Celebrating the Accession to the Name Takemoto Gendayu VIII

This announcement was issued by the Takemoto School, the jöruri singing accompaniment to the Bunraku puppet theater and one of the oldest surviving schools established during the Edo period. The surimono celebrates the name accession ceremony of Takemoto Gendayü VIII 竹本源太夫, who is met with congratulatory poems from a wide range of cultural figures at the time, a sign of the continuing importance of cultural networks, even in the days leading to World War II. The sheet is carefully structured in order of relative importance of contributors and, very possibly, in order of the size of monetary donation. The artist, Hasegawa Konobu, was part of a school of Osaka printmakers that is still active today. The bamboo design not only echoes the vertical components of the poems, but also it reflects the segmented structure of the three registers. The design also contains a hidden word play, as Takemoto means, literally, "base of bamboo plant," which is what we actually see. World War II greatly disrupted Japanese cultural patterns and one of the casualties seems to have been the tradition of the surimono. Printed on the eve of the war, this print stands as a poignant statement of the centuries-long tradition of printing illustrated surimono as a way of sharing, announcing and publishing haiku poetry within Japanese cultural groups.