Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/201

 latter idea is based on the fact that the second Tokugawa Shōgun, Hidetada (1605–1623), in connection with his crusade against Christianity, ordered every household throughout the realm to furnish itself with a Buddhist idol, and that when the extraordinary demand thus created had been satisfied, the busshi, being without employment, turned their attention to chiselling tobacco-pouch buttons. But Japanese authorities are agreed that the netsuke became fashionable as an appendage of the inro long before the tobacco-pouch began to be suspended from the girdle. Another error which has found currency in the same context, and which has helped to build up the theory connecting the netsuke with the sculptor of Buddhist idols is that many netsuke-shi (makers of netsuke) lived and worked at Nara, the chief home of idol-makers. It is certainly true that Nara may be called the birth-place of Japanese sculpture, and that, from the twelfth century onwards, the name "Nara" came to be associated with religious sculpture, just as in later times pottery was called seto-mono after the place (Seto) of its chief production. It is also true that among the celebrated productions of Nara—the Nara meibutsu, as they are called—there have long been included miniature images known as Nara ningyo (Nara puppets) which might easily be supposed to have suggested the earliest form of the netsuke. But the Nara ningyo were not connected with the netsuke, and as for the assertion that many netsuke-shi lived at Nara and that the carver of Buddhist images turned his chisel to the netsuke in default of other work, it is enough to say that the records, down to the end of the eighteenth century, do not contain the name of more than two netsuke-czrvers who resided at