Potteries and Paper Wares
nish the gold by rubbing it over with wet agates or carnelian.
At the other houses faience, in an infinity of new and strange designs and extraordinary colors is seen, each less and less Japanese. All these Awata potters work almost entirely for the foreign market, and their novelties are not disclosed to the visitor, nor sold in Japan, until they have had their vogue in the New York and London markets. From those foreign centres come instructions as to shapes, colors, and designs likely to prove popular for another season, and the ceramic artists abjectly follow these foreign models. All this helps to confuse a stranger; for, though the wares are named for the districts, towns, and provinces of their supposed nativity, he finds them made everywhere else—Satsuma, in three or four places outside of Satsuma; the Kaga of commerce, almost anywhere except in Kaga; while undecorated porcelain is brought from France by ship-loads to be decorated and sent out again, and everywhere the debasing effect of imitation and of this yielding to foreign dictates appears.
Cart-loads, car-loads, and ship loads of screens go from the great ports to foreign countries, and in Kioto the larger proportion of these are manufactured. Whether byobu, the screen, is a purely Japanese invention, or a variation of the hinged door easily suggested to any primitive people who can watch Nature’s many trap-doors and hinges, this people certainly makes most persistent use of it. Twenty different kinds may be seen in one’s daily rides past the little open houses, but never does one discover the abominations in coarse gold thread on black satin grounds so common in our country and so highly esteemed. The four-fold or six-fold screen of a Japanese house has its plain silk, paper, or gold-leaf surface, covered with one large design or picture extending over the whole surface, instead of the narrow panels
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