Netsuke (the Toggle of the Japanese Personal Smoking Set)

Netsuke is the small toggle in traditional Japanese dress that kept items hanging from the sash from falling. Since the kimono has no pockets, items such as tobacco pouches, pipe cases, seals, and medicine boxes were tied to the waist by a cord, with a toggle at the end of the cord hooked over the top edge of the wrapped sash (obi) to hold the set in place. The other links in this arrangement were the cord (himo) connecting the pieces and the single-holed bead (ojime) that cinched the cord; details are covered in the Japanese personal smoking set entry.

From Utility to Sculpture

The netsuke is accepted to have emerged in something like its familiar form in the 17th century. It spread widely through the Edo period (1603-1868); while its function stayed the same, its carved character came to the fore, and the toggle turned into a branch of miniature sculpture with standards of its own. Makers were called netsuke-shi. The field's earliest compendium is the Sōken Kishō, published in Osaka in 1781 by Inaba Tsūryū; the book introduces more than fifty masters, sometimes with illustrations of their work. After 1868, the spread of Western-style dress weakened the custom of hanging items from the sash, and the netsuke withdrew from everyday use.

Main Forms

Toggles are named for their shape. The most common is katabori, carved fully in the round and typically a few centimeters long. Manju is a flat, circular type named after a round confection. Kagamibuta resembles manju but has a metal lid inlaid into its center. Ryusa is carved with lattice-like openwork, while sashi has a long, rod-like shape. The range of materials is wide: ivory, boxwood and other hardwoods, horn, bone, metal, lacquer, ceramic. Newer materials such as celluloid were added to the list toward the end of the 19th century.

Smoking-Specific Types

Some of the toggles attached to smoking sets relate directly to fire. Examples cast in brass with a hollow, bowl-shaped interior are said to have been used to hold an ember for a while when lighting a kiseru. The shapes given to these bowls were drawn from everyday life: a wooden percussion instrument used to keep time in Buddhist rites (mokugyo), a shallow, wide-brimmed soldier's cap (jingasa), and more rarely a samurai helmet (kabuto). Records point to a far rarer type dating back to the 17th century: a working miniature flintlock mechanism set inside a walnut-sized metal shell, known as hiuchi-bako; this curiosity-inducing device never caught on widely. The business of fire and ash indoors was, in any case, already handled by the tabako-bon tray.

In everyday pairings, the toggle's form was chosen to suit the body of the pouch. A soft leather or cloth pouch was mostly matched with a flat manju or kagamibuta, while a hard-bodied tobacco container (tonkotsu) could be carried with any toggle type, especially katabori. Records suggest a common set arrangement in the last quarter of the 19th century ran as follows: a kagamibuta-shaped toggle in ivory or celluloid, a multi-strand silver chain hanging from it, a fixed ring-shaped ojime on the chain, and a decorated pouch at the end.

Interest Today

Netsuke is regarded today as an art form in its own right, and museums usually classify it separately from tobacco items. Even so, the pipe case (tsutsu) and the tonkotsu are considered together with netsuke because they share the same language of carving and ornament. Japanese terms mentioned in this entry are gathered in the Japanese pipe terminology glossary.