JAPAN
says that Kaneiye worked at the close of the fourteenth century, and describes guards by him which show that chiselling in relief was then practised. Kaneiye certainly did employ the method of relief chiselling in manufacturing guards. He worked, however, not at the end of the fourteenth century, but at the beginning of the sixteenth. There is, indeed, a little uncertainty about his date. Some records call him a pupil of Nobuiye, which would place him about the year 1520; others assign him to a slightly earlier epoch. At all events Gotō Yūjō had been working for at least twenty or thirty years before Kaneiye's time, and the true historical relation in which the two men stand to each other is that Yūjō invented relief chiselling and Kaneiye was the first to apply it to sword-guards.
For Gotō Yūjō was not a guard-maker. He never chiselled a guard, but devoted his attention solely to the smaller mounts, namely, the menuki, the kōgai, and the kozuka. It has been stated by European writers that from the artistic stand-point the guard is the most important part of the sword's furniture. That view would not be admitted by any Japanese connoisseur. In Japan, from the time when glyptic artists began to occupy themselves with the decoration of sword-mounts, a clear distinction was always drawn between the essential and the ornamental parts. The former comprised the guard, the ring, and the crown (fuchi and kashira) of the hilt; the latter, the menuki, the kōgai, and the kozuka. Until the seventeenth century the three last were known as the kitsu-dokoro (three parts), and though the distinction ceased to be rigid in later times, it was carefully observed by the early Goto masters as well as by their
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