Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/215

 detailed account of the nature and appearance of these materials. What is interesting is to note, first, the lesson taught by their great variety,—the immense care bestowed by the Japanese upon an article comparatively so unimportant as the tobacco-pouch, —and secondly, that they were the means of introducing some distinctly foreign elements into Japanese decorative art. For the great majority of these materials were imported, from India, from Holland, from Persia, from China, from Siam and other countries, and the designs impressed, woven, or embroidered upon them not only were emphatically alien, but also in many instances represented bizarre conceptions, crudely worked out, and falling far below the standards of decorative excellence to which the Japanese had themselves attained. But there has always been in Japan an affection for the quaint and the archaic. It owes its origin to the cult of the tea-clubs, and its effect upon the art of the country was in some respects vitiating. Thus in the case of these imported leathers and stuffs, when the materials themselves were not actually employed, their designs were occasionally taken by the glyptic artist as the most appropriate motive for decorating the surface of the pouch or the pipe-case, and the result is that these objects, when made of wood, ivory, horn, or bamboo, sometimes present a style of decoration without any Japanese affinities and with very little to recommend it from an artistic point of view. On the whole, however, the use of hard substances—bamboo, ebony, shitan, betel-nut, palm, ivory, or horn—for the manufacture of pouches was exceptional. In the case of ivory, a favourite though seldom practised method was to cut