The Chrysanthemum Festival: Japan's September 9
Japan has five seasonal festivals, one for each odd-numbered month, and most people can name four. Girls' Day in March, with the hina dolls. Boys' Day in May, with the carp streamers. Tanabata in July, with wishes on strips of paper. New Year, of course. The fifth is September 9, Chōyō, the Chrysanthemum Festival, and it has quietly become the one adults keep for themselves.
Nine and nine
The date comes from Chinese numerology. Nine is the largest single odd number, the number of yang, and the ninth day of the ninth month doubles it: chōyō means "double yang." That much energy in one day was thought to need balancing, and the balance was the chrysanthemum, a flower believed to ward off illness and stretch a life. Heian courtiers drank sake with chrysanthemum petals floating in it. Court ladies laid silk over the flowers overnight and wiped their faces with the dew-soaked cloth in the morning. A thousand years later, people still put a petal in the cup.
The grown-ups' Hina festival
Somewhere in the Edo period a second custom attached itself to the day. The hina dolls, packed away after Girls' Day in March, came out again in September for an airing, nochi no hina, "the later hina." The March festival is for daughters; the September one is for the women who were once daughters, and it is sometimes called, half-joking, the adults' Hina festival. That is why the objects of Chōyō are the objects of a bride's trousseau, at miniature scale: the shell bucket, the letter box, the lacquered stand, the clam shell that closes on itself.
Gofun
The pieces we chose for this edit share a technique. Gofun is a pigment made from ground oyster shells, the white that gives Japanese dolls their faces. Built up in layers with a brush, it can be raised into relief, and a certified traditional craftsman has done exactly that on Japanese cedar: white chrysanthemums standing a millimetre or two proud of the wood grain, tied with an orange cord. The kaioke, the shell bucket, is the tallest of them. The fubako, the letter box, opens and holds what gathers on a dresser. The miniature pair is doll-house scale and does not open at all; it is there to be looked at.
The same craftsman raises the flower on a clam shell. A kōgō is an incense box, and the clam is the shape it has taken for centuries because only a clam's own two halves fit together, which is the Japanese way of saying a marriage. Ours come small and large. Nobody will mind if you keep a ring in one.
What lifts them
Japanese display has a rule that Western shelves mostly ignore: the thing you value is raised. A gozen, the small footed stand, lifts a single object off the surface and makes it the point of the room. An oshiki, the flat square tray, does the same for a place at the table. Put the clam box on the gozen and a sake cup on the oshiki and you have set the festival without knowing anything else about it.
And the table
The colour of the day is vermilion with gold, which is also the colour of New Year, so the pieces do double duty. A hexagonal serving bowl in the tortoise-shell shape of long life; a footed plate shaped like the flower itself, for sushi or a tart; a soup bowl in persimmon red. All made for FOURGRACE in Echizen, the Fukui town that has made Japan's lacquerware for a thousand years. Beside them, from Kutani, the small plate, sake cup, chopsticks and rest painted with plum and chrysanthemum, the two flowers the Japanese set out for luck.
The ninth will have passed by the time most of these reach an American door. That is fine. In Japan the chrysanthemum is the flower of the whole autumn, and these objects are the kind that come out in September and stay out until the pine goes up for New Year.
The edit is here: Chrysanthemum Festival. Everything is made in Japan and ships from Tokyo with US duties included. The cedar and shell pieces are made in very small numbers; several are one of one.