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Metal Work.
The Japanese name for bronze is kara-kané (Chinese metal), and perhaps indicates that the art of melting this alloy was originally taken from the Chinese. Japanese bronzes contain copper and tin as their chief ingredients, together with a little lead or zinc. Although Chinese bronze must have been known in Japan for a very long time, still the art of casting bronze guns and muskets was undoubtedly learned by the Japanese from the first Europeans with whom they came in contact.
In the latter part of the fifteenth century the art of ornamental working in metal was greatly advanced by Yuijo, founder of the celebrated Goto family, and a personal friend of the great painter Motonobu. It is said that he and his descendants copied their designs upon sword guards from the drawings of the Kano school.
In their modelling for bronze castings the Japanese show wonderful mastery, representing figure scenes, landscape, foliage, flowers, birds, fish, animals, insects, kylins, dragons, and other mythological monsters. These subjects are often depicted in panels, on flower and other vases of very graceful outline. The flowers, leaves, and foliage are wrought out with great delicacy and grace, and the reptiles, fish, and insects are specially noteworthy for their admirable truth to nature; while their dragons and monsters are full of boldness and power. Many of their old pieces of bronze were devoted to the temples, and consisted of altar-pieces, flower vases, and the figures of the numerous gods. The altar-pieces usually consisted of an incense-burner with perforated cover, as a centre piece; a pair of flower vases, placed on each side of the incense-burner, and a pair of candlesticks on either side of the vases. The old vases, both bronze and porcelain, were designed as single pieces, and not in pairs “to match”; the making of vases and other articles in pairs is a practice introduced to meet European ideas.
The Japanese formerly devoted an immense amount of thought to their innumerable designs for sword guards (tsuba) and mounts, which were cast or chiselled in iron, and enriched by the addition of various coloured bronzes, gold, silver, and enamels. These sword guards, as well as the small knives, ko-katana, attached to the side of the waki-zashi, or smaller sword, illustrate the use made by the Japanese of alloys of various colours. The ground is generally iron, which is sometimes simply wrought into a raised design of flowers and other objects, or, pierced to form an open filigree work, without the addition of other metals, but more often the iron guard is inlaid with metals of different colours. Two alloys largely used by the Japanese in work of this nature are shakudo, an alloy of copper with about 3 per cent. of gold, by the use of which a blue-black surface, unalterable even by a London atmosphere, is obtained, and shibu-ichi, an alloy of three parts of silver with one of copper, of a silver-grey colour.
There are also the small metal plaques, kanamono, used for decorating tobacco pouches, sword handles, and for their arms and armour generally. One of these plaques, not an inch in diameter, in the possession of the author, is filled by a half-length figure of a warrior, beautifully drawn and modelled, and contains gold (kin), silver (gin), shakudo, shibu-ichi, and copper, on an iron base or background. The shakudo is inlaid with the most delicate ornament in gold and silver, while the shibu-ichi is inlaid with gold and shakudo; the face and hand is finely modelled, and the cap, arms, and armour are in high relief, the whole forming
