JAPAN
province is the Odo-yaki, produced at a town called Otsu, about five miles to the east of Kōchi. The factory was established at the close of the sixteenth century by a Korean potter called Shōhaku, who came to Japan in the train of Motochika, feudal chief of Tosa. Shōhaku is said to have originally used materials imported from Korea, which produced light-red, hard pâte, covered with diaphanous glaze. These pieces were not painted or enamelled, their only decoration being a coat of white glaze run over the ground-glaze so as to suggest the idea, sometimes of a wrapper, sometimes of streaks of snow. Another and choicer variety had somewhat coarse pâte, nearly white, over which was run lustrous grey glaze; the decoration consisting of scrolls and conventional designs incised in the pâte and filled in with white clay, after the fashion of the Yatsushiro faience and the Gohon ware of Korea. Of this early faience very few authentic specimens exist. Soon the potters began to use clay found at Nōchazan, in the neighbourhood of Kochi, the result being soft, reddish grey pâte covered with diaphanous glaze. In 1653 the character of the ware underwent a change. Yamanouchi Tadayoshi, lord of the province, invited from Ōsaka a skilled potter called Hisano Seihaku, who had been a pupil of the celebrated Kyoto artist Nomura Ninsei. Seihaku soon returned to Ōsaka, but not before he had introduced in Tosa the Kyoto style of Shibu-e decoration—that is to say, decoration in black or reddish brown under the glaze. Seihaku's place in Tosa was taken by his pupil Yamazaki Heinai, one of whose sons, Morita Mitsuhisa, subsequently went to Ōsaka and studied for several years under Seihaku.
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