Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/21



N Japan, as in most other countries, the manufacture of pottery has been carried on for many centuries, but the earliest history of the art is very obscure. Japanese archæologists have been accustomed to speak of Kameoka ware as the oldest produced in their country, and unquestionably the quality of the ware indicates an altogether rudimentary stage of manufacture, the specimens to which the name is given being vessels of rough pottery, irregular in shape, unglazed, and entirely without ornamentation. The term "Kameoka" is assigned to them because they have been exhumed in exceptional profusion in the Kameoka region of northern Japan, but they may be more intelligibly described as the pottery of the aborigines whom the invading Japanese immigrants displaced. Hence they do not properly find a place in the history of Japanese keramics, since they were the work of a different race, and since their manufacture never passed to a higher stage of development.