Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/186

 is used merely as an ornament. The artists were employed in modelling figures of Kwan-on and Dharma in white clay, with the conventional face and robes given to Buddhist personages, and toes all of the same length. A third was engaged upon a tiger, sitting up in a cat-like posture, intended to be two and a-half Japanese feet in height when finished. Most of their figures are modelled from drawings in Indian ink, but the coloured designs are laid on from memory. Until fourteen years ago a ware called Bekko-yaki was made at this village, the colours of which were intended to imitate tortoise-shell. It was a common ware, and used to be exported to Nagasaki in large quantities. A piece of this, said to be old, which was exhibited to me, had green blotches, as well as the two usual colours, yellow and brown.

At the Tamanoyama Company's establishment all sorts of ware are produced, common brown pottery, inferior blue-and-white, and highly gaudy crackle. Here I found a workman engaged in modelling a statuette of Christ after a sentimental woodcut in a religious periodical called the "Christian Observer;" he had copied the face and beard with considerable accuracy, but had draped the body and limbs in the robes of a Buddhist priest. Some stoves of brown earthenware, imitated from American iron stoves, were already ready for the kiln; their price was to be seven dollars delivered in Yedo. I saw also some huge white vases of monstrous shape, composed of hexagons, circles, squares, piled up as it were pell-mell, the result of an attempt at originality, unhampered by traditional notions of form.

The account given of themselves by the Kōrai jin (as they are called) is that all the inhabitants of the village, peasants as well as potters, are descended from Koreans brought over during the period Keihō (1596–1615) by a Satsuma samurai named Ijuin. Until about three years ago they wore their hair tied up in a knot at the top of the head, but most of them now wear the Japanese queue, or cut their hair in the style which has been introduced from abroad. They informed me that in former days they dressed themselves in their own costume on special occasions, as for