Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/296

 play his renowned calligraphy; how he presented this bit of white, unadorned, craquelé faience to Takeda, a Japanese doctor who had saved his life; how Takeda ignobly parted with it in payment of a debt, and how in the year 1639 it came into the possession of a Japanese feudal chief for a sum equivalent to £240. It is also recorded that the Abbot Nensei, in exchange for a little tea-jar of Chinese faience, known as "First Flower" (hatsu-hana), obtained (1584 ) a vermilion rescript excusing himself and his descendants from the payment of all taxes for ever. And it is further a fact that amateurs of the present time disburse hundreds of dollars for specimens of Soto-yaki that scarcely seem worth the boxes containing them. No sentiment, wholly spurious, could have established these subtle standards and maintained them through centuries. Even the shock of Western civilisation, unromantic, leisureless, and radical, has failed to lower them appreciably. If they are here left undiscussed, it is not because they excite contempt, but because they baffle comprehension.

Katō Shirozaemon's successor was his son, to whom he gave his own industrial name, Tōshiro. Hence a new source of confusion was introduced. For amateurs who apply the term Ko-Seto to the productions of Shirozaemon himself, have chosen to call his son's pieces Tōshiro-yaki, whereas by other connoisseurs the latter name is understood to refer to the works of the earlier potter. A more correct nomenclature distinguishes the pieces of the first generation as Tōshiro-yaki, and those of the second as Manaka Kobutsu (true middle-period antiquities). The ware is not inferior to that produced by the first Tōshiro, but Chinese clay being no longer used, the purplish