| Original Message: To me, the cord and bead are obvious replacements. |
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Although farmers would use any bead (such as a seed) as a slide closure for their purses, a Japanese gentleman would go a step further. Beads from other countries were adapted for functional usage. But beads were usually smaller and quieter than the large garish Chinese cloisonné bead. I suspect that your chartreuse tabular bead was added for commercial purposes since 1980, during the golden years of netsuke/ojime/inro collecting. How do we know this? In London, you can easily study acquisition dates on inro ensembles in museum collections and old auction catalogs from Christie's and Sotheby's. Again, I am reminding researchers how important the quality of the perforation is in an ojime; the hole must provide smooth passage of a cord. The Japanese word "ojime" literally translates: "slide closure." Ideally, the bead will have a perforation large and smooth enough to move up and down on a cord without cutting it. For unverifiable reasons, there are extremely few antique ojime in proportion to a wealth of old netsuke and inro. Why? I can only guess that fewer ojime were made, and more were lost. Because ojime are much smaller, they have less fashion impact than netsuke and inro and therefore less money was spent on them. And more were lost because they were small and the beads could be repurposed as traditional jewelry. All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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