H ow the Japanese Arrange Flowers 
AN ART THAT IN JAPAN IS TAUGHT TO THE YOUNGER GENERATION 
AS WIDELY AS MUSIC IS TAUGHT TO OUR OWN SONS AND DAUGHTERS 
by Bunkio Matsuki and F. W. Coburn 
Photographs by Luther H. Shattuck 
A MONG the many lessons which the domestic architecture of 
japan, reserved, dignified and restful down to this day, 
offers to Occidentals, none is more unexpectedly suggestive than 
the one which is revealed by a little study of the Japanese art of 
flower arrangement or ikebana. It comes, indeed, with something 
of a surprise to the American to learn that the art of placing 
flowers or foliage in vases 
or elsewhere is taken seri¬ 
ously by every Japanese of 
taste and discrimination; 
that there are different 
schools and theories of 
flower arrangement; that 
peripatetic teachers of the 
art give lessoins to the sons 
and daughters of middle- 
class families just as the 
piano and violin teachers go 
their rounds among us; that 
much of the wonderful skill 
of Japanese designers and 
pictorial artists is acquired 
through early acquaintance 
with the principles of artis¬ 
tic composition as taught by 
the exponents of ikebana. 
The stranger within the 
ga t e s of any cultivated 
household of Japan receives 
from the master of the 
house a tray of freshly cut 
flowers. His part it then is to 
place them so as to evince 
his taste, his understanding 
of honored traditions of 
decoration. On festal days 
in the great cities of the 
Empire shopkeepers remove 
from their windows the 
usual display of goods and 
show a single precious vase 
with some flower of the sea¬ 
son placed in accordance 
with the canons of ikebana. 
The crowds surging the 
streets on such occasions 
praise or condemn the merchant's display with the discrimination 
of an audience at one of our symphony concerts or of the spcta- 
tors at the opening night of one of our exhibitions of pictures. 
Herein, then, is one of the secrets of the artistic power of the 
Japanese. The love of flowers is universal; these people, with 
their almost preternatural intelligence and sensitiveness to esthetic 
impressions, are practically alone in having rationalized the use 
of flowers and foliage in decoration. Occidental bad taste in the 
use of the most exquisite of natural forms has been manifested 
for centuries in a thousand ways ; in the showy vulgarities of van 
Huysam, and other Dutch flower painters; in indelicate and un¬ 
imaginative conventionalizations of floral forms in millions upon 
millions of yards of textiles and wall papers; in the tawdry display 
of expensive exotics with which the “swell" florist's window and 
the multi-millionaire's mansion are overlQaded. In Japan flower ar¬ 
rangement has been one of the recognized fine arts since its canons 
were established by Yoshimasa, a distinguished artist of the six¬ 
teenth century. This man 
laid down rules and pre¬ 
cepts which, a little later, 
were amplified and refined 
by R i k i u , Hideyoshi’s 
clever master of the tea 
ceremony. During all the 
later flowering forth of 
Japanese art, in the sump¬ 
tuous development of the 
Tokugawa period, the mar¬ 
velous pictorial efforts of 
the artists of the Ukiy'oye. 
or popular school, down to> 
the present day, when Occi¬ 
dental and commercial in¬ 
fluences have greatly in¬ 
jured the architecture and 
allied arts of public build¬ 
ings, but only to a slight 
extent the household arts — 
in all this time all the Jap¬ 
anese people have kept re¬ 
minding themselves of their 
expressive axiom: "Fruit 
nourishes the body; flow¬ 
ers, the soul." 
To transfer the cult of 
ikebana bodily to this west¬ 
ern land would be as im¬ 
possible, however theoret¬ 
ically desirable it might be, 
as to change our more 
florid and assertive domes¬ 
tic architecture to the re¬ 
fined and subdued auster¬ 
ity of Japanese middle- 
class homes. Valuable in¬ 
struction, nevertheless, it 
would be for any American 
man or woman to sit at the feet of one of the Oriental masters of 
flower arrangement. 
Such a student would soon feel that the essential ideas of the 
Japanese about flowers are right. Theirs is a cult of floral forms 
that may be grown out-of-doors under strictly natural conditions. 
The forcing processes of the hothouse are distasteful even in 
present-day Japan, addicted to many innovations from the ()cci- 
dent. No follower of any school of ikebana would think of using 
a flower out of its proper season. In a semi-tropical country 
something is always in bloom, beginning with the January plum 
blossoms, which often appear simultaneously with snow flurries,. 
Five-flower arrangement, interesting variations of which are frequently 
sought by the Japanese who practise ikebana. Curious little forms and 
sculptured figures are occasionally used to hold the stems upright 
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