Nagoya
heavy porcelain is decorated here for the foreign market—men, women, and small boys mechanically repeating the monstrous designs in hideous colors, which they ignorantly suppose to represent western taste, and which the western world accepts as “so Japanese.” Modern Owari is least desirable and least Japanese of all the wares of Japan, but as thousands of dollars pour annually into Nagoya for these travesties of national art, their manufacture and export will still go on. Recently the Seto potteries have been turning out large tea-caddies, with double or pierced covers, by tens of thousands, daubing them with the discordant colors of cheap foreign mineral paints. Across the ocean they are called Japanese rose-jars, although the rose was unknown in Japan until the entrance of foreigners, and the rose-jar and the pot-pourri it contains would greatly astonish a Japanese. But as Nagoya and Seto are made rich and happy by badly decorated porcelain tea-caddies, industry gains if art loses.
Thirty thousand Nagoyans are engaged in the manufacture of a cheap cloisonné enamel, ship-loads of plaques and vases with one unvarying hard, pale-blue ground being exported annually. The powdered porcelain from Seto’s imperfect pieces forms the base of the enamel used, and the two industries work together economically.
In Nagoya town are shops filled with the charming Banko ware, made across the bay at Yokkaichi, which still retains all its old merits, unaltered by the demands of foreign markets. Banko teapots worked out of sheets of thin clay, pressed, folded, cut, and patterned in white mosaic or glazed designs in low relief, resemble nothing so much as bits of soft painted crapes stretched over hidden frames, and these fragile, unglazed pieces are all the more pleasing in the midst of Nagoya’s keramic nightmares.
Nagoya being a little off the line of tourist travel, its
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