Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/74

 with their former masterpieces, it becomes easy to imagine that the artisans of Korea also may have lapsed into a slough of incompetence equally deep as compared with their original elevation. At the time of the Japanese expedition, however, the little kingdom was in a comparatively flourishing condition, and practical justification existed for the Taikō's idea of procuring keramic experts there.

The Korean experts that came to Japan at the close of the sixteenth century were distributed throughout the factories in several fiefs, but for the present the student is invited to consider those only that reached the province of Hizen. The methods taught by Shonzui were then practised at the Nangawara factory, near Arita, but the results achieved were of little merit owing to the inferior nature of the material employed. Tradition asserts that the Nangawara factory was closed after Shonzui's death, and reopened by one Gosu Gombei towards the end of the sixteenth century. The story seems to be a popular record of the fact that, after Shonzui's death, his imported materials having failed and the production of porcelain being no longer possible, the work of his successors fell for a time into disrepute, but subsequently recovered a certain measure of public favour by the manufacture of stone-ware decorated with Chinese blue, which mineral has always been called Gosu by the Japanese. But, in truth, the history of the whole period from Shonzui's death (about 1550) to the close of the sixteenth century is wrapped in obscurity. Nothing can be affirmed except that at the latter date, the highest achievement of the Hizen potters was a stone-ware decorated, somewhat rudely, with impure blue under the glaze. Naoshige was then representative of the noble house of Nabeshima, whose fief