SPECIAL SUBJECTS
White enamel has always been the most difficult of all the pastes to obtain perfectly pure, and purple stands next on the list. Ability to produce a fine, speckless white constituted the only specialty of the Hirata family, and because they jealously guarded the secret of the process, tradition magnified their share in employing enamels generally. It is undeniable, however, that they showed great skill in decorating sword-furniture with vitrified pastes. They never covered the surface of a sword-guard or a dagger-haft with such ornamentation, but merely used the enamels to fill in floral designs, arabesques, scrolls, or mosaics enclosed in small medallions. Generally the pastes were polished (kazari-jippō) but occasionally they were of the nagashi-jippo style. Nor were they always fired in sitû. A not uncommon method (called ji-ita-jippō) was to complete the enamel design independently and then embed it in the metal field. By recourse to the latter device enamels could be used for decorating lacquered objects having a wooden base, and they were so used from the middle of the eighteenth century, especially in the ornamentation of inro (medicine-boxes suspended from the girdle). It may be added that the vitrified pastes of the Hirata family, and of other artists who freely imitated their work and even used their signatures were sometimes opaque (doro-jippō) and sometimes translucid (suki-jippō).
Kaji Tsunekichi, a samurai of Owari fief, was the first Japanese to manufacture cloisonné enamels of the kind known in the Occident by this name; that is to say, plates, vases, and censers having the surface entirely covered with vitrified pastes disposed in designs by means of cloisons. Like many other samurai Kaji,
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