A Journey Through Chinese Handicrafts | Expanded Edition

A record of ten years spent wandering the remote interior of China in search of the "living" folk tools of ethnic minorities. An expanded edition with a new chapter on travels in Yunnan and Guizhou after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mingei, meaning folk crafts, is a word coined by Soetsu Yanagi in the mid-1920s; Yanagi argued that practical crafts made by anonymous artisans have a beauty that rivals works of fine art.

Mingei Okumura, a shop of everyday goods centred on handwork gathered from across Japan and around the world, is a popular web shop whose owner, Shinobu Okumura, inheriting the ideas of Yanagi and other mingei pioneers, proposes "mingei" items suited to today's times and today's lives.

The place that captivated Okumura, and where he travelled almost every year until 2019, is China. Among its regions, it is Yunnan and Guizhou provinces, featured in this book, that he has visited most often.

Yunnan Province is full of places called hidden lands and spectacular sights. Guizhou Province, on the other hand, though called the poorest province, still preserves a culture of its own. He says what drew him to this area was a single piece of cloth, and that he plunged in with the feeling, "I want to visit the place where something like this is made."

For Okumura, handwork is not simply things like ceramics, textiles and woven basketry; he says it includes everything — terraced rice fields, Chinese tea, local cuisine, architecture, such culture and ways of life. In this book, too, while introducing handicrafts from Yunnan and Guizhou, he touches on the lives of ethnic minorities and the customs of each locality.

Okumura is also known as a gourmet, and he says that on journeys through the Chinese countryside, food is the greatest pleasure of all; the many dishes that appear one after another, which cannot be seen in Japan, can be called one of the attractions of this book.

Information is limited if you try to research Yunnan and Guizhou provinces in Japan. This book not only introduces the handwork Okumura encountered there but is also a travel report, and should be more reassuring advice than a guidebook on how to act in places where even basic English is barely understood and Google cannot be used.

The photographs in this book were taken by Yayoi Arimoto, who travels the world continuing to photograph her work, as she accompanied Okumura. Through Arimoto's sensibility, the colours of the places are vividly captured.

This expanded edition adds, as a new chapter, the record of a journey to Yunnan and Guizhou, visited for the first time in four years and several months when he finally resumed full-scale buying trips to China in 2024. Its content is valuable both as a document conveying China before COVID-19 and for showing the major changes that have occurred since.

Publisher: Seigensha
Publication year: 2024
Pages: 328
Dimensions: 190 × 129 mm

Chinese Handicrafts / Traditional Craft / Chinese Culture