Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/208

 rage, and in some quarters of Kyōtō every second house had its little workshop and kiln.

The methods of decoration practised by Ninsei were three. They are known among Japanese connoisseurs as shibu-ye, ai-ye, and kin-ye, or pictures in black and brown, in blue, and in enamels and gold. The shibu-ye and ai-ye are found upon pieces manufactured by Ninsei years before he began to employ enamels. It is certain that when Aoyama Koemon's recipes became known in Kyōtō, Ninsei was already renowned for his skill in the chaster fashions, which the best keramists of Kyōtō copied in later times. His pictorial designs were always remarkably bold and simple, but the shapes which he devised for incense-boxes show much variety; such things as battledores, helmets, official hats (yeboshi), bivalves, mythical animals, ducks, sparrows, cranes, and so forth, being copied with fidelity. Referring to the universality of his genius, it is generally said of him that the only things he could not make were céladon and porcelain. None of his descendants practised the potter's art. When Japanese speak, as they sometimes do, of "the second Ninsei" or "the third Ninsei," they are in error. There was but one Ninsei. Another misconception is to suppose that a contemporary potter, by name Wanjin, of Korean descent, anticipated Ninsei in the use of vitrifiable enamels. Wanjin only trod in Ninsei's footsteps, having himself no title to be mentioned in the same breath with the great amateur.

Near Seikanji, where Ninsei manufactured his first pieces, there exist the ruins of a factory where Gyogi Bosatsu is said to have worked. In the same locality, before Ninsei's era, two factories had already been