made Japanese swords, armor, netsuke, kiseru, inro and furnishings lost customers, but with the support of the new government, they began to make extremely elaborate metal, ivory and wood sculptures, which they then exported to the United States and Europe. During the Meiji and Taishō eras, Japanese sculpture progressed from the production of devotional objects, to decorative objects, and eventually to fine art. International exhibitions brought Japanese cast bronze to a new foreign audience, attracting strong praise. The past history of samurai weaponry equipped Japanese metalworkers to create metallic finishes in a wide range of colours. By combining and finishing copper, silver and gold in different proportions, they created specialised alloys including shakudō and shibuichi. With this variety of alloys and finishes, an artist could give the impression of full-colour decoration. The stimulus of Western art forms returned sculpture to the Japanese art scene and introduced the plaster cast, outdoor heroic sculpture, and the school of Paris concept of sculpture as an "art form". Such ideas adopted in Japan during the late 19th century, together with the return of state patronage, rejuvenated sculpture. In 1868, the new government banned the traditional syncretism of Shinto and Buddhism and ordered them to separate Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in order to establish a centralized government by the Emperor, who was the supreme priest of Shinto. In response to this situation, some Shinto priests started to destroy Buddhist temples. Okakura Tenshin and others worked hard in political activities to protect Buddhist art, and the government declared that it would protect Buddhism. The destruction stopped around 1874, but many precious Buddhist statues were lost. Contemporary art After World War II, sculptors turned away from the figurative French school of Rodin and Maillol toward aggressive modern and avant-garde forms and materials, sometimes on an enormous scale. A profusion of materials and techniques characterized these new experimental sculptures, which also absorbed the ideas of international "op" (optical illusion) and "pop" (popular motif) art. A number of innovative artists were both sculptors and painters or printmakers, their new theories cutting across material boundaries. In the 1970s, the ideas of contextual placement of natural objects of stone, wood, bamboo, and paper into relationships with people and their environment were embodied in the mono-ha school. The mono-ha artists emphasized materiality as the most important aspect of art and brought to an end the antiformalism that had dominated the avant-garde