weblink to the V&A’s Explore the Collections

https://collections.vam.ac.uk/search/?q=Gyokusendo&page=1&page_size=15

Gyokusendo website
https://www.gyokusendo.com/en/

Supported by the Toshiba International Foundation