Extant volumes of Ken’eirō gasō in the possession of the Collège de France

Ken’eirō is the name of the archives of the Tayasu family, one of three branch families of the Tokugawa, Japan’s ruling house during the Edo period (1600－1867). Ken’eirō gasō (‘Illustrated anthology of the Ken’eirō archives’) is a collection of mounted illustrations bound together in orichō (folding book) format. It embraces a great variety of subjects: the foreign vessels that visited the seas of Japan in the late Edo period; foreign people such as Russians and Dutchmen; upheavals of nature such as fires and earthquakes; original bulletins and broadsheets on popular topics and rumors; various types of arts and crafts; plants; rare animals; etc. Materials in the anthology related to the nō theater and other performing arts include: nō costumes (depictions from front and side; enlargements); masks; fans; associated tools and apparatus; stages; costumes for bugaku dance; dyeing and weaving designs. From annotations and marginalia added to the illustrations, they appear to date from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries.At present, there are a total of 17 extant volumes of the Ken’eirō gasō : 13 in the collection of the Tokyo National Museum, and 4 in the possession of the Institut des Hautes Études Japonaises of the Collège de France, from the collection of Pierre Kreitmann. We have no clear idea how many volumes the collection originally included; the extant volumes include title labels that indicate that the complete total must have been much larger.The first introduction to the collection, and the first indication that it included much material of relevance to the study of nō costumes, was made by NAGASAKI Iwao in December 1998, in Vol. 557 of the magazine Museum. At the time, Nagasaki was head of the senshoku (dyeing and weaving) division of Tokyo National Museum, and he is now professor at Kyōritsu Joshi Daigaku (Kyōritsu Women’s University) in Tokyo. Our research on the collection was guided by Nagasaki’s article. When Nagasaki published his article, the Kreitmann volumes were still held by Kreitmann at his home in Marseille, and Nagasaki had yet to see them, but they were later deposited with the Institut des Hautes Études Japonaises of the Collège de France. It was the director of the institute, MATSUZAKI Sekiko (a.k.a. Sekiko Matsuzaki-Petitmengin), who promptly alerted us to the move.In February 2003 and February 2004, we had the opportunity to examine the volumes at close hand, photograph them, and begin a detailed survey of their contents. As Nagasaki noted in his initial article, the Kreitmann volumes were obtained by Pierre Kreitmann’s grandfather, Louis Kreitmann (1851－1914), when he was dispatched as an instructor to the Japan Military Academy by the French Government in 1876－78. This paper deals only with the nō-related sections of Ken’eirō gasō, and should be viewed as an interim report on a continuing survey.It is composed as follows: 1. Introduction; 2. Research on the volumes in the collection of the Tokyo National Museum; 3. Bibliographical description of the Kreitmann volumes; 4. Outline of the Ken’eirō gasō as a whole; 5. Contents of the Kreitmann volumes; and 6. Conclusion.As a concrete example of research possibilities that the Ken’eirō gasō collection presents us with, this paper deals with the illustration of a karaori costume in Ken’eirō gasō zokuhen 3, namely the Dan ryūsui kakitsubata hanataba moyō karaori. A comparison with the contents of the 5-volume collection Furenagashi onōgumi (in the Kōzan Bunko collection of the Hosei University Noh Theater Research Institute), which records nō programs performed at the Edo Palace between the first month of 1721 and the third month of 1862, has revealed that, as the annotation to the illustration records, it is a copy of the design of a karaori costume received by the leading Hōshō-school actor when he performed the nō play Matsukaze in the special performance style mitome at a kugeshū gochisō nō performance on the first day of the third month of 1824.The Ken’eirō gasō volumes record numerous examples of such illustrations, and it is clear that it is an invaluable source not only for surveys on the designs, dates, and provenances of nō costumes, but also for many other aspects of the performance of nō in the late Edo period.In conclusion, I would like to sincerely thank NAGASAKI Iwao for his initial introduction to the collection, and the Institut des Hautes Études Japonaises of the Collège de France, and its director, MATSUZAKI Sekiko, for their generous permission to survey and photograph the Kreitmann volumes