Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/238

 whom allusion has been made in the section devoted to Awata pottery. The story of Mokubei is referred to here because of his important connection with the records of Kyōtō porcelain. His skill appears to have been early recognised. While he was still young, the people of Mita, in the province of Setsu, sent to Kyōtō delegates seeking the assistance of an expert to superintend the establishment of a factory. Mokubei desired to go, but Eisen refused to allow him, asserting that the assistance of such an artist would place the Mita ware above that of Kyōtō. Another of Eisen's pupils, by name Kamesuke, was therefore sent. Tradition says that Mokubei set himself originally to copy the ivory-white porcelain of China (Ming Chien-yao). In this line he was not successful. His fame was originally established by his imitations of an imported faience known as Kōchi-yaki, or ware of Cochin China. There had been tolerably intimate intercourse between Japan and Cochin China for several centuries. When the soldier of fortune, Yamada Nagamasa, made his way to Siam, two hundred years before Mokubei's era, he found so many of his countrymen already settled there that he was able to raise a Japanese corps which afterwards became a terror to Siam's enemies. In the exchange of productions that took place between Japan and these distant regions, a ware falsely attributed to the factories of Cochin China had come into the hands of the Japanese dilettanti, immediately attracting their admiration by its rarity and the beauty of its colours. It was hard faience, inferior in the preparation of its pâte to the pottery of Satsuma or Kyōtō, but covered with glazes, purple, yellow, green, and metallic bronze-red, of remarkable lustre and brilliancy. Small pieces only of this Kōchi-yaki