THE CARPENTER
Very often, when I was spending a morning in Inchie’s little curio store, a Kobe merchant would drop in to buy—a pompous fellow and burly, asking the price of everything he saw. “How much is this? and how much is that?” he would say, and “What do you suppose you’d charge for that?” Inchie would look up at the merchant and blink with almost a scared expression, so meek was it. The merchant, like the great bully that he was, feeling satisfied that he was cowing the little man, would pick up a piece of ivory and say, “How much?” “Four dollars,” answers Inchie. “Very dear,” replies the merchant sternly. Then Inchie would pick up another piece of ivory, putting away the former, and say with a scared expression, as though the merchant had frightened him down, “I charge two dollars for this.” “I will give you one and a half dollar,” urges the merchant. And little Inchie, puckering his brow and in a melancholy voice, says, “I takee,” the merchant going off highly delighted, convinced that he has been robbing all round.
Immediately after he had left the store, the change in Inchie was extraordinary. He was no longer meek and melancholy, but gleeful and triumphant, and longing to tell me what had happened. “The merchant from Kobe he berry much cheat, that man,” he said, with a chuckle. “I show him number one curio, I ask him number one cheap price, and he say, ‘Berry de-ar.’ Then I show him no number one curio and ask him more double price. He say, ‘I no pay that; I give half that.’ He take away curio at half that price, and that very good for me. I make more money like that than when I sell good curio.” Then Inchie explained how very easy it is to deceive the average traveller. He does not stand a chance against the Japanese merchant, and half the collections of curios ticketed and placed in museums in England as fine and unique specimens are in reality worthless imitations.
The really fine productions never leave the country at all. Westerners visiting Japan expect to secure fine works of art by paying a small sum for them; but it cannot possibly be done. In that country they know the value of productions, and will not easily part with them. Inchie, becoming very serious and natural, would give me a little lecture on the absurdity of Westerners coming to Japan expecting to buy really fine old curios and pictures at a small price, when no Japanese would part with them for any consideration. “A man,” he said, “will come from your country who thinks he understands Japan because he has read some books about it, and has seen some examples of bad art in England. That man has no eyes—he can’t see the really beautiful things. He comes to buy the old kakemono. He won’t buy the new kakemono by the good man that lives now. He no understand if it good or bad; but it must be old. Well, we make him the old one;” and here Inchie gave me an exact description of how they make the old kakemonos. They first begin by making the paper look old, and every producer has his several methods of bringing about age. This is how Inchie does it. He has eight various stains in eight separate baths, in which he puts his paper, holding the two opposite corners and dashing it from one bath to another in one quick, dexterous sweep. Then the paper is left to dry, and out of about one hundred sheets stained in this way, in all probability only a dozen will be found sufficiently perfect to deceive the buyer. That is the beginning of the manufacture of an imitation old kakemono to be sold to the European connoisseur for hundreds of dollars, afterwards to find its resting-place in some celebrated museum.
MAKING UP ACCOUNTS
What chance has a European against a genius like this? and how can he detect deception in objects that have been the result of such minute care and consideration? The Japanese can imitate postage stamps so accurately that the only hope of discovering a fraud lies in analysing the gum at the back of a stamp. When we stain paper in coffee or beer to give it the effect of age, we consider that we have gone far in the art of imposition; but in this direction, as in many others, we are mere babies compared with the Japanese.
“But then, Inchie,” I said, in reply to his statement that it was child’s play to deceive the Westerner, “you too are sometimes deceived by us. I know of a gentleman in England who brought over to Japan a large collection of modern porcelain of English manufacture, and by clever handling he imposed the whole lot on an artist at Osaka in exchange for some rare old Satsuma.” Then I enlarged on the hardship of the story. I explained how the Englishman had persuaded the Osaka painter to give up all the rare old Satsuma that he had collected during the course of a lifetime in exchange for this valueless English porcelain, remarking that it was wrong and almost cruel to take such a mean advantage of the poor Osaka merchant. “And what do you say to that for a clever fraud, Inchie?” I asked. Inchie only held his sides and laughed. At last he said, “Oh, he berry number one clever man, that at Osaka”; for, it seemed, he knew all about the Englishman and his porcelain, and also about the Satsuma. The painter, indeed, was known all over Japan by his clever imitations of old Satsuma, and it was also generally known that he had given this English gentleman a collection of imitations that he had painted himself in exchange for the English porcelain, which was interesting to him to study. The person to be pitied in Inchie’s estimation was the biter bit; and he was “number one sorry for that Englishman.”
Whenever any one fresh arrived in Tokio—young, old, pretty, or plain—I always sent him or her to Inchie’s store to buy curios. Such streams of people besieged him, all so different and some so quaint, that, although they were good for trade, Inchie was very uncertain as to whether they were good for me, and was anxious to have the matter cleared up. “You have many friends,” he would say, eyeing me suspiciously.