Latest / It's All Japanese to Me / Ep. 5 — Getemono: plain things, and odd things

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Ep. 5 — Getemono: plain things, and odd things · It's All Japanese to Me

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Rikuto.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: So today's word is getemono.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: It is written with three different characters.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Ge means low or lower.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Te means hand.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: And mono means thing.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: There's also an opposite word of getemono which is jotemono with jaw meaning upper.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: So very roughly, joutemono are high-end things and getemono are low-end things.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten, a large dictionary of a Japanese language, gives two meanings.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: The first is cheap and simple goods made without much extra work.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Popular things or local things and also crude, cheap things.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: The second meaning is things that people see as strange or a bit of.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: The first meaning connects to what I talked about in episode 2, Yonobi, and to Yanagi Souetsu.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: According to the Mie Prefecture Art Museum, Yanagi moved to Kyoto in 1924.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: After that,
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: he began buying large amounts of pottery and clothes at temple and shrine markets,
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: like the ones at Toji and Kitano Tenmangu.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: They were everyday wares made by unknown craftspeople.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: In the market, These were called getemono.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Traditional dealers did not pay much attention to them.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, the dictionary quotes Yanagi himself from 1927 was its first example of this meaning.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: In that passage,
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: he writes about some of the most celebrated tea utensils, the ones called omeibutsu.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: He writes that these famous pieces were postponed among everyday dishes and bowls
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: that people looked down on as getemono.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: As I mentioned in episode 2,
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yanagi and Kawai Kanjiro and Hamada Shoji made up the word mingei in 1925.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: They needed a new word because the existing words could not describe
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: the beauty they saw in these things.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: So you could say that some of the things we now call mingei were once called ketemonos.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: In Japanese today, though,
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: when I hear the word getemono, it is usually in the second meaning, something weird.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: From here, this is not from the dictionary, but it's just my impression.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: But to me, the first meaning and the second meaning feel quite different.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is very neutral and the second one is clearly negative.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: But the fact that one word has both meanings and moved from one to
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: the other makes me feel that the line between them is actually a bit blurry.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think we can also take something from this.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Something that looks weird or strange from one point of view It can look neutral
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: or even positive from another.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: And from some points of view, we might even find a kind of beauty in it.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: I get a little of this feeling when I look at something very chaotic,
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: like a piece of art that looks chaotic at first glance.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: I do not know exactly how the meaning changed, so I will leave it here.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, so that is it for today's episode about Ketemono.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much for listening and see you next time.
• 4:45
  [music]