Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/52

 produced wares which in all their artistic features surpassed anything that Korea herself had ever turned out. Before, however, considering these wares in detail, it will be convenient, in the chronological sequence of this history, to notice a faience more widely known than it deserves to be.

About the year 1525 a Korean potter came and settled in Kyōtō. He was popularly known as Ameya, probably because he at first followed the trade of a vendor of ame (wheat-flour jelly). Before he had long resided in Japan, he adopted the name of Masakichi, and married a Japanese woman called Teirin. Masakichi had hoped to find in Japan a profitable field for the exercise of his calling. But the times, and also—a candid critic would be disposed to say—his own homely methods, were against him. He set up a kiln in Kyōtō, and began to turn out a sort of archaic faience, which went by the appellation of So-kei-yaki, Sokei being the industrial name taken by Masakichi. The ware did not attract much attention until after Masakichi's death, when his wife, who seems to have been a woman of considerable taste, took the kiln into her own hands. Sen no Rikiu was then beginning to rank as a master of the Cha-no-Yu. He discovered in this Ama-yaki—as Teirin's ware was called—something that pleased his æsthetic instincts, and to signify his approval he bestowed upon the son of its manufacturers his own surname, Tanaka, which he had just exchanged for that of Rikiu. After his mother's decease, this son, Chōjiro, continued to produce the same faience in a street called Kamichōjamachi, Kyōtō. Even Sen no Rikiu's patronage did not at first bring the ware into favour. But in the year 1578 Oda Nobunaga, at Rikiu's inspiration,