The gold wears thin at the crown and the knuckles. That is where hands go.
In 1609 the second lord of Kaga decided his new castle town ought to make something. He brought seven casters to Takaoka and gave them land to settle on. Four hundred years later the town is still pouring metal, and most Japanese art bronze of the last century came out of those workshops.
The work has been divided for as long as anyone can remember. A sculptor builds the figure in clay — the genkei, the model — and then hands it over. More often than not he never touches the metal at all. The foundry takes it from there: the mould, the pour, the breaking open, and then weeks of filing and chasing every fold of a sleeve by hand.
A sculptor makes the model. He may never touch metal at all.
The foundry takes a sand or lost-wax mould from that model.
Bronze is poured. What comes out is rough, grey and unremarkable.
Seams filed away, detail cut back in by hand with chisels.
A separate trade heats and treats the metal for its colour. Two identical castings finished by two colourists are two different objects.
So when a bronze carries a famous name, the name usually belongs to the model rather than to the object you are holding. That is not a flaw in the arrangement. It is the arrangement. It is also why a piece by a well-known hand can be entirely genuine and cost a few hundred dollars instead of a few hundred thousand.
Then it is gilded, and then it is left alone for fifty years. Gold goes from the high points first — the crown, the knuckles, the ridge of a sleeve. What you end up with is a map of where hands and cloth and dust have been. The rubbed places are the places people reached for.
We say what we can see, and what the box says. Nothing past that.
In 1609 Maeda Toshinaga built a castle at Takaoka and settled seven casting families in a quarter beside it, the district still called Kanayamachi — the metal-workers' town. (Where exactly the seven came from is given differently in different accounts.) The castle was abandoned within six years. The foundry quarter was not, and it is still there.
Pieces are found one at a time, in Japan, and photographed before they are listed. Tell us what you are looking for, and we will write when something arrives that answers it.
We write when there is something to write about — some months twice, some months not at all.
Noted. We will write when something arrives.