At risk of sounding like an ageing hippy, I think the best music ever was performed between 1965 and 1976. During that period musicians and their fans were compartmentalised. If you liked heavy rock music (I did), you couldn’t like Motown and heaven forbid you should be caught out listening to “top of the pops” and all that “commercial” rubbish. Strangely, as time moves on, the compartments and classifications become increasingly flimsy and ill defined and I start to find I enjoy all sorts of other work. Is Rock Music from the early 70s still the best there is? Absolutely. Is it all there is? Absolutely not.
As in Music, there is a danger of allowing oneself to become too focussed on a very limited period, school or style of Japanese antiques. I seem to have gained a reputation for only liking ultra conservative Yamashiro workmanship and believing the only colour for lacquer in koshirae is black. I admit there is some truth in this and I have for many years focussed on Yamashiro koto work and later work, such as Hizen, that has its origins in this style.
There really is nothing finer than a Yamashiro suguha hamon on a tight ko-itame hada covered in ji-nie and enclosed within a gentle and dignified sugata. Or a beautiful koshirae with black lacquered saya and Iron tsuba
Sorry, I am getting carried away!