Hans Spörry (1859-1925) worked as a silk inspector in Yokohama from 1890 till 1896 and sent detailed notes about the Japanese textile industry, including costs of production, glossaries, illustrations, newspaper clippings, and textile patterns back to the Seidebwebschule Zurich, an educational establishment with focus in textile production. His textile-related archives are part of the collection at the Textilemuseum in St. Gallen. A part of this collection was shown in 2014 at the exhibition “Kirschblüte und Edelweiss. Der Import des Exotischen.”
However, the collecting activities of Hans Spörry were not limited to textiles. On the request of Carl Schröter, the professor of botanical studies at the ETH, Spörry collected a number of objects of daily use, focusing primarily on artifacts made from bamboo. This extensive collection resulted in a later publication on “The use of bamboo in Japan and the catalogue of the Spörry’s bamboo collection” (“Die Verwendung des Bambus in Japan und Katalog der Spörry’schen Bambus-Sammlung”, Zurich 1903). This collection is located nowadays in the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich and was exhibited locally four times.
Spörry’s fine netsuke collection is at the Bern Historical Museum and became the subject of the Lizenziat paper for one of the students of the department, Simone Jenni. The results of her survey were presented at the international conference in Zurich in 2013.
The department of KGOA is actively engaged in surveying and researching these and other collections of Japanese objects and archives assembled by Hans Spörry and deposited in various Swiss museums.