SWORD-FURNITURE
of experts who worked at Hikone in Omi province. Their style was moulded on that of Kitagawa Sōden (circ. 1640), who forged large iron guards having curved edges, and decorated them with chiselling à jour as well as surface modelling. The peculiarity of these guards was that the figures generally sculptured were those of Dutchmen, Chinese, or some of the uncouth-looking foreigners depicted in ancient Japanese encyclopedias of ethnography. The chiselling was more or less crude and clumsy, and gold damascening was usually added. Sōden used the mark Sōheishi, which is vulgarly pronounced Mogarashi. Thus his guards, and those subsequently produced at Hikone in the same style, are commonly spoken of as Mogarashi-tsuba.
Among the families which contributed materially to make the seventeenth century remarkable for masterpieces of chiselling in all grades of relief and in the round, with occasional additions, in later times, of the kata-kiri method of the Yokoya masters, a high place must be assigned to the Yoshioka of Yedo, founded by Shigehiro at the close of the sixteenth century, and brought into prominence by his son Shigetsugu, who was appointed to work for the Yedo Court in the year 1600 and died in 1653. The Yoshioka was a noble family of Fujiwara descent, and its early representatives had the titles of Bungo-no-suke and Buzen-no-suke. They did not use these titles in marking their works, but they did frequently use the title Inaba-no-suke. Attached to the employment of the latter there was a restriction characteristic of Japanese customs. The Inaba branch of the same family had a hereditary though conditional right to the high post of court councillor (goroju), and when-
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