Behind the Tags: Discovering Stories in the Mead’s Japanese Print Collection

By Mone Kawano ‘25

I am an international student from Japan and a senior at Amherst College majoring in the History of Art. I got an opportunity to work on campus at the Mead Art Museum using my language skills and knowledge of art history. This is my second year of working at the Mead as a digital collections intern, and here, I would like to introduce my work at the museum.

Do you know about the Five Colleges Database? You can search objects in museum collections from the local Five College Consortium and Historic Deerfield. My work has been to enhance the content and searchability of the Mead’s online database. I have worked on tagging individual artworks, and writing and recording image descriptions in English and Japanese. Often, this work also leads me to research some artworks to correct and update content information.

Among the over 20,000 works in the Mead collections, I have mostly focused on Japanese prints, namely Ukiyo-e prints. ¹ Do you know how many Japanese prints that the Mead owns? Approximately 2,700. Since Mead has about 3,500 Japanese works overall, you can see that most of the Japanese collections in Mead are prints. I have reviewed more than 1,200 records, adding tags and checking and revising the cataloging information. This opportunity allowed me to learn about Japanese prints in general, as well as the common themes across the Mead acquisitions. 

The main goal of my internship was to tag artwork for searches in the database. Tagging means adding keywords and terms for each record to help people discover specific items, and find similar and related objects. Thinking about the print’s main theme and how it is visually rendered, I choose around 7-10 words for tags from a predefined drop-down list. Though it looks like a simple task at first, below, I will introduce two examples to present the complexity of the assignment. 

The first stage is to check the balance between general and specific keywords in relation to the cultural background. I learned that I have to choose the words that are 100% definite based on the picture. The process is not as simple as putting keywords for whatever you see; I value the process of clarifying what’s going on in the scene so that 1. I can select relevant keywords more concretely, and at the same time, 2. I should avoid making assumptions. I often use the cultural context for this process. I often focus on the text of the title and identify various subjects in order to understand the print better. 

Let me give you some examples.

This is a scene from a famous historical battle called the Battle of Dan-no-ura, which I can tell from the title text in the upper right. For this type of water scene, it is sometimes difficult to identify whether it is a sea, river, or lake if you only see the illustration without a broader context. In general, I use “water” as the keyword.

However, knowing this is a part of the battle of Dan-no-ura, I can also put “seas” as a tag, because the battle takes place at the Kanmon Straits, the stretch of water separating Honshu and Kyushu, two of Japan’s four main islands. This kind of identification happens to the many prints with scenes that illustrate historical sites and sightseeing spots.

Here is another example of a print that I worked on.

This print appears to depict a woman, with their kimono style and design, hairstyle, and headdress. However, the person is actually a man acting as a woman’s character in a Kabuki performance. In the Kabuki world, only men can act, so male actors, called Oyama, play female roles. In this case, I do not add tags for “men/male” or “women/female”; instead, I use “figures” so that I do not identify their gender and do not confuse the viewers. Also, I add tags such as “Kabuki,” “actor,” and “costume” so that viewers can identify the situation easily. 

The museum’s online database is also in the process of adding image descriptions and updating missing, partial, and incorrect information. By tagging, I describe the situation of the works, which often did not have much information, for example, those are “Untitled.”

Research Discoveries Beyond Tagging

Next, I would like to introduce my research discoveries. As I work on tagging, I sometimes add internal notes to provide new information or correct the metadata. Here is one example where an intriguing discrepancy led me to do deeper research on the artwork.

This is a woodblock print titled Edo Purple from the series “Fashionable Register of Good Style Dyed-Stuffs by Utagawa Kuniyoshi in the 18th to 19th century (AC 1994.121). This artwork has two interesting points. 

The print immediately caught my attention because the woman’s figure seems different from other Mead’s prints. Women are one of the most popular themes in Ukiyo-e prints. They mainly depict beautiful women, such as popular courtesans, pretty girls in towns, and women’s attractive gestures and poses. Not in this print! Even though it depicts a young woman centered in the picture, her body is turned away from the viewer, and she glances back over her left shoulder to show the beautifully designed kimono and obi sash. The focus is on the kimono as it is confirmed by the text in the top left, which reads in Japanese “Fashionable Register of Good Style Dyed-Stuffs,”(流行御染物悵), a catalog of kimonos. 

Ukiyo-e’s were commonly used for advertisements, but in my experience with the Mead collection, although there are many prints of women, this is the only one I have found that is from a kimono catalog, and that was the reason the print stood out to me.

As I looked into the work, I found more interesting aspects in its kimono colors. Below the title of the print, saying “kimono catalog,” the text reads Edo Purple (江戸紫). Edo purple was the name of a specific color in Japan, representing dark blue purple. However, when looking at the kimono and obi sash colors, I couldn’t see any blue-purple. The layered kimono with an outer robe is printed in a muted green color with flower patterns on the hem, and a red underskirt. An obi sash features cloud-like designs in black, white, red, and gold.

Thinking about this print as part of a kimono catalog and knowing that the color “Edo Purple” is the kimono title, it is strange that this title and color do not match. The further research on this print reveals that this artwork has different published versions, which suggests that the Mead work comes from a later edition printed with different colors. I found the same print with different colors on the Yahoo auction page. The work uses a blue-purple color for the kimono, which matches the title, Edo Purple.

Comparing the two artworks, the one from the Mead and the other with the purple kimono, some differences suggest that the Mead work is a later edition. One difference is that there are no fireworks in the Mead print. A close examination of the Mead print also reveals that the printing quality is not as good as that in the Yahoo auction. For instance, if we compare the trees, we will see that the Yahoo version is done with a greater sense of space and color. 

Also, the “book” behind the title on the top right is colored in the Yahoo work and not in the Mead work. Water is colored in the Yahoo version but not in the Mead one. Finally, the Mead print has been cut down along the top and the right edge. Given that the title is “Edo Purple,” I believe that Kuniyoshi intended for the print to emphasize purple.

Although I could not find the same print in other museums, the British Museum has several prints from the same series, Fashionable Register of Good Style Dyed-Stuffs.

(Figure 5. Left) Fukagawa Nezumi from a series Fashionable Register of Good Style Dyed-Stuffs, Print artist: Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Published by: Moritaya Hanzo, 19thC(mid), The British Museum.

(Figure 6. Right) Ririn cha from a series Fashionable Register of Good Style Dyed-Stuffs, Print artist: Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Published by: Moritaya Hanzo, 19thC(mid) The British Museum.

They both look to be better impressions than the one on Yahoo Auction and the one in the Mead. There is no blurring, the images are rendered in fine detailed quality, for example, the pink around the eyes of the Ririn image.

This might indicate that the Fashionable Register of Good Style Dyed-Stuffs series was published in multiple editions. The British Museum examples of a higher quality seem to be the earliest versions that are closer to Kuniyoshi’s intentions. The later editions were printed in response to the popularity of the work, with some color changes and lower print quality.

This color and quality change for woodblock prints points to an interesting feature of ukiyo-e, which is that popular works were frequently reprinted. My research on the fashionable print with the color name “Edo Murasaki” (or Edo Purple) was especially exciting because I solved the mystery of the puzzling color.

In summary, I have introduced my work on tagging and researching Japanese prints. Although tagging seems a simple task, it requires close visual analysis and consideration of cultural and historical context. This process often raises questions, leading to further discoveries. Through this work, I believe I could contribute some meaningful updates to the database that help connect users more effectively with the Mead’s collection. The most appealing part of my internship work is the many encounters with the wonderful works and interesting stories behind them. While I have focused here on a few examples from the Japanese prints collection, the Mead offers many interesting artworks that await you to be explored.

P. S.

During my last week, when finishing up my internship, I was tagging the Japanese print AC 2005.1019, which only shows the figure’s legs and the lower part of a kimono. I noticed that it might be a partial portrait. The distinct kimono pattern seemed familiar, and after searching through the database, I found that  AC 2005.1015, a print of a Kabuki actor, features the exact same pattern. I overlaid the images digitally and discovered that the elements—the hand, kimono, and obi belt—align remarkably well. 

When we pulled out the print AC 2005.1019 from the storage, there was another surprise! The work was used by Paul Binnie, a Scottish artist, in 2015 for his artistic intervention in the collection. He “completed” what was believed to be a partial print, as you see, in his work, Tattooed Man. Now the lower part has two interchangeable bodies. This discovery, interestingly, poses another dilemma for the museum curators: how prints should be displayed.

(Figure 7. Right) Three woodblock prints: AC 2005.1019 (the bottom left), Tattooed Man (the top left), and  AC 2005.1015 (right).

(Figure 8. Left) Mone Kawano with two aligned ukiyo-e prints of a Kabuki actor.

Endnote

1. Ukiyo-e Print
   Ukiyo-e is one mainstream genre of Japanese art from the 17th through 19th centuries. In Japan, it was called the Edo period, where the Tokugawa shogunate established peace and stable rule over 250 years. Under the prolonged regime, merchants had economic power and art and culture flourished for the general public, not only for authority. The print was a suitable art form, as it could be published in large quantities and distributed throughout the country. 
   The printmaking process was a team effort. “An Ukiyo-e print takes the cooperation of three artists to finish one work—one to draw the design, one to curve it, and one to print the design. First, the artist, called Eshi, sketches the design using ink lines. Second, the carver, called Horishi, pastes the sketch on a block made of wild cherry wood and carves out the design.” The carver uses different blocks for each color. Then, the printer, called Surishi, applies color to the blocks under the artist’s supervision.
   “Ukiyo-e” translates literally as “picture of the floating world.” It refers to images of the unstable, fleeting living world of mortal life, in comparison to the Pure Land afterlife in the Buddhist concept. The original implication was negative, but then it turned to a positive association; with socio-historical changes, people gained a positive image for this world, now associated with economic growth and modern, fashionable culture.
   The themes are diverse; for example, portraits of beautiful women, Kabuki actors, and sumo wrestlers, beautiful scenery from sightseeing spots, scenes from historical and mythological stories, and so on. People consumed ukiyo-e prints as we consume other kinds of popular images today, collecting travel postcards, reading fashion magazines, and saving favorite artists’ and actors’ pictures on social media.
   
   Reference:
   “How to Make Ukiyo-e,” Kids Web Japan, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, https://web-japan.org/kidsweb/virtual/ukiyoe/ukiyoe02.html. ↩︎