History
In 1639, the Matsudaira clan became rulers of the Kanō Domain and brought with them umbrella artisans from their former home in the Akashi Domain (modern-day Hyōgo Prefecture). By 1756, the umbrellas became more fully developed and the modern shapes and designs first appeared.
During the end of the Edo period, approximately 520,000 umbrellas were shipped north to Edo each year. By the beginning of the Meiji period, production increased to 12 million umbrellas each year and international sales first began on a widescale. Production continued to increase until its peak during the Shōwa period, which 15 million umbrellas being produced each year, but modern production has dropped to just tens of thousands of umbrellas.
Read more about this topic: Gifu Umbrellas
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Three million of such stones would be needed before the work was done. Three million stones of an average weight of 5,000 pounds, every stone cut precisely to fit into its destined place in the great pyramid. From the quarries they pulled the stones across the desert to the banks of the Nile. Never in the history of the world had so great a task been performed. Their faith gave them strength, and their joy gave them song.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)