petethe canadian

Looks like it may be some kind of legal document.

This is the beginning of another old scroll, my wife read a bit and thinks it's from a shrine or temple, I have no idea how old it is but I do have photos of the rest of the scroll so if they load I will post those later. If anyone wants to venture a guess, I'd appreciate it.Thanks.

This is the end of one of the scrolls I found at my in-laws, generally where we find dates and often names are written. I have a date of 1633 but I am not sure thats accurate. Maybe there's a date here and the insect damage may be right where the date once was. If anyone sees a date please let me know. Thanks.

Agreed, one day everything we found at my in-laws place will be returned to Japan, thats where it belongs, had I not found them they'd still be there deteriorating more and more, here they're safe with us and they're small enough for my wife to pack in a suitcase when the time comes and she will bring them back on one of her trips to see friends and family in Japan. This is the second of 2 pages I got in Sendai, appears to be written for the same occasion, possibly by the same person.

The rest of the archery scroll images won't load. Here's an 1825 painting of the layout for a samurai feast for the staff of the place that was hosting the event. The colours are still very vibrant, the washi paper has some damage along the creases but still a pretty cool piece.

This is the start of the scroll about building archery targets, first photo loaded no problem so I hope the rest will too.

where do I find the photo resizer here? I looked but must have missed it. OK found it and I'll just load the photos that I can, most are just too big, unfortunate we have some great stuff.

can't load the next section of the scroll

I'd like to add more photos but I can't, too bigI

I got this while living in Japan, there are very few online but the ones I saw call this a hanging amulet but I have also read that these were used to carry scrolls or important documents while traveling, not sure what it is actually called. Since I have found very few like it dating it is guesswork, but to me it looks like Edo period with a possibility of it being early Meiji. The metal end caps are original but the metal strapping looks to me to have been added at a later date possibly because the wood split from end to end and rather than throwing it away or replacing it previous owner[s] had it repaired. Whoever added the metal strapping left all the small nails they used protruding through the wood into the interior making it impossible to store anything inside that needs to be retrieved, just too risky putting a hand in there with out it being punctured a hundred times. Still a very interesting piece and I will add photos of the end caps, the metal work is outstanding and it was done by a highly skilled artisan, with several auspicious Japanese symbols. The himo looks original to me and if it was replaced at some point it was done a very long time ago.

I have to cut them off somewhere they're too long to capture in one shot if I want them to be legible. This is the start of a scroll, it has insect damage further along I''ll post photos of the entire scroll section by section.

was I getting carried away? didn't realize it.

Domo mina san. Here's a look at another hanko from a different scroll, I have photos of all the scrolls, taken section by section and I can post more pics of those if anyone is interested. They took scrolls like this very seriously, on the ones I found the receiver was not allowed to divulge anything he learned not even to his family, it was all very secret. I found 5 books altogether and the thickest one seems to be an encyclopedia of sorts filled with all kinds of information a samurai head of a household needed to know from battlefield medicine to presenting gifts to superiors to how to use lacquer, plus j=how to make oneself invisible, no kidding. There are recipes for the energy balls samurai needed for long marches when they couldn't stop for food etc. Other books I found are how to write, the wrong sentence or reference to a particular season could be regarded as uneducated in Edo city so they took all of this extremely seriously. Another book is about samurai laws, all hand written on washi paper that has dragons embossed in the paper on the covers. Someday we will return these all to Japan either to a museum or university, thats where they belong. I have them to photograph them and catalogue them and hopefully try to get them translated but the encyclopedia is 144 pages so thats going to take some time. My brother in law wasn't interested in any of this so my wife and I brought them to Canada with us. ,

Under the maewa brass metal I saw some washi paper sticking out and when I looked closely I saw these 5 shims wrapped in old washi paper, I read it was not unusual for makers to do this to stop the rattling of the metal. Plausible. The sellers said it was a samurai saddle, their country so I figured they would know, even if it isn't it's still a very cool piece in our collection. The washi paper looks old, apparently in the Edo period washi was very expensive and was recycled before recycling was cool, the washi here contains a lot of particles, could be from the recycling process or it was made that way, we brought washi back with us and some pieces are white while others have bits of different things like leaves etc. The monkey motif was not added, it was cut out from a solid piece of brass then some mother of pearl was added behind it. I would wager saddles evolved over the generations, if mine doesn't look like every other saddle out there, that could be one reason and they were not all made in the same place, perhaps different regions had different designs not uncommon in Japan at all. Some saddles were made for battle some were made for exhibitions like parades, I am not saying my saddle has seen battles, I wasn't there so I don't know. One thing is certain, I was not going to leave it behind.

This is an image I saved from the web because it looks a lot like my saddle. When I got it the saddle was held together something like this photo. I have both ends, the maewa and the shizuwa. I took it apart when we sent 110 boxes from Japan to Canada in a container. I could put it back together to look like the one in this photo, wouldn't be hard but it is easier to store in two pieces.