Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/277

 contemporaries, and every connoisseur knows that on the mitsu-dokoro are to be found the most delicate workmanship and the most elaborate decorative effects in the whole range of Japanese metal work. The guard has special attractions which cannot be imparted to such comparatively petty objects as the kogai or the kozuka, but it is not to the guard alone or chiefly that the student must look for the history of this branch of Japanese art.

Gotō Yūjō's skill was expended almost solely on the menuki and the kōgai. So far as concerns the menuki, he cannot be credited with much originality. During certainly two, and probably seven, centuries before his time, the menuki had received attention at the hands of glyptic experts, and had been variously decorated according to the fancy of the swordsman or the genius of the artist. Yūjō merely brought to the chiselling of these little objects a new quality of skill, and to the designing of their forms, in his later years, a new wealth of fancy derived from the co-operation of the renowned pictorial artist Kano Masanobu. Besides, although the beauty of the menuki was incalculably increased by Yūjō, he made no radical change in the method of chiselling it. In his hands it remained what it had been in the hands of his predecessors, either repoussé work with fine surface chiselling, or, in rare cases, a solid carving. It has been argued that since the kozuka and the had a place in the scabbard of the waki-zashi for at least two centuries before Goto's time, and since such unrivalled armourers as the Miyōchin no Judai (the Ten Miyōchin generations) as well as two of the Six Giyoshi, were his predecessors, the ornamentation of these portions of the sword-furniture