Antique Shopping in Tokyo with Tatami

Dai Okumura is drinking a whiskey highball in a little studio above a ramen shop in Jimbocho. It’s a very sunny day in Tokyo. He’s just driven into town from his home in Chiba. On a day like today, he jokes, he should be out surfing.

The studio belongs to his friend, who, like Dai, is also a dealer in antiques. It’s his home away from home in the city. A place to come and hang out and drink a few drinks with friends, somewhere to talk about their latest finds, big sales, interesting objects they’ve uncovered on their travels, or just to chat about football, art, exhibitions, and music.

“I like to see the art in all these things that aren’t called art yet.”

Dai has been dealing in antiques for much of his career, “Though honestly, it depends on how you define ‘antique,’” he explains. And the contents of the studio bear some witness to that sensibility. It’s not very zen, in the way some shops of its like in Tokyo, all tasteful wabi-sabi and mingei craft. Tatami, the name Dai has given to the loose collective of dealers and friends he works with, operates in more rebellious, unusual, and alive areas of the antique business.

Behind Dai, for example, sits a hanging scroll depicting Jigoku Tayū, also known as the Courtesan from Hell, the mythological daughter of a samurai who was kidnapped and sold to a brothel, and whose robes depict demons busy at work boiling souls in large vats, and prodding at them with pitchforks.

“I never consciously tried to develop my eye or taste for antiques,” Dai explains. “But I think I’ve always looked at things — whether that's antiques, art, music, surfing, whatever — without really separating them. That hasn’t changed in the past, and probably won’t in the future either.”

“Maybe people sense something rebellious in tatami because antiques are often seen as conservative or rigid.”

Tatami was founded out of a feeling, more than simply as a business. Dai had found himself working with a lot of internationally based clients, and wanted to bring together his friends, who he thought shared the same sensibility as him, and a thought that together they could be more than the sum of their parts. The loose collective has changed members over the years, “Times change, people change,” Dai says, but the core feeling of providing an interesting take on what he calls “contemporary antiques” remains.

“My wife came up with the name,” Dai says, “We wanted something very Japanese and very simple — like “geisha” or “kabuki.” Maybe people sense something rebellious in tatami because antiques are often seen as conservative or rigid. That contrast probably makes it stronger.”

When it comes to finding the dealers who he works with at Tatami there’s no formula, he’s more attracted to people's individuality, someone who loves what they do, and has a “strong sense of intention or will behind what they do,” he says.

“You’d have to ask them what it is that attracts them to Tatami though,” he says, laughing. “Maybe one element is exactly that rebellious, unconventional spirit you mentioned earlier.”

“I never consciously tried to develop my eye or taste for antiques. But I think I’ve always looked at things — whether that's antiques, art, music, surfing, whatever — without really separating them.”

How Dai finds the objects he sells is, he admits, less romantic than you might hope. "Mostly through dealers I know, conversations, and the internet," he says. Though sometimes, on a good day, he might uncover something on the street while walking around, or at the beach after surfing — a chance encounter with an object that stops him in his tracks. The sourcing is almost beside the point in the way he tells it, what matters is something intrinsic or unique in the object itself, when asked for some recommendations for places to pick up some antiques while we’re in town, he ushers us away from the tourist traps and towards little fairs that pop up on the outskirts of the city.

What draws him to something is harder to articulate. Music, surfing, nature, art, antiques, they’re all part of the same cultural ecosystem for Dai, “Cats, too,” he says, laughing, all these “I like to see the art in all these things that aren’t called art yet.”

That approach, that restless refusal to settle on any register of beauty, value, or meaning that might exclude any other is at the centre of the kind of things he collects and sells. The courtesan from hell has to make sense next to an abstract painting next to a lucky maneki inu figurine, a stone and bamboo object d’art or an example of some ancient calligraphy.

Dai is also an artist himself, with a show coming up at Mizusai Gallery in Tokyo, as well as working on a new book, an intimate account of the history of Tatami, and his life in antiques and collecting. It's the kind of project that resists easy categorisation, much like Tatami itself. The personal and the professional, the ancient and the contemporary, the Japanese and the international, all distinctions hold for very long in Dai's world.

Asked what separates his world from the more formal structures of antique or contemporary art dealing, he pauses. "Antique dealing, contemporary art dealing — maybe even ordinary companies — I think they're all fundamentally not that different," he says. "But I just can't really become part of those systems." That is potentially the clearest definition of what Tatami is: a place built by and for people who operate outside the usual categories, who find one another through instinct rather than institution, and who trust the feeling of a thing over any framework built to explain it. “Don't think. Feel,” Dai says, by way of parting.