Art: Throwaway Bamboo

Packaging is one of the small degradations of Western life. The impenetrable plastic pocket sealing in 290 worth of panhead screws, the jumbo detergent carton, the Vegas Rococo embossed vinyl “presentation” box around a new pen, apart from brown-paper bags (of which, in any case, we use too many) —it is hardly possible to go into the corner shop and find a package that is not ugly or delusive or frustrating or wasteful, or all four. That is why the Japan Society’s current exhibition in New York, “Tsutsumu—the Art of Japanese Packaging,” should not be missed. Organized and chosen by the Tokyo designer Hideyuki Oka, it consists of 221 packages, ranging from sake bottles to wrappings for candied papaya. All the designs have a long craft history, and some are very old indeed: one type of wooden container, tied together with strips of bark and used for carrying the raw fish on vinegared rice known as sushi, has been continuously made in Nara prefecture for more than a thousand years. But everything in the show is to this day a standard form of packaging among a number—diminishing, alas—of shops, stalls and manufacturers. For this reason, “Tsutsumu “is probably the cheapest design exhibition yet put on by a New York museum (total bill for buying the contents: $600.70).

Utopian Jabberwocky. But it is also different in quality and meaning from things like the mixture of Utopian Milanese-Maoist Jabberwocky and toys for the very rich that the Museum of Modern Art had in its last big design show, “Italy: the New Domestic Landscape” (TIME, May 29). Tsutsumu, of course, is more interesting because it is more real. It consists of virtually anonymous objects with actual uses, free of a designer’s narcissism, refined over a long time, that work. The Japanese package is no less an aspect of the country’s cultural heritage than the design of a “stolen view” garden or the traditional cutting of a mortise-and-tenon joint in a cedar beam. Like the rest of that heritage, it is dying. The souvenir shop of the famous Ryoanji temple in Kyoto sells boxes of tiny oblong sugar candies. The boxes are exquisitely plain, made of thin strips of unpainted pine. But touch one with a cigarette and it melts: the pine is, in fact, printed Styrofoam.

When mathematicians speak of the “elegance” of a proof, they do not mean decorative grace notes; they mean the kind of succinct, one-pointed blow that undercuts one’s expectations of complexity. In that sense, what Oka calls “these utilitarian wrappings, these crystallizations of everyday wisdom” are elegant indeed. Problem: to pack one dried salt yellowtail in straw so that it can be unwrapped frugally and eaten over a period of time. It must keep up to six months, so some air must get to it but flies must not. The answer in Ishikawa prefecture is to sheathe it in straight wisps of straw and then bind it in straw rope like a corn husk, unwrap as much as you need, cut it off, close the inner layer of straw, retie the bundle. Such packaging uses humble materials with breathtaking panache: witness a bottle for sweet sake from Tokyo, coarse brown earthenware capped with a mottled sheet of bamboo bark and tied with creeper — an ordering of color and texture so fine as to annihilate (by comparison) any drink container now selling in the West, but doomed to extinction because it can only be made by hand.

The principle behind this kind of work, as Oka points out, is twofold. First, there is a traditional regard for the symbolism of the materials themselves. Thus, because paper was considered to embody a deity in ancient Japan, you could not cut it (a murder of the god). You could fold it without violation, however, and thus origami and its related art of paper packaging came into being. Second, the package is an act of obeisance to its recipient, rather than a flat invitation to consume. In the material on show at Japan House this idea is beautifully eloquent: the studied attention to design, to the mating of materials with their contents, is part of the gift and no less touching for being destroyed at the moment of opening. “One of the reasons,” Oka notes, “why traditional packaging is disappearing so rapidly in our modern society is that it is so inefficient . . . May this not also indicate that we are rapidly losing our human capacity for love and consideration?” May? That’s restraint in packaging for you.

Robert Hughes