Commercially, Nagoya is best known as the centre of a great pottery and porcelain district, Seto in Owari being as famous as Staffordshire in England. In the Seto suburb porcelain clay is found, and silica exists in large quantities a few miles away. From the castle tower one sees the smoke of continuous lines of kilns surrounding the valley, and all the ware is sent in from these villages to Nagoya for distribution. Here the finest egg-shell porcelain, rivalling the French ware, is made, much of it going to Yokohama to be decorated for the foreign market. Seto itself has given its name to all porcelain, and especially to the pale, gray-green ware so commonly used in Japanese households. Old green Seto ware is highly esteemed, both for its soft tinting and its peculiar glaze, suggesting jade or lacquer to the touch more than hard, kiln-burnt porcelain. The bulk of the commoner 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 curio shops are not entirely stripped of their best things. As Owari’s princes exchanged porcelains liberally with the daimios of Hizen and Kaga, some rare pieces of old Imari and Kutani are often chanced upon, as the impoverishment of great families, and the rage for foreign dress and fashions, tempts the better class to part with heirlooms. Whole afternoons wore on as we made our way into the graces of certain curio dealers, that they might disclose their jealously-guarded treasures. These old men of Nagoya have a real affection for the beautiful things of the past, made before any foreign demands had corrupted and debased the native art. Once convinced of the intelligent interest of their customer, the owners proudly open the godown, and the swords, the lacquer, and the porcelains appear, and, lifted from their boxes, stripped of cotton and silk wrappings, are set forth. These old dealers are men wholly of the past, who meditate and smoke long over an offer, and if they agree to the price solemnly and slowly clap their hands as a ratification of the terms. Four times we passed by the largest curio shop in Nagoya, led by the tea-jars and boxes in the front to suppose that it was only the abode of a tea-merchant. When we had accidentally bought some choice tea there, we were invited back to a court, where two godowns were crowded with old porcelains and lacquer. Near by was another shop where arms, armor, Buddhas, altar-pieces, saints, images, carvings, candlesticks, koros, robes, trappings, and all the paraphernalia of priests, temples, warriors, and yashikis were heaped up on the floor and hung overhead.
The coolies had been anxious about our rate of progress on the last Tokaido days, fearing to miss the great matsuri of the Nagoya year, which, celebrating the deeds of the founder and patron saints of the city, has been maintained with great pomp and splendor for centuries. The procession was to take four hours in passing, and our landlord engaged places for us in the house of a shoe-dealer in the main street. The dealer in geta and dzori dealt only in those national foot coverings, but, yielding to foreign fashions, had set up a sign of
“Shoes the Shop.”
The sliding screens of the front wall of the room over the shop were removed, and bright-red blankets thrown over the ledge and spread out on the eaves of the lower story. All the houses were open and decorated in this same way, and lanterns hung in rows from the eaves and from upright posts at the door-way.
The worthy shoe-dealer’s blankets and lanterns were just like his neighbors’, but when three foreigners appeared at the low balcony, then the multitude stopped and stared open-mouthed at that unusual spectacle, and we divided popular interest with the procession as long as we remained there. Policemen were perplexed between their duty of making the crowds move on and their own pleasure of having a look at the strangers. Soldiers from the garrison stared by hundreds, and the policemen requested them to depart, as well as the rustics and townspeople. Policemen rank much higher, in a way, than the soldiers, the guardians of the peace being nearly all descendants of the old samurai, the two-sworded, privileged retainers of feudal days, while the common soldier is enlisted from the farm laborers; and one quickly sees how much more regard the lower classes have for the gunsa than for the soldier.
The procession began with high ornamental wooden cars, or dasha, set on wheels hewn from single blocks of wood, and drawn by ropes, to which every pious person was supposed to lend a hand. Regular coolies were engaged for the steady wheel-horse work, and sang a wild chorus as men with stout sticks pried the clumsy wheels up for the first turn. The corner posts and upper railings of the dasha are lacquered in black or red, and finished with plates of open-work brass, or elaborately-gilded carvings. The sides are hung with curtains of rich old brocade or painted cloth, and the railed top is a stage, on which puppet-shows and tableaux represent scenes from mythology and legend. On one car Raiden, the red Thunder God, mounted on a rearing charger, shook his circle of drums, and Suzume, the priestess, repeated her sacred dance before the cave. Comic scenes took best with the audience, however, and the jolly old shojo, men who come up from the bottom of the sea for a revel on shore, wearing mats of bright red hair and gowns of gorgeous brocade, were received with greatest favor. They ladled out saké from a deep jar, and finally stood on their heads on the rim of the jar and drank from the depths. There were only twelve dasha in line, but they stopped every fifty feet while the puppets were put through their performances.
Succeeding the cars came a daimio’s train, preceded by heralds in quaint, mediæval costume, and presenting every phase of the old-time parade. Chinese sages and instructors, Korean prisoners, falconers and priests walked in line after the daimios, who were mounted on horses half hidden in clumsy but beautiful old trappings. The men in white silk gowns and lacquer hats, who took the daimios’ places at the head of the line, are descendants of those great families of the province, whose members have ridden in Nagoya’s matsuri parades for centuries. After them came an endless line of men in armor, the suits of mail being either heirlooms of the wearers or provided from the rich stores of such things owned by the temple. The armor surpassed the treasures of curio shops, and the dents and cuts in the cuirasses and helmets attested their antiquity. Having sat from eleven o’clock until three in the upper room with the family of the shoeman, we parted with elaborate expressions of esteem on both sides, and with such bows and prostrations from them that we wondered how our guide would contrive to slip a gift into their hands.