Introduction

In pre-modern Japan, woollen fabrics were uncommon due to the country’s humid climate and the absence of sheep. Recent research has revealed, however, that despite Japan’s seclusion policy from the seventeenth till the nineteenth century, a number of Indian carpets was brought to Japan by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) during exactly that period. Still today, Japan holds a total of three starmedallion Indian carpets from the eighteenth century. This type of carpet was often depicted in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings but there are no extant examples elsewhere. Moreover, a star-medallion Indian carpet has recently been discovered in Kyoto (Fig. 14.1).

As discussed in this chapter, the Dutch presented Indian and Persian carpets as gifts to Japanese rulers and elites to maintain good relations from the seventeenth century onwards. Such imported gifts circulated exclusively among a limited number of people such as shoguns and other elites. Rulers, high officials, and powerful merchants enjoyed the privilege of using carpets from overseas. From the eighteenth century onwards, however, a larger variety of people across the social spectrum was able to get access to Indian and Persian carpets. Since the mid-eighteenth century, wealthy Kyoto merchants decided to use imported Indian carpets also as covers for the floats of the Kyoto Gion Festival (Fig. 14.2). This annual festival, which originated in the tenth century to protect people from the plague, celebrates the Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto. From the fourteenth century onward, when merchants increased their economic power, those residing in the Shimogyo area in Kyoto organised parades of large floats on the occasion of the Gion Festival each June.