Daini no Sanmi

Does this print look a little bit familiar to you? Haven't you seen this design somewhere before? Well, if you are a new collector of my prints, you perhaps won't know this, but those of you who have seen many of the designs in this series will by now be very familiar with this pose - the long kimono open at the front to show the hakama, and one hand raised in front of the face, hiding the mouth. This is the fourth (and last) of the prints in Shunsho's set that uses this exact pose.

I'm a bit curious; I've seen the same pose used in pictures by other artists too, and wonder if it is just something that was a sort of standard visual pattern, or if this was the actual way that women would stand in those days. I know that covering the mouth is something that women in modern Japan sometimes do when they are laughing, and in Western societies too it is considered polite to cover the mouth when it is being opened wide, but it seems hard to imagine that anyone would stand this way for a formal 'portrait'. What is the origin of this custom of keeping the face and mouth covered - did they all have bad teeth?

Our subject this month is the lady known generally as 'Daini no Sanmi'. As usual this is a title rather than a name; my books tell me it was bestowed on her in consequence of her service as a wet nurse to Emperor Go Reizei. (And that sentence certainly gave me pause when I read it - do they mean his wet nurse when he was a child, before he became Emperor, or was he actually Emperor already at the time she was taking care of him ...?)

It seems that she was an accomplished poet, and quite of lot of her work has survived.

Back near the beginning of this series, about nine years ago, I made a visit one day to one of the men working as a traditional woodblock printer, Mr. Kenji Seki. I had not previously had many chances to talk with such a man, and I had a million things to ask him. He was very friendly, answering my questions and demonstrating how the work was done, but he went quite a long way beyond this, and gave me many presents, including an old baren that was no longer useful for him (but which was a wonderful treasure for me) and many bags of pigments for me to use.

Up to that point I had been using prepared watercolours from tubes, but he explained to me that those colours faded too much, and anyway, it wasn't the printer's job to 'choose' tints and shades that had been prepared by somebody else, but to 'make' ones own colours, working from a few basic ingredients. It was a collection of these basic pigments that he gave me: indigo, vermillion, ultramarine, etc. At one point as he was digging in his boxes and pouring pigments into small plastic bags for me, he paused over one pigment, thought for a moment, and then decided to give me some. He explained as he gave it to me that this particular batch of pigment had been handed down to him by an older printer, and probably dated back to the Taisho era ... It was now extremely difficult to obtain such a pigment, and this was very, very expensive. It was a very fine sample of 'beni', the reddish pigment obtained from the flower known as 'beni-bana'. I accepted the small bag with reverence, and with many thanks.

In the years since then, that small bag has been sitting in my pigment drawer untouched. I occasionally took it out, opened it up, and touched and smelled the reddish powder, but decided each time against using it in one of my prints. It had waited a long time, it could wait a little longer ...

I guess you know why I am telling you this little story now ... Yes, I printed the 'hakama' on this month's print using this old old pigment. Perhaps I should have waited longer, until I became more skilled and more 'worthy' of such a special material. But in that case, one could wait forever ...

Thank you Seki-san, for the pigment. I hope you don't think it has been wasted ...

March 1998

Translation: Steven Carter