JAPAN
were not visible, but really delicate work could not be done. In Kwōjō's time a solder was discovered so good that a piece of metal fixed with it could be afterwards chiselled in loco. The use of this ro (literally, wax), as the Japanese called it, made an immense difference in the quality of detail chiselling, and the uttori iroye (riveted plating) of the first Goto experts was finally abandoned.
It is unnecessary to enter into any further analysis of the Goto masters' work. What has been said above of the first six generations applies to the methods of all their successors. The influence exercised by the family and its branches in this particular sphere of Japanese art was enormous. Until the time of Kwōjō and Tokujō sword-mounts were valued solely for their uses: the idea of collecting and treasuring them as objects of art does not appear to have occurred to any dilettante. But when the reign of peace inaugurated by the Tokugawa regents gave people leisure to think of the sword's furniture as much as of its blade, it began to be the fashion to make collections of the beautiful specimens of sculpture in metal, then produced in large quantities in the capitals of many of the fifes; and from that era until the present, it was always considered that the basis of every good collection must be a series representing the works of the first fourteen Goto experts, from Yūjō to Keijō. Any careful student of the subject who has had an opportunity of examining the splendid works of other great masters, will be disposed to rebel against the factitious prominence thus assigned to the productions of the Goto,—the iye-bori, or "carvings of the family," as they are called. Yet the Japanese verdict is probably correct, for the foundation of this
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