Huang Goodman · Art Forgotten

Art Forgotten

Art from public museum collections. A mismatched real Japanese law, and some other factoids.

Every object, image and description comes from the museum's own catalogue record, and every object links to its original. Japanese records are machine-translated into English; the museum's Japanese is kept beside the translation because it is the authoritative form. Each law carries its official number and links to e-Gov 法令検索, the Japanese government's statute database.

Saucer
{Saucer · Seifū Yohei III (Japanese, 1851–1914) · 1893–1914 · Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0}

Yohei III’s main output for his sophisticated clientele was in the form of tea sets and dining sets. He created a range of dishes in green glazes. He often produced in pairs, sets of five, or sets of ten. For this set of ten small dishes in a simple, round form that emphasizes the glaze above all, the box lid designates the piece as seiji, or green-glazed porcelain, using a general term for the extensive palette of green glazes often called celadon in English. The box lid further identifies the dishes themselves as tōchō, literally “bean-sized saucers,” a size that makes them suitable for dipping sauces.

View the original at Cleveland Museum of Art →
The law
屋外広告物法
Outdoor Advertising Act
昭和二十四年法律第百八十九号 · Act No. 189 of 1949

Article 1 gives three grounds for regulating a sign: forming good landscape, maintaining scenic character, and preventing danger to the public. Article 3 then lets a prefecture prohibit outdoor advertising outright, by ordinance, in named categories of place.

The cool part. Read the list in Article 3 and it stops being an advertising law. The places where signage can be banned include landscape districts, scenic districts, preservation districts for groups of traditional buildings, the surroundings of designated Important Cultural Properties, and historic sites, places of scenic beauty and natural monuments. The statute protects the view by removing the sentences written across it.

Verify at e-Gov 法令検索 →

Use it The border is the idea. Use it as an edge treatment and leave the centre empty.

Description source: museum curator text — not generated