iTopSpin
Current Posts => Collecting, Modding, Turning and Spin Science => Topic started by: Jeremy McCreary on June 12, 2019, 02:45:20 PM
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My copy from Japan finally arrived!
(http://ta0.com/papyrus/images/Edo-tops_book.jpg)
Photo originally posted by ta0 in this recent Edo koma thread (http://www.ta0.com/forum/index.php/topic,5717.0.html).
English title: Edo Tops
Authors: Michiyaki Hiroi and Masaaki Hiroi (modern master of Edo top-making)
Copyright: 1993
Binding: Paperback with stiff, glossy cover slip
Source: Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/4817087706/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_image_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)
Condition: Used but excellent
Price: $49.28 shipped
Beautiful book! Surprised to find that it opens from the left, but it's thoroughly Japanese, so how else? Text is mostly in Japanese with some tantalizing English here and there.
Really wish I could read every word -- especially the sections on general top design and engineering, Edo top types and starting methods, Edo top-making (including how the onboard mechanisms work), and Edo top play (including the throwing of chonkakegoma-like tops). No luck resolving the age-old question, is "Edo koma" or "Edo goma", or "Edogoma" the best English term?
But the lavish illustrations more than make up for all that. Pages 10-96 are gorgeous full-page color photos of Edo tops and other spintoys with perfect angles and lighting. These show a much wider variety of Edo spintoys than I've seen anywhere else and are worth the price alone. The other color plate section (pp. 137-144) shows Japanese and Western paintings and drawings of tops in play.
And there are many, many B&W photos and drawings everywhere else. Of these, especially enjoyed (i) the line drawing chart of Edo hand and assisted top play with Japanese and English captions on pp. 196-197, and (ii) the many diagrams of top physics and engineering and Edo top play instructions after p. 167.
As for the Edo tops themselves, these words come to mind in no particular order: Whimsical, colorful, playful, delightful, elegant, masterful, diverse, ingenious, artistic, and cute. I consider the spinning top a fascinating toy, a physics laboratory, and a kinetic art form, and you'll find all of these personas highly developed in Edo tops. You really have to see all of them to get the full impact.
Visions of LEGO knock-offs are already swirling in my head. And now I have the info to pull some of them off -- at least in schematic form.
Bottom line: Highly recommended for any top fancier, even if you can't read Japanese.
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That looks like a great book Jeremy! I have had some limited success translating my old Japanese comic books using a translator app like the one by Google. Have you tried using that?
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That looks like a great book Jeremy! I have had some limited success translating my old Japanese comic books using a translator app like the one by Google. Have you tried using that?
Of course, why didn't I think of that?? Forgot all about our trip to Spain last summer. Son taught me to use Google Translate's camera mode to view menus and signs as if they'd been in English all along. Pure magic! Used it all day every day. And it never occurred to me to try it on this book. Sheesh!
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I'm very happy to have got this wonderful Edo Koma made by one of the Hiroi brothers. The Furuido (= Old Well) Ghost appears on page 47 of their book and it's signed at the bottom by Michiaki.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW2IniWd8xk
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I'm very happy to have got this wonderful Edo Koma made by one of the Hiroi brothers. It appears on page 47 of their book and it's signed at the bottom by Michiaki.
Show off! Well, that and lucky dog.
Japanese tops really speak to me -- both mechanically and emotionally. I never tire of looking through this book.
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This is another Edo Koma signed by Michiaki. It appears on page 41 of the Hiroi brothers' book:
(https://i.ibb.co/VLCrjQk/image.png)
I like the skin texture on the back of the Japanese board (Ino) made by scrapping the wood.
I confess that when I first got it I was a little disappointed. The top spun very smoothly at the top of the stick: I was expecting it to wobble and transmit some motion to the boar. It just made a little noise from the ball attached to the stick. But the bottom of the boar is obviously made slanted towards the center line what to me indicated that it was meant to rock side to side. A similar edo koma with a snail instead of a boar was claimed on its auction that it moved forward (I didn't win that one). I wondered it the stick had been replaced: it looked new and very straight.
That's how I left it on the bookshelf. But a couple of weeks later I found that a book had fell on it and bent the stick. Hallelujah! Now the board does rock and makes some rattling noises! :) Not a huge amount but enough to give it the appearance of being alive. The amount of rocking depends on the speed of the spin and goes up and down as the spin decreases. I guess there is some resonance effect.
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The gods smiled on you with that book. Love how the dynamics hinge on a seemingly insignificant detail.
Would love to know the back story here. The hedgehog clearly takes a dim view of having a top spinning on its back. As would any animal not belonging to this forum. Do hedgehogs hold a special place in Japanese culture?
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It's actually a boar (Inoshishi) not a hedgehog, according to the caption on the book. The Japanese boar or white-moustached pig, is a wild boar native from Japan. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_boar):
It is a small, almost maneless, yellowish-brown subspecies with distinctive white whiskers extending from the corners of the mouth to the cheeks.
It features prominently in Japanese culture, where it is widely seen as a fearsome and reckless animal, to the point that several words and expressions in Japanese referring to recklessness include references to boars. The boar is the last animal of the oriental zodiac, with people born during the year of the Pig being said to embody the boar-like traits of determination and impetuosity . . . Boars are also seen as symbols of fertility and prosperity . . .
This edo koma was actually listed under Kokeshi dolls, not tops. There is currently another similar edo koma of the same vein from the Hiroi brothers for auction (https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/j471825376), a "squirting whale":
(https://i.ibb.co/B45Fxq1/image.png)
The bottom looks flat on the photos, so I don't know if the whale moves.
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Thanks! I have great respect for Japanese culture -- a fascinating lens onto the world.
But they're just projecting on boars here. If anybody deserves to be the poster-species for recklessness, it's us. And we're supposed to be the "smart ones"!
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This photo is from the book:
(https://i.ibb.co/sHZdTFf/image.png)
Together with the boar I got the one on the left. I thought it was about a mouse, but I just translated the caption and it's a sparrow (Sparrow's Inn) ;D
I confess I was hopping the mouse/sparrow would come out while spinning. If you look carefully on the larger top (Pumpkin Eating Mouse), at least one mouse has a string attached and should come in and out. But no, the sparrow is fixed (I think carved directly into the wood), so that was little disappointing. But the finish is very good, including the bamboo shaped launcher. It spins like butter, what makes me think that the sparrow's hole is part of the balancing process. It's signed by Michiaki Hiroi.
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That Sparrow's Inn top is pretty darned cute. Would love to see it in action.
Based on the larger than average apparent (max axial length) / (max radius) and (CM height) / (max radius) ratios, thinking it might have some Tourenado-like behavioral tendencies -- but only with the right ball tip.
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. . . thinking it might have some Tourenado-like behavioral tendencies -- but only with the right ball tip.
Nope, the tip is kind of pointy:
(https://i.ibb.co/b7FsdmV/image.png)
In fact, once the leaning angle is such that the red ball touches the ground, it changes personality into a rattling bouncing top!
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Yeah, I can see that happening with a bottom like that.
I've experimented with lots of tops with an effective tip radius of curvature that grows rapidly with tilt -- sometimes even in jumps.
You can get some pretty chaotic behaviors that way. But some high-speed, high-CM tops like the ones below maintain wobble-free precession all the way down. Both of these "sidewinders" finish by spinning sideways (at 90° tilt) on the edges of their white and blue disks at high speed without wobble. The disks are at their CMs by design.
(https://i.ibb.co/C5FSkJ2/20180430-170054-crop.jpg) (https://ibb.co/MDLJY86)
Either way, fun to watch the dynamic unfold.
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This book, "Koma collection from around the world by Yasuaki Mori" has 2560 photos of komas and spinning tops. Although it's very good as a reference, specially for Edo tops from the Hiroi family and their disciples, the photos are too small to really appreciate them.
(https://i.ibb.co/1dJQdDF/image.png)
Mr. Mori assembled this collection over 49 years, starting in 1969. His story is similar to that of other collectors: he started because his brother had another collection (kokeshi dolls), thinking that there was a finite number of komas, to discover too late that you can never complete the collection.
The book starts with the komas by Michiaki Hiroi. According to the book (and my translator ::) ), the Hiroi family (father Kenjiro Hiroi and the two brothers) moved to Sendai city after WWII and continued the family tradition of making komas and wooden toys. At one point the Sendai Kiji Toys Association was formed by people in the vicinity of Sendai who wanted to preserve the tradition by introducing toys in each region, distributing them, exchanging information, and publishing journals. The work of Michiaki Hiroi, who was the leading craftsman in Edo toys, was a main subject. In June 1975 he started a collection of 100 selected komas, the first of which was the "Married Tops." It took 18 years until the 100th top was produced in July 1993, the last one been "Three Generations of Turtles". I'm guessing that every member of the association got each top as they were produced. There was a 200 limited edition book about these 100 komas by Yasushi Shinoda. The association was disbanded at that time but a new association was formed in 1994: Edo Top Association. Michiaki made 2 more series of 50 komas each: "selection of the best 50 Edo styles" (1994 to 2000) and "selection of 50 Edo techniques" (2000 to 2012). The book has pictures of all 200 komas on these collections with the date in which the were produced.
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These are the first ten of the 100 collection by Michiaki Hiroi:
(https://i.ibb.co/kmCn77g/image.png)
I had the opportunity to get the very first one on a Yahoo Japan auction, the Married Couple koma (夫婦独楽), but I let it pass because I thought they were too simple. Now I regret it. Several more komas from that collection have appeared on those auctions and I have about 6 or 7 of them (and I lost bids on half a dozen more).
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In addition to the 200 komas from those three series, there are another 148 komas from Michiaki Hiroi (広井 道顕).
The 5th section includes komas by 9 of his disciples:
1- Tamio Niiyama (新山民夫)
2- Takashi Kamada (鎌田 孝志)
3- Hideo Watanabe (渡辺英夫)
4- Hoshi Hiroaki (星博秋)
5- Koji Narumura (鳴村幸二)
6- Mi Niiyama (新山美)
7- Yuichi Komuro (小室由一)
8- Hoshisadayoshi (星定良)
9 Masashi Hirabayashi (平林 正志)
The 6th section has 110 komas from Michiaki's brother Masaaki Hiroi (広井 政昭)
The 7th section has tops by Tamotsu Fukushima (福島 保)
The 8th section by Kumiko Enomoto (榎本久美子), Rika Sakuma (坂間理香), and unknown makers.
That covers the first third of the book. I have included the kanji characters for reference in the future.
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It took 18 years until the 100th top was produced in July 1993, the last one been "Three Generations of Turtles".
I just realized that the turtles koma is the one on the top right corner of the Edo Top book cover, which is in fact from 1993.
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Another book with a Japanese koma collection:
(https://i.ibb.co/xF2VYSm/image.png)
This is the collection of 577 komas from Mitsui (Hiraku?) Nakamura that he donated to Toyohachi City Central Library. The book is from 2006. The photos much larger than in Mori's book.
It has 11 chapters, the first 10 dedicated to different komas according to one classification scheme:
00 - Flat plate, "circus", Komas. These are typically komas that spin at the end of a stick. But to me some should be in other chapters.
(https://i.ibb.co/VMQtrmC/image.png) (https://ibb.co/VMQtrmC)
01 - Twist tops (finger and palm tops)
(https://i.ibb.co/n7gfFNN/image.png) (https://ibb.co/n7gfFNN)
02 - Whistling and humming tops
(https://i.ibb.co/ys9L41S/image.png) (https://ibb.co/ys9L41S)
03 - Whip tops (including some Sasebo, Testsu and even a beigoma!)
(https://i.ibb.co/KKbDBzW/image.png) (https://ibb.co/KKbDBzW)
04 - Throwing tops
(https://i.ibb.co/LDy6hHb/image.png) (https://ibb.co/LDy6hHb)
05 - String-pull started (including self-winding)
(https://i.ibb.co/Hn7NcwQ/image.png) (https://ibb.co/Hn7NcwQ)
06 - Fortune telling
(https://i.ibb.co/0ymjvc9/image.png) (https://ibb.co/0ymjvc9)
07 - Unusual (outside classification?)
(https://i.ibb.co/bNv96by/image.png) (https://ibb.co/bNv96by)
08- Miniature
(https://i.ibb.co/qCfgzbK/image.png) (https://ibb.co/qCfgzbK)
09 - Foreign
The last chapter talks a little about the history of tops and the collection, but the main section is the description of several classification schemes of tops by different people. This is paradoxical to me as I think the tops in the book are not well classified. ::)
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As we've discovered many times over, classifying tops is like herding cats. So a critical look at past schemes is certainly warranted. Too bad the author's own attempt fell flat.
I could really use a fortune-telling top. After all the remodeling cost overruns, Kathy and I agreed on Christmas cards only this year. Need to know soon if she's going to get me a present anyway.
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This is a wonderful book: "Koma Play, the secret of rotation", by Yoshiko Yagita and Yutaka Yamaguchi, 1979:
(https://i.ibb.co/4gTfYJR/image.png) (https://ibb.co/rf6tcv2)
It might have been inspired by Gould's book, but with a Japanese angle, and it has more specifics about playing, turning and science. Yamaguchi graduated from the Department of Physics, Tokyo University of Science.
Has some nice color plates:
(https://i.ibb.co/wWRnFdQ/image.png) (https://ibb.co/9TNxkp4)
(https://i.ibb.co/R7vBNt1/image.png) (https://ibb.co/fQ1n9Zb)
It seems to have good coverage of the history of komas:
(https://i.ibb.co/LpqjCXN/image.png]) (https://ibb.co/f0K6CzD)
It even explains the brush balancing method:
(https://i.ibb.co/ysXqdCz/image.png) (https://ibb.co/12LT7NC)
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This is a wonderful book: "Koma Play, the secret of rotation", by Yoshiko Yagita and Yutaka Yamaguchi, 1979:
Excellent! Where'd you get your copy?
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Excellent! Where'd you get your copy?
It was a gift from Taka.
(https://i.ibb.co/tBMzQzc/image.png) (https://ibb.co/qBMC7C9)
(https://i.ibb.co/MsGFZ97/image.png) (https://ibb.co/80d1NX9)
(https://i.ibb.co/RQVLDSw/image.png) (https://ibb.co/frPmxSw)
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how can one get a copy ?
I d be much interested in buying one.🤗🥳
good day
jim