Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/125

 afield in search of a subject, selecting flowers, trees, landscapes, or mythical incidents. He also set himself technical tasks like those in which his Chinese confrère revelled. He would enclose a tiny censer in a basket of porcelain, or spread under the surface of a milk-white glaze designs in relief, executed with mechanical and artistic fidelity superior even to the work of the Chinese. He delighted, too, in modelling little figures of his favourite Karako, rampant dragons, mythical Shishi, wrinkled old men, fishes, and so forth. In this sort of work he excelled all other porcelain manufacturers in the Orient. Vitrifiable enamels he did not use, but the drapery of his Karako, and the details of other modelling, were often picked out with three coloured glazes, rich blue, russet-brown, and black. The potters of Mikawachi were also renowned for their egg-shell porcelain, but their reputation in this kind of ware was not acquired till a late period, and in producing it they seem to have confined themselves to the manufacture of cups, rice-bowls, and plates. Strange to say, neither they nor any other Japanese keramists attempted to imitate the lace-pattern (commonly called "grains-of-rice pattern") porcelain of China. To cut designs in the biscuit and fill them with glaze was a feat apparently beyond Japanese skill in former times, though it has been accomplished by the potters of to-day.

It should be noted that the Hizen potters seldom manufactured pieces in biscuit (i. e. unglazed porcelain). Specimens of such ware are exceptional. When of Imari clay, they are generally censers or wine-bottles with designs in high relief—as arabesques, floral scrolls, mythical animals, and so forth. At the Mikawachi factory glaze was nearly always ap-