Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/352

 small scale in the hands of the potters Tanaka Sakai, Matsumura Jisaburo, Nagao Teigoro, and others.

In the suburbs of Kyōtō, distant about five (English) miles from the city, lies the village of Fushimi, celebrated as the site of the Palace of Pleasure (Jūraku), built by the order of the Taiko, and by his order also levelled with the ground after the intrigues of its first inmate, Hidetsugu. Near this village, at a place called Fukakusa, there was a fine pipe-clay that gave peculiarly close, hard pâte. For the sake of this clay the village was occasionally chosen by potters as a place of residence. It has been shown that the "father of potters," Katō Shirozaemon, attempted to manufacture porcelain there in the thirteenth century, and that Sōshiro, who flourished in the time of the Taikō (1590), produced with Fukakusa clay unglazed pottery of considerable beauty which he decorated with black and gold lacquer, receiving from the Taikō the title of merit Tenka Ichi. The records tell nothing of Sōshiro's family. If any of his descendants inherited his art, their names have not survived. Contemporary with him was an expert called Hirata Heiemon, who opened a factory in Kawara-machi, Fushimi, in the year 1593. By this man and his posterity the manufacture of the Fukakusa-yaki was virtually monopolised. The factory was moved to Sukikai-bashi, in the same village, in 1642, and there it still remains, its present owner, Heiemon, being ninth in descent from the founder. At the outset the productions were confined to unglazed pottery, which owed its merit entirely to quality of pâte and accuracy of finish. Articles such as fire-boxes, tea-urns, ash-holders,