Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/293

 showed a fertile fancy in choosing and inventing de- signs. Naturally their work was not uniformly good. The great majority of the inferior samurai and all the common foot-soldiers (ashigaru) had to be content with weapons on which little decorative labour had been expended. But with the nobles and the officers of rank the case was different. At their order the great armourers, and subsequently the chisellers of sword-mounts, worked with ever-increasing rivalry to produce fine guards which, while presenting an appearance of lightness and delicacy, nevertheless possessed all the elements of strength and durability necessary in a soldier's weapons. Many of these guards are interesting and valuable for the sake of the decorative ability and extraordinary technical skill that they display; but they belong, of course, to a class of artistic workmanship distinct from that of the surface-chiselled sword-mounts of later times. It may be well here to dismiss, once for all, a theory sometimes advanced by writers in Europe that many of the elaborate guards of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were of cast iron. That cast-iron guards had no existence cannot be affirmed; they may sometimes have been made for weapons of the most inferior description. But the Japanese themselves deny that cast iron was ever regarded as a suitable material for a sword-guard, its liability to fracture being a fatal objection. The connoisseur—and every samurai was something of a connoisseur in matters concerning his sword—attached more importance to the tempering of the metal than to the fashion of the ornamental chiselling, and in every record of great armourers skill in forging iron heads the list of their achievements. There is a story told of a celebrated