Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/197

 subjected to processes which must have effectually obscured their provenance. For example, one kind, having been macerated some ten times with juice extracted from the bark of the peach-tree, was then dyed with a solution of gall-nut and sulphate of iron, after which it was polished with a pumice-stone, treated with plum-juice, and finally softened by hand-rubbing. Reference to these materials is made here, not for the purpose of discussing their origin or characteristics, but solely because they illustrate the care and taste bestowed on the sage-mono. It must not be supposed, however, that all these curious and pretty materials were imported or manufactured for the sake of the kinchaku alone. The kinchaku is given a prominent place among the sage-mono because it seems to have been the oldest of such objects. In importance it was quite secondary to the tobacco-pouch and pipe-case. Tobacco-pouches and pipe-cases, however, are comparatively modern affairs. Whether the Japanese learned to smoke tobacco when Hideyoshi's troops invaded Korea, or whether they received it from their first Occidental visitors, the Portuguese, they certainly knew nothing of the virtues and vices of the leaf until the closing years of the sixteenth century, nor was it till the middle of the seventeenth that the pouch and the pipe began to assume the dainty and highly ornate forms now so familiar. Tobacco did not originally commend itself to polite society in Japan. Sir Ernest Satow, quoting from the family records of a certain Dr. Saka, describes that, in the year 1609, the dissipation of tobacco-smoking led to the formation of two associations in Edo (Tōkyō), the Bramble Club and the Leather-breeches Club. Their members were roistering blades