Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/196

 There is no information on that subject; but when the elaborate and beautiful character of Japanese costume at so remote a date as the eighth century is remembered, there seems reason to suppose that the quality and ornamentation of the kinchaku were not incongruous with the garments it accompanied. At all events it is known that by the middle of the seventeenth century the choice of material for the manufacture of the kinchaku and of the other objects suspended from a gentleman's girdle—objects known generically as sage-mono, or suspended things—had become a business demanding as much delicacy of judgment and causing as great a mental strain as a Western belle's selection of her first ball-dress. It is mentioned, in a Chinese record of old-time officialdom and its functions, that the duty of collecting various kinds of furs and skins in the autumn, and presenting them to the Imperial Court in the spring, occupied the constant attention of an important bureau. The Japanese Imperial Court was never sufficiently wealthy or sufficiently luxurious to follow that example; but the extraordinary development of refined taste among aristocratic classes under the feudal system is aptly illustrated by the fact that in records dating from the seventeenth century, no less than ninety-three different kinds of leathers and furs are enumerated and carefully described as orthodox materials for sage-mono. Of these, ten were of Japanese manufacture, the others being imported from China, India, Persia, Ceylon, Luson, Russia, Holland, and elsewhere. No attempt has ever been made to identify these leathers, and even if sufficient inducements offered, the task would scarcely be possible, seeing that many of the skins, after reaching Japan, were