Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/202

 Nara, and that they include only one sculptor of the busshi class. With exceptions so rare as to prove the rule, the netsuke-shi had their workshops in one of "the three cities"—Yedo, Kyōtō, and Ōsaka—and confined themselves mainly to ornamenting the appendages of sage-mono. Reference may be made here to another strange theory which has been advanced by more than one European writer, that many netsuke-makers were dentists whose skill in the use of the chisel was acquired by carving false teeth. In the long list of early netsuke-shi there are only two who were in any way connected with the dentist's profession.

It may appear that disproportionate attention is here devoted to the question of the origin of the netsuke and the ōjime, but the fact is that no objects of art found in Japan are more essentially Japanese, whether their range of fanciful motives be considered, or the extraordinary dexterity of their carvers, or their originality. India, borrowing the art from Persia, developed much skill in carving, piercing, and inlaying long before the Japanese netsuke came into existence, and the Chinese, from an early epoch, sculptured tusks and slabs of ivory in the most elaborate manner, carrying their craft to the extent of cutting puzzle-balls, one inside the other, out of a single piece of ivory. But the Japanese netsuke and ōjime belong to an entirely different category from the productions of India, China, or Persia. No one thinks of making a collection of the latter: half-a-dozen specimens suffice to illustrate the art of each country; a greater number would be wearisome. In the case of the netsuke, however, it is scarcely possible to possess too many. Inevitably the same subject is often repeated