Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/273

 cases the plate of grained metal was bent to the required shape and veneered to a base of thicker metal. The metal-workers of Nagoya, from the middle of the eighteenth century, produced excellent mokume grounds. Their favourite plan was to weld four or five lamin of different metals—iron, shakudo, copper, shibuichi, silver and sometimes gold—into a sheet. The corners of the latter were then cut off, and the plate, having been reheated, was placed vertically on each of the four sections in succession, and beaten flat by strokes delivered from the opposite section. These Nagoya experts were also successful with a special kind of mokume known as tama-mokume. The different metals, having been reduced to spherical form, are loaded like bullets into an iron cylinder, which is brought to a red heat, placed vertically on the anvil and hammered into a plate. In this kind of mokume the contours of the graining take a circular form.

One other variety of decoration has to be mentioned. It is called guri-bori, and its model is taken from the well-known tsui-shiu (or tsui-koku) lacquer, which shows a formal diaper cut deeply into several coats of superposed lacquer, the channels being narrower below than above, so that the slope of their sides enables the various strata of the lacquer coats to be clearly seen. To produce this effect in metal, alternating plates of two metals, or perhaps three, were welded together, and when they had been shaped into the form of the projected object, the design was deeply chiselled, the channels ultimately presenting horizontally streaked sides. The guri-bori exhibits technical skill only, but it is worth noting that although in nearly all the processes of decorative metal work modern Japanese