BEISAI SEAL, EDO PERIOD (19TH CENTURY)

Another comparable shark, from the hand of the same carver, is published in the Questions and Answers column of the INCS Journal, vol 8, no. 4, 1981, figs 6a and 6b. A collector asked for the meaning of the same seal on his shark. The late Raymond Bushell's response explained that the character Bei or Mi meant rice and suggested jokingly that perhaps the inference was that rice dealers are as greedy as sharks. It is overwhelmingly unlikely though that the seal is intended as anything other than a signature; and one which follows the example of the Asakusa stag antler carvers in the third quarter of the 19th century (Kokusai, Rensai, Hakusai, Eisai - the list is a long one) in using a stylised form of the first character only of their art names as their signature. Ogawa Beisai was a 19th century stag antler carver who's work is known from only one thoroughly individual documented piece illustrated in Okada's 1951 Japanese Tourist Board book Netsuke. It is an individual depiction of a stag and doe lying on the large corona of the deer antler, and it is signed carved by Beisai at the old age of 65. Photographs of netsuke and base signature detail are reproduced in Meinertzhagen card Index. Udea's netsuke no Kenkyu records another work (or possibly the same; the signature detail published might not include the entire base of the netsuke) likewise dated to his 65th year and including the information that he used the horns of a deer from Itsukushima-an Island also known as Miyajima, near Hiroshima and off Aki (next to Iwami) province, famous as a deer sanctuary. It records that Beisai used an antler which, he specified, had been naturally shed.

Ueda and Okada both list Beisai as resident on Itsukushima; as they mention other details of his family names one must assume for the moment that he did actually live on the deer sanctuary island, at least some of the time, in later life.