Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/386

 for decoration that consists generally of floral designs or diapers, traced sometimes with white slip, but more usually with a paste formed of glue and white-lead powder. No personal record of the Akahada potters is preserved. The only remembered artist is Bokuhaku. He flourished down to about 1860.

At the village of Kuwana, in the province of Ise, between the years 1736 and 1795, there lived a rich merchant, by name Numanami Gozaemon, who in the days of his prosperity turned his thoughts to garden-making, that refined extravagance which has always been among the first fancies of a wealthy Japanese. Until that time Gozaemon had given himself little concern about the Chajin and their tenets, but his horticultural predilections necessarily drove him to seek the aid of those masters of æsthetics. To this end he visited Kyōtō, and there became the pupil of a renowned virtuoso, from whom he acquired not the principles of garden-making alone, but also that taste for keramics which forms an integral part of the Tea Ceremonials. The renown of the great potter Kenzan was then fresh, and the Kyomizu factories had attained the zenith of their excellence. The merchant of Kuwana, now an ardent disciple of the Cha-no-Yu ethics, never wearied of wandering from workshop to workshop and watching the clay assume, under the touch of skilled manipulators, shapes the beauties of which he had newly learned to appreciate. His interest gradually developed into a desire to imitate. The Kyōtō potters were easily persuaded to explain their processes, and whether their pupil pos-