Detail, figurine of a lady in court dress, 7 1/4" tall, handpainted china, stamped on the base Made in Occupied Japan.
Private collection

Reading Men, Women and Things, Memories of the Duke of Portland (London: Faber & Faber, 1937) has inspired me, as you know, not least in the direction of contemplating the organization of my own thoughts on men, women, and things, although not necessarily in that order.  In fact, this morning I decided I would commence preparations for the cataloguing of my extensive collection of Made-In-Occupied-Japan figurines -- what a young friend who sometimes visits calls my "China Action Figures," charmingly unaware in his youthful innocence that not everything in this world spawns its own tie-in merchandise.  

So I set up a little photo studio and prepared to work.  I did not get very far, however, before I began to notice, with the critical and close examination required for the task, a disheartening number of flaws and old repairs and missing bits that, while making my little people no less precious to me, might nonetheless diminish their value in the eyes of my heirs who from a practical perspective would be more interested in the commercial and resale value of the collection, once they'd gotten me out of the way.

I was reminded at this stage of a visit I made to a certain grand Park Avenue residence, the contents of which were being catalogued in situ, for a prospective sale of the residence and contents ("lock, stock and barrel" so to speak) to a certain lady, now deceased, of Philipine extraction and with an exceptional penchant for shoes.  The sale did not go forward, but that's another story.  What I recall from that time was the delicate rapid-fire pecking sound of a portable Olivetti typewriter emanating from one of the drawing rooms where, in a tweed skirt and St. John knit twin set, a very efficient woman of a certain age sat at a card table, cataloguing what to me seemed an impressive collection of Meissen figurines displayed around the vast and tastefully decorated room in various breakfronts and vitrines.  The expert -- more experienced than I in these matters and therefore considerably less enthusiastic -- paused in her typing, lifted a shepherdess with crook and attached lamb and drew the figure near her with a slightly pained expression on her face.  Then she sighed and tuttled reproachfully.

"Chipped," she sniffed, as though she'd suspected as much all along.

Still, and although hardly comparable to the holdings of the Dukes of Portland at Welbeck Abbey [where the 6th Duke entertained King Carlos of Portugal in 1904 and let him win at billiards even though he was not as good a player as either the Duke or Sir Evan Charteris was],  I find my little china people valuable and provocative in their own right.  Designed to imitate the fine and precious porcelain of the eighteenth century French and German factories which in turn had been set up to compete with the product created in the mysterious East, these mass-produced collectibles allowed the ordinary middle class post-war American consumer the satisfaction of owning something reminiscent of the famous collections formed by the robber barons of the turn of the century. 

The humble parlor of a farmer's wife in Ohio, say, could be cheered up with a shelf of these hand-painted Five and Dime figurines (the shelf made by her boy in high school woodshop, or by her husband out in the barn while he sneaked a couple beers), lending a little European Grand Tour elegance to her otherwise hard and sometimes bleak Midwestern Protestant existence.  She might not be Mrs. Astor, Vanderbilt or Rockefeller, but she could still be proud knowing whenever she dusted those little fancy folks that somewhere far away there were Orientals working to make them -- as restitution, you might say, at least in part, for what they had put our brave boys and men through during the War.

Of course the boys and men coming back from that War didn't talk about what they'd seen or done, at least not with the womenfolk, (maybe not even with each other, down at the VFW over shots and beer chasers) and so it was not clear whether in addition to the hardship and privations and suffering and shooting and bombing and dying there might have been any fun to be had overseas during that War, but this part or pretty much any other part of that War was not discussed.  You did not talk about the War except to refer to it as though it had ended last week, even years and years later.

In any case, at least you could rest assured that those little china people were being made in a country we now occupied so they would not get away with anything like that ever again -- and here in her ruminating on the matter  the farmer's wife might imagine a dimly lit room full of small Oriental pagan children, (those not yet converted by Christian missionaries), painting with tiny brushes the tiny little white caucasian faces and fancy European outfits, under the watchful eye of the tall blond blue-eyed Occupation Soldiers, and that would make her feel good and safe, because the men were doing what they should be doing, and the women were doing what they needed to be doing -- just like she was doing day in and day out, whether she felt like it or not --  and things were right where they needed to be, things were right where they belonged.