JAPAN
pect, the conquest of China. At all events they had free access to his presence, and he showed himself equally willing to meet and converse with them, whether they had only an account of their travels to offer, or whether they brought him a gift of a musk-cat or presented some of the exceedingly homely jars of Luzon pottery to which Japanese tea-clubs attached extraordinary value. The town of Sakai was at that time one of the most flourishing commercial emporia of Japan. Its merchants possessed great wealth and influence, and so far from sharing the social stigma of their predecessors in the more exclusive days of Kyōtō rule, they were recipients of official patronage, obtained occasional admittance, condescending indeed but still courteous, to aristocratic circles, and became famous not only for their attachment to the tea cult, but even for their skill in composing a new kind of verselet which they were the means of bringing into fashion. A Portuguese missionary visiting Japan at that epoch records with astonishment that he saw a Sakai merchant pay fifteen hundred crowns for a tripod censer, and when the Taikō organised a gigantic tea-cult réunion at Kitano, three Sakai tradesmen won the distinction of having contributed the finest objects of virtu to the wonderful collection there displayed. It is, perhaps, to the exigencies of the Ashikaga Shōguns, as much as to the robust intelligence of the Taikō, that Japanese tradesmen owed their first emergence
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