Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/335

 incentive. Among the middle classes there was little if any demand for utensils of faience, and it is recorded that the choicest productions of the Karatsu potters during the twelfth century were bowls for measuring rice, called Yoné-hakari. These, as well as the Oku-gōrai, were stoved in an inverted position. They bear, inside, three marks, traces of their supports while in the kiln, and the glaze runs towards the upper rim, which it generally fails to cover. It is thick glaze, of a reddish grey tint, in tolerably good keeping with the pâte, which is dark slate-colour. Early in the thirteenth century the factory at Karatsu, like those in Owari, felt the influence of the newly developed taste for tea, and began to adopt the improvements introduced by Katō Shirozaemon. Among these the most noteworthy was that the pieces were no longer baked in an inverted position: their inner surface ceased to be disfigured by marks of supports, and their upper portions by the rough edges of the glaze. These easily detected differences distinguish the original outcome of the Karatsu kilns—namely, the Oku-gōrai and Kome-hakari or Yoné-hakari—from the pieces produced during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—namely, the Ko-garatsu (Old Karatsu) and Seto-garatsu. With regard to this last term, it is evidently derived from the fact that after the faience manufactured at Seto by Katō Shirozaemon began to grow famous, his methods were adopted by the potters of Karatsu. The truth is that the potters of Karatsu were chiefly imitators. Their best efforts being intended for the tea-clubs, they took as models the rusty wares of Korea, Annam, Luzon, etc., or the choicer but still sombre products of the Seto kilns.

Things remained thus at Karatsu until the close of