At this stage we are brought into contact not only with the local history and the politics of the day, but with the great questions of world traffic that were being fought out at the time. The rich western island of Kiushiu had long been the principal seat of the efforts of the Portuguese and Spanish missionaries. They had nowhere more converts than on the coasts of Hizen and on the adjacent islands. So that to one or more of these early kilns established near Arita we may reasonably assign some at least of those strange plates, painted with Biblical subjects, that have excited so much curiosity. I will only point to the large dish with an elaborate picture of the Baptism of Christ in the centre, now at South Kensington (PL. XIV.). The subject is painted in blue under the glaze and heightened by gilding. Around the edge we find a design of little naked boys--_amorini_, in fact--playing among flowers.[114]
We can find nothing in the Japanese records to throw light on the porcelain made in Hizen during the first half of the seventeenth century, but much of the somewhat roughly decorated blue and white ware (the larger dishes especially, made for India and Persia) has been classed, on the ground of the occurrence of spur-marks, and of the nature of the paste and decoration, as Japanese.[115] Some of this ware may be as old as this time, when (I mean shortly before the middle of the seventeenth century) the demand from the West was ever increasing, and the Chinese supply was so uncertain and so inferior in quality.
Meantime the Dutch and English factories on the island of Hirado, opposite to the pottery district of Imari, were finally closed (1641), and all communication with the outside world prohibited. The only exception made was in favour of the strictly limited commerce carried on through the Dutch and Chinese merchants, who were confined in their prison-like factories at Nagasaki.[116]
Now it is a remarkable fact that our first definite information concerning the introduction of Japanese porcelain into Europe dates from this very period, and it is to approximately the same date that the Japanese ascribe the introduction of coloured enamels among the Hizen potters. One Higashidori Tokuzayemon, a potter of Imari, is said to have derived some knowledge of the precious secret from the captain of a Chinese junk trading at Nagasaki in 1648. With the assistance of Kakiyemon, a skilled potter of the same district, he succeeded in imitating the five-coloured enamelled wares of the Wan-li period. Another Japanese authority[117] gives the name of his assistant as Gosu Gombei, and states that by 1645, after many fruitless experiments, they were able to produce a ware decorated with coloured enamels and with gold and silver, which was exported at first through the medium of a Chinese merchant, and shortly after sold to the Dutch.