Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/200

 name was Jō-o. Among his associates and immediate successors were three men, Sōhku, Shōi, and Kōhei, whose reputation as potters is still preserved by devotees of the Tea Ceremonials. Like all the Kyōtō keramists of those days, they made the manufacture of tea utensils not a profession but a pastime, and, from the specimens of their work now extant, they may be said to have followed the methods of the Seto potters at a considerable distance. The pâte of the tiny pieces ascribed to them is light brown, verging upon buff, fine and tolerably hard. The glaze is opaque and of a dark mahogany colour. It has little lustre, and its method of application argues but scanty skill. In the same century and the beginning of the next, seven names are recorded: Genjûro, Shimbei, Kōsan, Moemon, Kichibei, Dōmi, and Manemon. These amateurs were contemporaries and successors of Sen no Rikiu; they probably flourished between 1560 and 1630. In this book, Kanko Zusetsu, Mr. Ninagawa Noritane discusses at some length the probable professions of the six, and, for the purpose of comparing their merits, quotes passages from unfamiliar annals. It would be fruitless to follow the learned antiquarian into such dissertations. What has been said above of Sōhaku and his contemporaries applies equally to Genjûro, Manemon, and the rest. They are interesting for the sake of the time in which they lived, not at all for any addition they made to its keramic resources. A tea-jar manufactured by Moemon and depicted in the Kanko Zusetsu shows that he, at least, studied ruggedness and rusticity rather than beauty or technical excellence.

The reader will remember that during the second half of the sixteenth century the Raku faience, inau-