Bibliography of Japanese Tobacco Ware (Bib)

The bibliography of Japanese tobacco ware is a survey of the core texts written in Western languages and in Japanese on the kiseru and the items surrounding it. Listed on Pipedia under the abbreviation "Bib," this is the final installment of a series John C. Loring wrote on Japanese tobacco ware; according to the copyright notice on the page, it was compiled in 2001-2002. The field has no dedicated journal of its own, so its literature is not gathered in a single place — it is scattered across netsuke society bulletins, journals of Asian art, and museum publications.

Comprehensive Reference Works

The first stop for anyone doing a survey is Norman L. Sandfield's The Ultimate Netsuke Bibliography, published in Chicago in 1999. Though the title points to netsuke, this 384-page volume, holding more than four thousand four hundred entries, presents books, journal articles, and auction catalogues in separate indexes; the literature on pipe cases and tobacco pouches is included in this compilation as well. The compendium was updated in 2001 with an addendum and corrections booklet. The volumes turned to for reading signatures are George Lazarnick's single-volume dictionary of 1976 and his two-volume dictionary of 1982; while their focus is on netsuke signatures, the signatures of case and tonkotsu makers also appear in these volumes.

Articles in Periodicals

Articles are gathered mainly in three publications: the bulletin of the society founded in 1975 under the name Netsuke Kenkyukai (known today as the International Netsuke Society Journal), Arts of Asia, which began publishing in Hong Kong in 1970, and Daruma, which ran in Japan in English from 1993 to 2011.

• Raymond Bushell's article on kiseru-zutsu in the November-December 1980 issue of Arts of Asia is counted among the field's early reference texts, thanks to its photographic documentation of sixty carvers' signatures.

• William and Betty Parker published a study of smoking ensembles in 1983 and an index of case makers in 1984; corrections to the index were given in a later issue that same year.

• Charles Holme's article on tobacco boxes, published in International Studio in 1901, is counted among the earliest known studies of the tonkotsu, and was reprinted in the society bulletin in 1989.

• Nadine and Philippe Quinet's article devoted directly to the kiseru also appeared in the same bulletin; because the entry gives the year with a question mark, its date is not certain. Benjamin Rapaport's 1997 article in Arts of Asia treats the kiseru alongside Asia's other pipes.

Terms used in these writings are explained in the glossary of Japanese pipe terms, and the parts of the ensemble are described in the entry The Japanese personal smoking ensemble.

Tobacco's Arrival in Japan

Two texts sit at the historical core of the subject. The paper the British diplomat Ernest M. Satow read to the Asiatic Society of Japan in 1877 is among the early Western studies of tobacco's arrival on the island; it was reprinted in 1883. More than a century later, Suzuki Tatsuya (Barnabas T. Suzuki) revisited the subject in his book published by Shibunkaku in Kyoto in November 1999, drawing on first-hand documents of the period and opening earlier assumptions about the arrival to debate. According to the bibliography's entry, an English-language partial summary of this study was published in 2001 in the yearbook of the Académie Internationale de la Pipe.

Museum and Exhibition Publications

Most of the visual material is found in institutional publications. Japan Tobacco's Tobacco and Salt Museum, opened in 1978 and relocated to Tokyo's Sumida ward in 2015, has issued separate volumes for the kiseru, tabako-bon, tabako-ire, and ukiyo-e prints. Alongside these are the catalogue of Shimada City Museum's 1996 exhibition on pipes and craftsmen, and the volume Tsubame City Industrial Museum prepared in 1999 for the Maruyama Seijiro collection. Both are written in Japanese; but since most of their pages are filled with color photographs, researchers without Japanese can still make use of them. For the broader publishing landscape of the field, see the entry pipe books and publications.