Seashell Patterns: Shell Motifs from a Japanese Design Book

Japanese Seashell Patterns

Conchology—the study of shells—began as an Enlightenment-era craze in Europe, with shells collected as exotic treasures from distant shores. Quickly, it became both a scientific pursuit and a cultural obsession. In early twentieth-century Japan, this fascination found a brilliant advocate in Yochiro Hirase (1859–1925), a collector, dealer, and self-taught malacologist whose work bridged science, art, and design. His unique work Shell Motifs (Kaigara dammen zuan) 貝殻断面, published at the beginning of the century, showcased seashell patterns printed from the cross-sections of the shells he discovered.

Kaigara dammen zuan: Seashell Patterns

Hirase was one of the first wave of amateur scientists to emerge during Japan’s Meiji Era (1868–1912). Over his lifetime, he amassed nearly 4,000 specimens—1,000 of which were entirely new to science. His contributions were not limited to collecting; in 1907, he launched the Conchological Magazine and later established a seashell museum in Kyoto. He also supplied overseas scholars with specimens, helping to introduce Japan’s rich molluscan biodiversity to the broader scientific community.

Like many of his contemporaries, Hirase catalogued his findings in lavishly illustrated volumes. A skilled painter and calligrapher, he rendered each shell in vivid detail. Around 1913, Kyoto’s leading art publisher Unsodo released Kaigara dammen zuan (Shell Motifs). It opened with two colour plates of shells in Hirase’s meticulous style, but what followed was something entirely new: bold black-and-white designs derived from cross-sections to make seashell patterns.

Seashell Art and Pattern Design

Hirase explained in the preface that he was “not a designer or artist,” but that, while cutting seashells at different angles for study, he was struck by the strange and compelling patterns inside. Using seal ink, he pressed the sections onto paper, calling them “inside wonders.” With illustrator Jun Nishikawa, he transformed these organic seashell patterns into repeating motifs. The result was a design book rather than a strictly scientific catalogue, bound in the traditional Japanese accordion style and printed using woodblock techniques. The swirling patterns and graphic lines recall both ukiyo-e woodcuts and the emerging aesthetics of Art Deco in the 1920s, situating Hirase’s work at a unique intersection of tradition and modernity.

Japanese Woodblock Printing

The following year, Hirase returned to more conventional natural history publishing with Kai senshu (One Thousand Kinds of Shells). This ambitious project, planned as ten volumes but realised as four (1914–1922), featured 100 shells per book, rendered across 20 full-colour plates. Interestingly, Hirase again turned to the woodblock printing tradition rather than the newer lithographic methods commonly used in scientific illustration. As he explained in the second volume’s preface, he wanted to employ the “peculiar art of [his] country” to create a work “not wholly for the benefit of scientific studies but rather for reference for artists and technologies.”

Hirase’s publications stand at the intersection of science and art, merging rigorous natural history with a distinctly Japanese aesthetic sensibility. His legacy endures not only in the shells he discovered but in the way he revealed their hidden beauty as objects of both scientific knowledge and aesthetic design in a brilliant example of where art meets science.