Glass Discussion & Research. NO IDENTIFICATION REQUESTS here please. > Far East (excluding China)
List of Japanese glass makers
ahremck:
For those who might be interested there is 'Japanese Glass' Facebook group that I created because I realised several of my Murano items probably were not and they were not Czech either. We have athree excellent people who are very serious Japanese collectors.
Ross
kwqd:
--- Quote from: chasdevlin on April 19, 2020, 08:37:15 AM ---I've become interested in it after coming to realise how many pieces I've had have been Japanese. The lack of information can be frustrating. I've been relying on the same kind of links that are above in order to find out more, but it would be great to have more resources.
I do wonder how much interest there is in their art glass within Japan. There must be collectors I would have thought. Has anyone come across any Japanese blogs or anything like that dedicated to their glass?
--- End quote ---
There does not currently seem to be much interest in acquiring or documenting Japanese art glass, except from a very small number of serious collectors around the world, possibly due to the lack of information about this glass. Most collectors just seem to want to be able to differentiate Japanese glass from other glass, so they don't mistakenly buy it. Prices are all over the place and often wildly inflated, especially for production Iwata and Kamei glass and some other production glass (Kamei has become a generic term for anything suspected to be Japanese). I've never seen any of this inflated production Japanese art glass sell for the prices being asked. Not sure if someone is trying to drive the price up on this stuff or if this is also due to the lack of information about this glass. I've bought directly from Japan, for pretty reasonable prices, if you don't count the shipping costs. At least the Japanese understand the difference between artist pieces and production glass.
None of the serious collectors that I have interacted with have any good sources for information about Japanese art glass and, at best, are attempting to put bits and pieces of information together, as I have been trying to do. I do know one collector who has been to Japan in recent years and visited some of the extant glass houses and gained some information about those makers' history and has freely shared that information.
This general lack of information is probably due to cultural factors and the lack of interest in this glass by collectors while it was being produced and as many of the Japanese glass houses went out of business in the 1980s and 1990s and others transitioned into producing other products in order to survive. Japanese culture discouraged seeking recognition as an individual, instead to defer to the group or organization, so information about individual artists who worked for the major glass houses is scant. Japanese tastes have apparently changed since glass houses were producing art glass pre-2000 and, as far as I can tell, there is not much interest in this glass in Japan. The major interest there that I see is to cater to the export market. I have not seen that those exporting this glass from Japan, in general, have any more information about this glass than those outside of Japan do. Time is probably running out to document information about pre-2000 Japanese art glass as the people who worked in this industry die, since no other information seems to have survived. I do not know of any concerted effort in Japan to gather or preserve this information. I have made an effort to find sources in Japan with no success.
Sorry if this is rambling, I just got up for a bit and made the mistake of checking my email. Going back to bed!
kwqd:
Awake, now, and had one cup of coffee. My post was in the spirit of this thread and aimed at the glass houses which were active in Japan pre-2000, not the Japanese studio art glass movement or artists. I have not put much effort into looking at the studio art glass movement in Japan or into learning about Japanese studio glass artists. It was interesting to note that there are some ties between the studio art glass movement in Japan and Illinois State University, which I attended. I never met Joel Phillip Meyers, though he taught at ISU while I was attending there, but I have since met some of his students. I did not become interested in art glass until a few years later.
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