The next step in the improvement of Japanese printing followed the same course as it had in Europe, that is to say, the use of metallic types. The first attempt in this improved method was made by the aforesaid Kanetsugu Naoye, head of the vassals of the house of Uyesugi, who was at that time lord of Yonezawa. The book which Naoye ordered to be reprinted was the celebrated Chinese literary glossary called the _Wen-hsuean_, which literally means selected literary pieces, in verse as well as in prose. This reprint was put into execution at Fushimi in the year 1606, which was the fourth year of the Shogunate of Iyeyasu, and the metallic material then used in casting the types was copper. With him as the precursor, several patrons of learning followed in his wake. Among the most noted of them were Iyeyasu himself and the Emperor Go-Midsunowo. This Emperor, who was the son and successor of the Emperor Go-Yozei, imitated his father in encouraging the reproduction of books with type, not of wood but of copper as Naoye had done. The book printed under the imperial auspices in 1621 was the fifteen volumes of a Chinese lexicon after the block print issued in China of the Sung dynasty. Prior, however, to the undertaking of the Emperor, Iyeyasu, as ex-Shogun, ordered reprints to be made with copper types at his residential town of Sumpu, now called Shidzuoka, in the province of Suruga. The books reprinted there in 1615 and 1616 were the index of the complete series of the Buddhist Tripitaka and the Extracts from Various Chinese Classics. Besides these, it should be mentioned in his honour as a patron of learning, that he ordered more than one hundred thousand pieces of wooden types to be manufactured for the reprinting of various useful books. From 1599, the year before the decisive battle of Sekigahara, until the end of his Shogunate, Iyeyasu's agent at Fushimi carried on the printing of books with movable wooden types without any cessation. Among the books reprinted there were the _Adzuma-kagami_, the record of the earlier Kamakura Shogunate, a Chinese political miscellany written at the beginning of the T'ang dynasty, and some old Chinese strategical works.