by Natalie Bennett

There’s a question feminists have been asking for a long time: do professions lose status because women join them, or are women allowed into professions only when they are losing status? (Doctors in Russia – who through the 20th century had relatively low status compared to their compatriots in Western Europe – are the classic example.)

As I passed around the Crafting Beauty exhibition, presented by the British Museum in association with the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, that old question was at the front of my mind. In the West, by and large, women’s “craft” has had poor status, low expectations as opposed to men’s “art”. It has been left, by and large, to “the ladies”. It’s not that way in Japan, and it seems that, at least in most of the celebrated national crafts, the women have never, and still are not, getting a look-in, not being given that peculiarly Japanese status of “Living National Treaure”.

I’m through the pottery section and well into metalwork before I find the first woman, Osumi Yukie (born 1945) with ‘Sea Breeze’, a vase in hammered silver decoated with inlay. Ripples on the surface of the vase are laid on ripples of darker inlay, which overlay the rhythmic base pattern of hammering. You are looking into the depths of the universe.

Finally, in textiles, there are more women – which you might, perhaps Eurocentrically, expected. The spectacular kiminos, made by patient wood-block printing or sometimes through fancy weaving techniques were traditionally designed and made by men but now women artists are increasingly influential says the exhibition; a claim that the presentation of the work of four women and nine men almost supports.

With lacquer however we are back to an all-male cast, although this part of the exhibition generates the positive though that if you can do all these things with lacquer and bamboo — pretty environmentally friendly materials — you really don’t need plastics. A rich red orange “Tray with Handle” by Masumura Kiichora has the shape but a glorious depth of volour and an organic shape no petrochemical could quite match.

If I can suppress my feminist revolt, then I’d have to, however, confess this is a spectacular exhibition that does have some very interesting things to say about the contrast between Western and Japanese ideas of art and craft.

One of these is the importance of continuity. The exhibition tries to draw a line from ceramic vessels from 13,500BC and lacquered ware from 7,000 BC to the current day. That might be a bit of a stretch, but you can’t argue with the fact that a very Seventies, and you would think at first glance surely machine-made, 20th-century technological brown vase was in fact made by Nakagawa Mamoru from copper and “hazy moon silver” (a copper silver alloy) inlay, a development form the fact that during Edo period his native city famous for such fine metal inlay typically used for samurai warrioir stirrups.

Sakaisa Kakemon XIV comes from family that has been making kakiemon-style pots – an opaque qhite glaze with delicate decoration (not quite to my taste, but I’ll confess a bias against flowers). But I am impressed that pots using much the same technique were first exported in 16th from the city of Arita, where these are still made today.

But that reverence for tradition has not, somehow, stifled innovation. Shimizu Uichi developed what is termed ‘cracked ice celadon’ (it looks spectacularly just like the description), from the long-term Asian traditional glaze. It is represented here with a spectacular large aqua-coloured bowl that managed a spectacular blend of the obviously human-made spectacular form with an astonishly organic detail.

Now if only we could get more female hands, more female talents, given free rein – what more could be added?

The exhibition continues until October 21. Tickets: £5/£4.