Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/203

 1620, and that it was carried to great perfection by the first Kakiemon and his contemporaries about thirty years later. Naturally, a considerable quantity of the new ware found its way to the capital, where it excited at once the admiration and the envy of the leading keramists. But for a time the possibility of imitating it does not seem to have been conceived, since the secret was guarded at the Hizen factories by a series of the most rigorous enactments. It happened, however, that between the years 1650 and 1655 a certain Aoyama Koemon, acting as agent for the sale of the new porcelain, associated himself with one Kurobei, a faience vendor of Kyōtō, and was persuaded by the latter to disclose the methods which had won for Arita so valuable a monopoly. The unfortunate Koemon's indiscretion is said to have cost him his life, but the precious recipe remained in Kurobei's possession, and subsequently passed into the hands of Nomura Ninsei. There is, therefore, very little risk of inaccuracy in ascribing the first manufacture of enamelled faience in Japan to the year 1655.

These facts, elicited by independent research, recently received remarkable confirmation from a scroll written and signed by a Kyōtō potter, Tsuboya Rokubei, in the year 1759. The scroll reads as follows:

"During the Meirei era (1655–1657), there came from Saruyama in the province of Hizen a man named Aoyama Koemon. From him our ancestor, Kurobei, learned the secret mode of manufacturing vitrifiable enamels, having bound himself by a solemn oath not to reveal it. The circumstance is one to be treasured in the memories of keramic decorators."

Not having made keramics his profession, Ninsei had no fixed workshop. His first productions were