We went to see the exhibition of Mingei at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow – a nice, small-scale, thoughtful exhibition on a topic which I felt I should have known about, but didn’t (and highly relevant to William Morris): the interest on the part of a relatively small number of Japanese intellectuals, including Bernard Leach who seems to have been co-opted as an honorary Japanese craftsperson in spite of not being able to speak the language, in the crafts of rural Japan: textiles and pottery from areas of the country which had recently been annexed. There was an image of Bernard Leach wearing what looked like plus-fours. I wasn’t able to photograph it, but have now found it online:-

This is what he looked like at the time while in Japan:-