manufacture." The same thing is true, generally speaking, of Japanese art in all its branches. The painter, the lacquerer, the worker in metal,—all had in view the personal requirements of a small and highly cultivated class of nobles. Money-making was never their aim, nor were their minds distracted by the knowledge of the existence of numerous styles besides their own.
It need scarcely be added that public "collections," whether of porcelain or of other art-objects, were entirely foreign to the spirit and usage of Old Japan. They date back only a few decades, and owe their origin to European influence. The Ueno Museum at Tōkyō and the Museum at Nara are perhaps the best in the country. But we believe that the finest collections of Japanese porcelain and pottery are to be seen abroad, that brought together by Professor E. S. Morse and now belonging to the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston, Massachusetts, being the most complete and therefore the most instructive in the world. (See also Article on Archæology.)
Books recommended. Brinkley's Japan and China, Vol. VIII, is exhaustive. See also Catalogue of the Morse Collection of Japanese Pottery, and for prehistoric pottery, The Dolmens and Burial Mounds in Japan, by Wm. Gowland, published by the Society of Antiquaries (London).—Japan and its Art, by M. B. Huish, is a smaller popular treatise.
Posts. When Ieyasu, in A.D. 1603, brought Japan to a state of peace which lasted for two hundred and fifty years, a rude postal system spontaneously sprang up in the shape of private agencies, called hikyaku-ya, which undertook, for a low charge, but also at a low rate of speed, to transmit private correspondence from place to place both by land and sea. The official despatches of the Shōgunate were all sent by special government couriers, under the control of postmasters (ekiteishi) at the various post-towns. Couriers belonging to the different clans carried the despatches of their respective Daimyōs to and from the seat of government at Yedo.
The first approximation to a modern postal system was that introduced early in 1871, chiefly through the efforts of Mr. (now
