Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/80

 already educated by specimens which the Ming keramists had been sending over during nearly two centuries and a half, there is no difficulty in understanding that the Arita productions did not excite much enthusiasm. That they found their way to Europe is incredible. For though the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, traded with Japan during the years when this first true Japanese porcelain was manufactured, not only was commerce in the Arita wares interdicted, but also it seems most unlikely that these merchants would have encumbered their ships with wares interesting only as specimens of a country's earliest efforts to imitate the already high achievements of a neighbouring empire. Had the Portuguese or the Dutch foreseen to what enthusiastic admiration the Western world would be stirred, some three centuries later, by its introduction to Japanese art, they would doubtless have been shrewd enough to carry away a few historical pieces of Arita blue-and-white. But these pious traders were neither prophets nor æsthetes.

The factory of Arita is within eight miles of Imari, a port situated at the head of a deep, well-sheltered bay on the northwest coast of Hizen. Imari, though itself an insignificant village, was the market town of the district, and the place to which all the porcelain was carried for distribution by water. It was thus that, when the Arita ware began to attract public attention, people fell into the habit of calling it by the name of the port of shipment rather than by that of the factory. Tradition says that the first wares manufactured by Risampei and his three Korean comrades were designated Kinko-yaki, Kinko being the name—according to Japanese pronunciation—of