464 ART INDUSTRY AND RELATED OCCUPATIONS. 



beneficent and unselfish activity in the porcelain painting of Arita, 

 in the metal and enamel work of Kioto, in the cabinet-making of 

 Tokio, and elsewhere. 



Compared with our European porcelain and stone-ware factories, 

 those of the Japanese seem small, a business employing forty or 

 fifty labourers being one of the largest. The lighter labours, such 

 as rubbing the colours, glazing, etc., are often performed by women, 

 while the working of the material, shaping, and burning, is always 

 done by men. In order to form an idea of the extremely simple 

 and primitive working apparatus, we must throw ourselves back 

 a hundred years or more, into the time when in our own country 

 porcelain was burned in low kilns, and the entire preparation of the 

 material was effected without machines, or with only the help of the 

 simplest possible water-power works. In Japan, too, the materials 

 needed are not all usually found in the place of manufacture, and 

 nowhere are they prepared and then brought to market, as in China, 

 for instance, or as the " China clay " in England, but every factory 

 provides them for itself, in raw condition, sometimes from great 

 distances, and in the most inconvenient ways. 



The constituents are separately broken up, washed, sifted, etc., 

 before they are weighed, measured, and mixed together. In break- 

 ing up the hard porcelain stones, felspar, or quartz, the primitive 

 stamping-mill is used universally, as in rice husking described on 

 page 45. These automatic stamping-mills are found generally on 

 the little water courses long before the factory is reached. Their 

 slow work lasts for several days usually, before the small quantity 

 of stone is broken up finely enough, in the iron-bound troughs, to 

 be carried to the washing process. These old-fashioned stamp 

 mills, with their slow movement, were formerly used very generally 

 in Europe, — for example, in the mining districts of the Harz and 

 Saxon Mountains. 



They are still used in Asia Minor, Armenia, and Persia, to 

 pulverize various substances, among them oak tan-bark, as was 

 lately observed by the correspondent of the Cologne Gazette at 

 Niksar.i 



The washing of the pulverized material (porcelain stone, kaolin, 

 felspar, quartz) is done by hand after the old fashion, in discon- 

 nected tubes, barrels,or mortar-beds, and stirred about in water with 

 paddles, and then left to rest for a short time that the coarser and 

 heavier particles may settle to the bottom. The separation of the 

 fine floating paste is effected by opening one or the other of the 

 tap-holes, of which there are usually four placed irregularly one 

 above the other. Finally, the whole pulpy mass is passed through 

 a fine cloth sieve, which separates all the coarse grains and other 

 impurities. 



Funnel-shaped boxes are used in place of our filter presses. 

 The walls are made of staves. On the bottom is a layer of gravel 

 * " Ein Ausflug ins Armenische," Koln. Zeitnng, 21/2, 1886. 



