Early-Modern Plastic: How Whale Baleen Shaped the Culture of Tokugawa Japan

• In Event: The Animal Kingdom and Aquatic Ecosystems in the Early Modern World

Abstract

With the rise of organized whaling groups operating as one of the Tokugawa period's (1603-1868) new specialized fisheries beginning in the early seventeenth century, whale products shaped new developments within Japanese culture. While the major product of Japan's whaling today is meat, Tokugawa whalers sold not just meat, but also oil, bone, and baleen. In Europe and America, baleen (also known as whalebone) became an essential resource for the stiffened clothing of men and women in the 16th-19th centuries, shaping human bodies and culture. While also available in Japan during approximately the same period, baleen drove cultural innovation in a different direction than Western corsets or hoop skirts. Baleen springs played an essential role in the construction of bunraku puppets, used in the widely popular puppet theater, and in the operation of clockwork karakuri dolls, used as both toys and devices to study the natural world and what it meant to be alive. In both of these examples, no other material was available within Japan which could serve in the place of baleen. However, as both the puppets and dolls are relatively small and thus required a tiny fraction of the baleen from a single whale, the remaining baleen was available for use in other objects as well. This paper will consider the meaning for Tokugawa culture of the availability of this early-modern equivalent of plastic - flexible but strong, easily shaped into new forms and yet, unlike plastic, entirely derived from harvested animals.

Author

• Jakobina K. Arch, Whitman College