Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/364

 finding his official income insufficient for the wants of his family, sought to supplement it by pursuing a handicraft, and at twenty years of age—he was born in 1802—he took up the occupation of a metal-plater. According to his own account of his career, he chanced, in 1830, to read in a book of the sixteenth century that the materials for shippō decoration were coral, lapis lazuli, mother-of-pearl, agate, amber, tortoise-shell, and rock-crystal. There was here no question of vitrified pastes, but actually of the "seven precious things." The idea suggested to Kaji Tsunekichi seems to have been that these substances were actually used for making vitrifiable pastes, but his misconception was corrected two years later by examination of a specimen of Chinese cloisonné enamel which he obtained from a merchant, Matsuoka Kahei, of Nagoya. He now applied himself with patient assiduity to work of this kind, and succeeded, in 1839, in making a plate, six inches in diameter, which he sold to Matsuoka for five riyo. This achievement inspired still greater efforts. Various articles were turned out, chiefly pen-rests, desk-screens, cups, and such small specimens, and in 1839 he had the honour of seeing his productions presented to the Tokugawa Court in Yedo by the feudal chief of Owari as examples of the technical achievements of the fief. Orders now came to Kaji and he enjoyed a time of comparative prosperity. In 1853 he began to take pupils, and made known the manufacturing processes to several persons. Thus, during twenty years previous to the re-opening of the country to foreign trade in 1857, cloisonné enamelling had been applied in the manner now understood by the term, and when for-