Customer Reviews

Snow, Wave, Pine: Traditional Patterns in Japanese Design

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This eye-filling book clearly illustrates the rich symbolism of Japanese design. Though not meant as an all-inclusive guide to Japanese arts, the pictorial choices are wonderful. Each design "theme" is accompained by brief but highly informative text. There is also a generous selection of family crests (mon), which would be of particular interest to kimono enthusiasts. This color-saturated album is a joy to look at and would complement Merrily Baird's more complete and scholarly tome, "Symbols of Japan," which, though awesomely researched, has rather weak illustrations in several sections.

Mr. Hibi and Mr Niwa, wrote this book,which has fantastic pictures of a variety of patterns used in Japanese Designs. I have used this book as reference for my students, and I strongly recommend this book for Japanese artist lovers. It has more pictures than detailed written research.However all in all it is a great package.

The photographs are wonderful, the book is classy. The text is kept short to not interfere with the pictures.
A bit too compressed, in my opionion. I would have liked more than four lines of text telling me that something is often depicted.
It's a wonderful book to have it displayed on a table, and to show off a little bit, but that's not the reason why I buy books...

We're big fans of Arts & Crafts style, especially the bits that incorporate "Japanesque" features (such as Greene & Greene architecture). This book is a great addition to our library, since it has loads of photos of Japanese design motifs.

Chapters are devoted to plant patterns, animal patterns, natural phenomena (such as flowing water and mountains), implements and structures (boats and bridges), geometric patterns, and family crests. Each subject within those category gets two pages of photos, with 4-8 images and just a bit of explanatory text. For instance, the "bamboo" page has two long paragraphs explaining its place in Japanese design (Including, "Bamboo, along with pine boughs and plum blossoms, is one of the 'three friends of winter' and is considered a good omen"), and photos of bamboo on a mirror case, a formal robe, a detail of bamboo in embroidery, a fan, a lidded makie bowl, a rice bowl, a lacquer pitcher, and detail from (I think) another lacquered bowl.

The book is a great brainstorming source when you're trying to come up with ideas for, in our case, stained glass, quilting and applique designs, or woodworking inlay. And it's a great coffee table book to make you say, "Oh, *pretty!*" It's a little less useful if you want to look at a lot of the detail work since, with several photos on the page, many of them are a little small for figuring out how to turn that specific dragon motif into an embroidery design. It might be thin if you're looking at this as a historical reference, too.

That's hardly a knock against the book, though, because it will serve us very well for inspirational ideas.

This is a very high quality book that photographically documents the use of plant and animal images, natural phenomena, implements and structures, geometric patterns, miscellaneous patterns and family crests in textiles, lacquerware, ceramics, hair combs, paper goods, glassware, wood, metal, and glassware.

Within the textile category alone, the book includes images of woven brocades, kasuri, embroidery, yuzen dyeing, katazome, woodblock prints, woven stripes and checks and free hand paste resist textiles. This is one of the most extensive of the very few widely available books that focus on images of Japanese craft production. Well worth the price, especially Amazon's discounted price.

The book is wonderful! Reach in picture and well structured. There is little research, but i'm proud i've bought it. It's really useful to my study.