Porcelain

by Edward Dillon

The merits of Chinese porcelain, however, have long been acknowledged by the Japanese. Possibly as early as the ninth century specimens of celadon were imported. Direct communication with China has indeed since that time been subject to many interruptions, and it has at all times been carried on subject to galling restrictions and heavy duties levied by the governments of both countries. The Japanese have at many times made piratical descents upon the coast of China, and among the loot thus obtained many fine pieces of Chinese porcelain may have found their way to Japan. There was, however, a period in the fifteenth century during which a pretty steady trade was kept up, under the patronage of the pleasure-loving Ashikaga Shoguns, and many specimens of the earlier Ming porcelain must have reached Japan at that time. It has always been the celadon ware that has found most favour with the Japanese, and fabulous prices were, and indeed still are, given for fine pieces. We may note that such specimens are as a rule associated in the Japanese mind with the Yuan or Mongol dynasty. Speaking generally, however, it was not to this direct intercourse with China that the Japanese attribute their knowledge of ceramic processes. From an early date nearly all that they knew of the continental lands of Asia seems to have reached them from Korea, a country where they played alternately the part of ruthless invaders and devastators, and of eager and submissive students.

Let us then rapidly glance over the records preserved by the Japanese of their early lessons in the potter’s art, that we may better understand the conditions under which the manufacture of porcelain was at length established in the country at the end of the sixteenth century.

Of the early pottery of Japan—rude figures, coffins, and strange-shaped vases of coarse earthenware dating from the early centuries of our era—we know, thanks to the researches of Mr. Gowland, much more than we do of the products of a similar stage of culture in China. In the British Museum we may see a collection, unique of its kind in Europe, of prehistoric objects, found most of them in or around the dolmen tombs of the early emperors, and brought together in Japan by that energetic explorer. As, according to Japanese tradition, Korean potters were in those early days already settled in Japan, we need not be surprised to find that vessels of very similar shape, but of a rather better ware, have also been found in Korean tombs.

The earliest ware whose origin we can trace to a definite spot, is that formerly made at Karatsu, in Hizen, near to the great porcelain district of later days. Korean potters are traditionally reported to have been established here as far back as the early part of the seventh century. Of this primitive ware we will only note that the pieces were placed in the kiln in an inverted position, either without supports (the Kuchi-nashi-de, or ‘unglazed orifice ware‘), or supported by two props of rectangular section (the Geta okoshi, or ‘clog supports‘). This is a point of interest in connection with the similar devices used in firing some of the early celadon. But, as Captain Brinkley points out (The Chrysanthemum, vol. iii. p. 18), it was the introduction of tea from China[112] early in the thirteenth century that gave rise, for the first time, to a demand for a better kind of pottery.

Kato Shirozayemon, a native of Owari, made, we are told, a five years’ visit to China about this time (he returned to his native village of Seto in 1223) in order to study the potter’s craft. The ware that he succeeded in making on his return to Japan has a reddish brown paste covered with a dark glaze, streaked and patched with lighter tints. This was probably more or less an imitation of the Kien yao, the ‘hare-fur’ cups made in the province of Fukien in late Sung times.[113] These cups, so prized by the Japanese, are of interest to us, as they may, in some degree, be regarded as the ancestral type from which the long series of Japanese tea-bowls is derived. But neither the ware of Toshiro (he is generally known by this shortened form of his name), nor that of his followers, has any claim to be classed as porcelain. It is, however, from Seto, the native village of Toshiro, where he set up his kilns on his return from China, that the commonest Japanese name for all kinds of ceramic ware, but more especially for porcelain, is derived, and the district is now a great centre for the production of blue and white porcelain.

Apart from this dark ware and from the heavy celadon, it would seem that at this time, and even later, the only true porcelain known to the Japanese was the white translucent ware of Korea, itself probably an offshoot of some early form of Ting ware. That Toshiro, who must have travelled in Fukien barely two generations earlier than Marco Polo, should only have learned to make this one kind of dark ware, shows how locally circumscribed was the knowledge and use in China, in Sung times, of different kinds of porcelain.

We have to wait nearly three hundred years for the first attempts at the manufacture of porcelain in Japan. Gorodayu Shonsui, the second great name in the history of Japanese ceramics, made his way to Fuchow early in the sixteenth century. He probably visited King-te-chen, and returned to Japan in the year 1513, bringing with him specimens of the materials used by the Chinese, both for the paste and for the glaze of their porcelain. But although Shonsui on his return settled at Arita, in the centre of what was at a later time the principal porcelain district of Japan, he appears never to have discovered the precious deposits of kaolin in the neighbouring hills; for when the supplies brought from China came to an end, he and his successors had to fall back upon the manufacture of fayence. A few specimens of the ware he made have been preserved in Japan, and it has often been copied since Shonsui’s time—even in China, it is said. It is a fair imitation of the Ming blue and white, and we may note that the plum-blossom often occurs in the decoration. We are told that the secret of the process of enamel painting was rigorously kept from Shonsui. We have seen that it is at least doubtful whether this process was known to the Chinese at that time, but the reference may be to the ware covered with polychrome painted glazes.

There are two pieces attributed to Shonsui, on native evidence, in the historical collection of Japanese pottery at South Kensington, but it is very doubtful whether these very ordinary pieces of blue and white are even as old as the later date (1580-90) somewhat strangely attributed to them on the same authority.

And now the Korean potter is found again on the scene. It was reserved for Risampei, a native of that country, to recognise for the first time—in 1599, it is said—the value of the white crumbling rocks out-cropping on the hills that rise at the back of Arita. Here he built his kilns and succeeded in making a fairly good imitation of the Chinese blue and white which was now becoming more and more in request as an article of commerce.

At this stage we are brought into contact not only with the local history and the politics of the day, but with the great questions of world traffic that were being fought out at the time. The rich western island of Kiushiu had long been the principal seat of the efforts of the Portuguese and Spanish missionaries. They had nowhere more converts than on the coasts of Hizen and on the adjacent islands. So that to one or more of these early kilns established near Arita we may reasonably assign some at least of those strange plates, painted with Biblical subjects, that have excited so much curiosity. I will only point to the large dish with an elaborate picture of the Baptism of Christ in the centre, now at South Kensington ([Pl. xiv].). The subject is painted in blue under the glaze and heightened by gilding. Around the edge we find a design of little naked boys—amorini, in fact—playing among flowers.[114]