Die Arbeiter & die Zeit
Ko-Goto-Schule · Kozuka · Shakudo · Vergoldeter Rahmen · Momoyama Zeit
An old Kozuka
Pick it up. The weight announces it before anything else does. This kozuka is heavier than the objects around it in the same collection — not dramatically, but perceptibly, the difference between an object made when metal was worked at a certain thickness because that was how it was done, and objects made later, when refinement had taught makers to economize without losing quality. The weight is not excess. It is age.
The form, too: taller and more substantial than the slender kozuka of the mature Edo period. A gilded frame runs along all four edges, enclosing the deep shakudo ground. On the ura the gold is clearly visible — this is not plain copper but a frame deliberately gilded. The whole object is organized around the relationship between gold and shakudo: the darkest ground the tradition had available, and the warmest metal, in conversation across every surface.
Zwei Figuren bei der Arbeit
On the shakudo ground, two gold figures in high takazogan. Left of center, the larger figure crouches forward over a low object — a vessel, a bellows, a furnace element — engaged in work that requires the whole body, bent forward, arms active. A tool or implement extends from the figure’s hands. To the right, a second figure, smaller, seated with a large basket or vessel beside them, in the posture of watchful pause — the second worker, the companion, momentarily still while the first continues.
This is a genre scene — working people in their environment — which was not the Goto school’s standard vocabulary. The school served the highest ranks of samurai society, and its canonical subjects were classical. Working craftspeople appear in early Goto work that preceded the school’s strict conventionalization. The gilded frame itself points toward this earlier moment: the tradition forming rather than the tradition perfected.
Momoyama
The weight, proportions, gilded frame, plain or lightly textured shakudo ground, and genre subject all point toward the threshold between the medieval and the early modern. An object made when the Goto tradition was still finding the form it would later perfect, and when two working figures in gold on deep black shakudo could be chosen as worthy of a sword fitting without requiring classical justification.
Ko Goto Kozuka
Kozuka. Ko-Goto-Schule (zugeschrieben). Shakudo, iroe takazogan in kin, vergoldeter Rahmen. Shokuninzu. Momoyama Zeit. Mumei. Privatsammlung, erworben in Europa.