11Story

12 May 2009

The Kreiner Collection 1964, 1966 and 1969

Made in Japan

Contents - The Early Collections before the Opening of Japan - The Austro-Hungarian East Asia Expedition 1868-1871 - The Vienna World Exhibition 1873 - The Drasche-Wartinberg Collection 1877 - The Troll Collection 1886 - The Siebold Collection 1889     - Este Collection 1893 - The Kreiner Collection 1964, 1966 and 1969 - The Haga Collection 1965 and 1969 - The Kubō Collection 1987−1989 - The Collections of Curators - HARU – SPRING

 

 

The Kreiner Collection 1964, 1966 und 1969

 

Josef Kreiner (b. 1940) was initially active as a professor and board member at the Institute for Japanese Studies, University of Vienna. He was later appointed to the University of Bonn, where he remained until his retirement. A large number of the acquisitions from the years 1964 to 1972 derive from his collective ventures. As the museum possessed few objects from Japan’s agricultural milieu, with the exception of a few raincoats, straw hats and shoes, and models of agricultural implements from the Siebold collection, Kreiner aimed to compensate for this absence of folk culture objects through intensive collecting of agricultural devices and agrarian household goods.   On his first research trip as a young foreign beneficiary of a Japanese government scholarship, which led him to Okinawa and the Tokara island chain south of Kagoshima, he acquired his first agricultural tools as well as the unique mask from the island Akuseki.   In 1965-66, Kreiner lived for half a year in the Fukui prefecture performing fieldwork, where reports reached him of the Izumi valley within the mountains. The valley floor was a morass due to the construction of one of the then-largest dams in Japan. Kreiner seized the chance, collecting in the sometimes already abandoned farmsteads or purchasing old, useless equipment from farmers leaving their farms. A singular collection was formed, which – with those already mentioned – yielded a complete set of agricultural implements and agrarian household goods.

 

 

 

Agrarian household goods Kreiner Collection 1966 © Museum of Ethnology, Vienna

 

 

Winnowing machines, used to clean corn, were invented as early as the second century B.C. in China, and reached Europe as late as 1720, where they revolutionized agricultural production methods. We do not know for certain when they reached Japan; according to information recorded by Kreiner in the acquisition notes they were “certainly in use prior to the Meiji period (1868-1911)” in Fukui.

 

 

Winnowing machine (tōmi) from the Village of Izumi in Fukui Prefecture Inv.-no: 145.758 Kreiner Collection 1966 © Museum of Ethnology, Vienna

 

 

 

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