Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/307

 multitude of notions adopted by the carvers of this school. One of the principal centres of manufacture was the province of Chōshiu, the Yamaguchi Prefecture of the present day. As early as the close of the fourteenth century, an expert called Mitsune (art name, Jokan Inshi) began to work at Suwo in that province, and founded the Nakai family. This artist and his immediate successors made no special contributions to the art; they followed the old style of decoration applied to a flat surface. But at the beginning of the seventeenth century Nobutsune, a scion of the family, moved from Suwo to Hagi in the same fief, and the work of the Nakai experts thenceforth began to attract wide attention. Nobutsune's grandson, Tomoyuki (1660, the first of that name, i.e. Zensuke, as distinguished from the second, Zembei), and above all his great-grandson, Tomotsune (1680), stand in the front rank of chisellers. They carved iron guards with the most elaborately chiselled designs à jour, involving both faces of the guard, their motives being warriors, mythological figures, birds, animals, flowers, landscapes, fish, insects, in short, every natural object that could be utilised for such a purpose. While Tomoyuki was approaching the zenith of his fame, an expert of the Umetada family, named Meiju, moved from Kyōtō to Hagi, and his grandson Nobumasa (1690) established the Okada family, which contributed several good artists to the Chōshiu school. Another and more important family whose representatives also worked at Hagi, was the Okamoto, of which there were two branches, one founded at the end of the sixteenth century by Tomoharu; the other, a hundred years later, by Tomotsugu. Yet another