The Kusudama Was Meiji Japan's Signature Tsumami-Zaiku Piece
Tracing the history of tsumami-zaiku, one word keeps reappearing: kusudama — a decorative ball built from many small folded flowers.
A fashion around 1887. An exhibition award in 1898. The single entry at a national exhibition in 1908. Three records of three unrelated occasions, all pointing at the same object. Here we read them side by side.
Earlier in this series: Is tsumami-zaiku originally Japanese? · Why tsumami-zaiku did not spread · The 1908 exposition kusudama · What foreign buyers didn't know
1. Around 1887 — girls of sixteen or seventeen "always" wore one
Late in his 1909 manual Tsumami-zaiku Shinan, Yamada Okimatsu looks back on how designs had changed. The original reads:
此の細工の最も盛になり初めたのは明治二十年頃からであつて簪として流行したものであります、其當時の十六七歳の女子は必ず藥玉簪の長い房のものを挿したものであります只今のハイカラ頭から見ると實に優美であります
"This craft first became truly popular around Meiji 20 [1887], as a fashion in kanzashi. In those days, girls of sixteen or seventeen always wore a kusudama kanzashi with long tassels. Seen against today's fashionable Western hairstyles, it was truly elegant."
The marginal heading on that page reads 島田髷に藥玉の簪 — "a kusudama kanzashi on a shimada chignon."
One caution. What the author dates to around 1887 is the beginning of the fashion, not the origin of the craft. This passage cannot be read as "tsumami-zaiku began in 1887." What it gives us is a working craftsman, writing in 1909, recording from memory when the boom started.
The same section names the specific items in fashion then: shimada no ryōzashi, harimochi, ichimonji no negake, and horn-stemmed tsumami kanzashi with an ear-pick finial. And the author adds that most of the designs among these fashionable items "came from my own hand." He is writing as someone who made the fashion, not someone who observed it.
2. 1898 — three of seven awards went to kusudama
The same book transcribes, in full, the award certificates from the First Women's Products Exhibition of 1898 (Meiji 31). Every recipient was a student of the author's.
The certificate names the head judge Yamataka Nobutsuna, the executive director Mitsui Hachirojirō, and the honorary president Komatsu Yoriko, and closes "the tenth day of the fifth month, Meiji 31." The awards were:
| Award | Item | Maker |
|---|---|---|
| First prize | Electrified artificial flower with tsumami and metallic-cord work | Konishi Mitsu |
| Same | Tsumami-zaiku potted chrysanthemum | Yoshida Nao |
| Same | Tsumami-zaiku kusudama | Kubota Haru |
| Same | Tsumami-zaiku kusudama | Okamura Kuni |
| Same | Tsumami-zaiku flowers of the four seasons | Sasaki Kanu and Kaneko Tomi |
| Same | Tsumami-zaiku kusudama | Yamada Tatsu |
| Same | Tsumami artificial flowers | Udaka Nobu |
Three of the seven were kusudama — more than any other single form. The rest are spread across different subjects, while the kusudama appears three times.
Note that "Yamada Tatsu" shares a surname with the author, Yamada Okimatsu. The source does not state any relationship. She may have been a relative, but since the source is silent we will say no more than that.
Something else in this table is worth pausing on. All eight recipients were women, and their names survive. Konishi Mitsu, Yoshida Nao, Kubota Haru, Okamura Kuni, Sasaki Kanu, Kaneko Tomi, Yamada Tatsu, Udaka Nobu. The names of women who won prizes for this handwork 128 years ago are still legible today — which is, in itself, part of what makes this source valuable.
The Imperial Household bought six pieces — and a kusudama headed the list
Directly after the list of recipients, the author writes:
此の内宮内省御買上げの榮を得たる作品は四季草花藥玉其他で六點ありましたが、皆直段も十圓以上廿五圓以下でありました。此の如く意匠をすれば随分美事なるものが出來るのでありまして、是等出品の生徒とても漸く一年程の修業生でありました
"Among these, the works honoured with purchase by the Imperial Household Ministry were a kusudama of the flowers of the four seasons and others, six pieces in all; the prices were all between ten and twenty-five yen. Work of this quality of design can indeed be made — and the students who entered these pieces were only about a year into their training."
The marginal heading on that page reads 宮内省の御用品 — "goods for the Imperial Household Ministry."
The first of the six pieces named is, again, a kusudama. As for the price: the same book states elsewhere that a woman working in tsumami-zaiku could earn about thirty yen a month, which gives a sense of what ten to twenty-five yen meant. And the makers had been studying for roughly one year.
3. 1908 — the piece at the national exhibition was also a kusudama
From the judges' report we read in an earlier article. At the 1908 Tokyo Industrial Exhibition, tsumami-zaiku was represented by one exhibitor and two pieces. The judges described the work:
僅ニ數十個ノ摘花ヲ集メテ藥玉ヲ作リ室内裝飾品ニ擬シタルニ過キス
"It is merely several dozen tsumami flowers gathered together to form a kusudama, presented as an interior decoration." The only tsumami-zaiku entry at a national exhibition was, again, a kusudama.
Read our full article on that report
And in 1909: "still in fashion"
There is one more line, immediately before the award transcription:
當時も尚殘りて流行をして居ります摘み藥玉其他種々の意匠を施したるものが當時に於ても其まゝ流行して居るものも尠くないのです
"The tsumami kusudama, still surviving and in fashion, along with pieces worked in various other designs — not a few of them remain in fashion today just as they were."
The kusudama kanzashi that came into fashion around 1887 was, by the author's own account, still in fashion when he wrote in 1909. More than twenty years.
One further observation from this section. According to the author, hana-kanzashi had previously been "combs with plain gold leaf applied." Replacing that surface entirely with tsumami-zaiku was the new fashion of the day. From a comb faced in gold leaf to a comb covered in silk flowers — and the kusudama sat inside that shift.
What the sources establish, and what they don't
What these four passages establish is that for more than twenty years, from around 1887 to 1909, the kusudama remained a defining form of tsumami-zaiku. It recurs across unrelated contexts: as a fashion, as an award subject, as an exhibition entry, and as a form still current at the time of writing.
We can't write that the kusudama was "the best-selling item" of its day. No sales figures survive anywhere. What we have is the fact that it appears in four separate records. The date of around 1887 is also the author's recollection, not a figure drawn from documents. We report what the sources say.
About Oharibako (Kyoto)
Oharibako has been making kanzashi (traditional Japanese hair ornaments) and kimono accessories in Nishijin, Kyoto, using pure silk and rice starch paste. We still make kusudama. Several dozen flowers, folded one at a time and gathered into a sphere — the form has not changed in at least 138 years.
Maru-Tsumami vs. Ken-Tsumami: The Basic Folds
Sources
Yamada Okimatsu, Tsumami-zaiku Shinan, Hakubunkan, December 1909. "Changes in tsumami-zaiku design, and fashion," pp. 258-259; "Results of my students' entries at the First Women's Exhibition," p. 259. National Diet Library Digital Collections, PID 848808 (DOI: 10.11501/848808), image 143. Public domain.
Tokyo Kangyō Hakurankai Shinsa Hōkoku, vol. 7, 1908. National Diet Library Digital Collections, PID 801790 (catalogued by the NDL as vol. 3), image 73. Public domain.
All quotations transcribed directly from the original scanned pages.