Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/308

 family was the Fujii, founded contemporaneously with the later branch of the Okamoto by Kyokaze. No detailed reference need be here made to the experts that bore the names of these families. Their work was nearly all in the same style, chiselling à jour with surface modelling; but in comparatively modern times some of them abandoned that fashion and became highly skilled in relief carving of the Kyōtō school. The material used by the Chōshiu artists was invariably iron, which they tempered and treated with marked ability, the Satsuma workers alone being counted their peers in that respect. Inlaying and picking out with gold were freely resorted to in the decoration of elaborate specimens.

But it is to the Kinai family of Yechizen that the seventeenth century owes its finest examples of chiselling à jour. Remarkable as were the achievements of this family, its record is somewhat obscure. The best authorities agree, however, that the first Kinai expert worked about the year 1680, and that he was succeeded by five generations of the family. They all used the mark Kinai, prefixing the ideograph Yechizen or Yechizen no Kuni, and their productions are thus far indistinguishable. But the second Kinai (1660) was incomparably the greatest expert of the family. It will scarcely be too much to say that he stands at the head of all Japanese sukashi chisellers. He carved designs à jour in iron with as much delicacy and elaboration as though the material were paper. Of course a sword-guard, which must have a certain degree of solidity and thickness, does not offer the best field for such work. It is in censers—especially clove-boilers—and incense boxes that the