Setodaishō

A small general, armoured head to foot in crockery.

A teapot for a helmet. Plates as shoulder-guards. A sake flask worked into the cuirass somewhere.

Setodaishō — "the General of Seto ware."

And Sekien's caption is a full costume drama

This is one of the plates where you realize how much the man was showing off.

His 1784 caption stages the picture as a scene from the *Romance of the Three Kingdoms* — the great Chinese historical epic, which any educated Edo reader would have known the way an English reader knows Shakespeare's histories.

He puts Guan Yu in it — the legendary warrior, called here by a title punning on shouting — and Cao Cao, the great antagonist.

And he renders them in pottery terms. The kannabe, the vessel for warming sake. The nishikide, the brocade-patterned ware.

Chinese generals, recast as types of dish.

The war is between two kilns

And here's what the whole conceit is actually about.

The plate stages a war between Seto ware and Karatsu ware.

Seto is in Aichi — eastern Japan's great ceramic centre.

Karatsu is in Saga, on Kyushu — western Japan's.

And the reason that's a war worth staging is in the language.

"Setomono" — "Seto things" — is the ordinary Japanese word for ceramics, in eastern Japan.

"Karatsumono" — "Karatsu things" — is the ordinary word for ceramics, in the west.

Two regional production centres so completely dominant that each one's name became the generic word for the product.

That's the commercial equivalent of "hoover" or "biro," except it happened twice, in the same country, at opposite ends, for the same category of object.

So a Japanese person in 1784 saying "pass me the setomono" and a Japanese person in Kyushu saying "pass me the karatsumono" were naming rival market territories without noticing.

Which makes this the only yokai born from a supply chain

Sekien took a regional trade rivalry, dressed it in a Chinese epic's costume, and let the dishes fight it out.

The tsukumogami catalogue is mostly about grievance — objects used for a hundred years, thrown away, and coming back annoyed about it. The umbrella. The sandal. The dust-rag.

And filed among those grievances is a market-share war.

Two kiln districts, four hundred kilometres apart, competing for the national crockery trade — and one artist looked at that and saw a battlefield.

What it tells you about the catalogues

I keep coming back to this because it changes how the whole Edo monster corpus reads.

These books are not folk collections. Not entirely, and sometimes not at all.

They're the work of an extremely well-read urban artist making jokes for other well-read urban readers — jokes about the classics, about the clergy, about moneylenders, about the pleasure quarters, and here about the ceramics industry.

A large share of what the world now takes as ancient Japanese belief is Sekien being clever, on a deadline, for an audience that got it.

Setodaishō is the case where the joke is economic, which is why nobody remembers it — the punchline expired with the market it was about.

Though not entirely. Go into a Japanese kitchen today and the word for the plates is still, in half the country, "Seto things." The general won.