Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/389

 Two other very attractive kinds of lacquer, though they do not belong to the artistic class, are called Tsugaru-nuri and Wakasa-nuri, names derived from the districts (Tsugaru and Wakasa) where they are produced. These lacquers are not of the makiye kind. The decorative design, in which several colours appear, presents an appearance of marbling or leaf-pattern, sometimes, however, being in regular stripes, and sometimes in an apparently fortuitous mélange of clouding and spotting. It has been supposed that the Tsugaru and Wakasa patterns are manufactured by pressing leaves or twigs of plants into the soft surface of the lacquer and removing them when the latter is dry, various processes of coating and polishing being subsequently applied to the ground thus obtained. But though that method is adopted in some instances, the general plan is to spread upon a naka-nuri base a pattern of putty, over which coats of coloured lacquer are laid—black, yellow, red, and green in the case of Tsugaru-nuri, with addition of golden yellow, orange and brown for Wakasa-nuri,—the whole being then covered with translucid lac, and finally polished in the usual way. Like the "transmutation glazes" of Chinese porcelain, the disposition of the colours on these curious lacquers is in a measure accidental, for the salience of any part of the design determines the amount of friction to which it must be subjected before reduction to a plane surface, and consequently determines also the colour that emerges from the superincumbent layers. Cognate with these lacquers is the so-called "tortoise-shell," known in Japan as "rubbed off lacquer" (suri-hagashi-nuri), which need not be described further than to say that the upper coat of black or amber-brown lacquer