A pottery tour of Japan

In search of ceramic beauty (published in the Washington Times, 9/23/00)
By Richard Busch

More than perhaps any other country on the planet, Japan seems immersed in physical beauty, a country that offers the visitor a movable feast for the eyes. Esthetically pleasing sights pop up all over the place: zen gardens, the careful presentation of food in restaurants, calligraphic writing, artful flower arrangements, shoji screens, the meticulous packaging of store purchases, and a dazzling array of crafts—baskets, wood carvings, weaving, lacquerware, handmade cutlery, gold leaf, delicate fans, wicker ware, and perhaps most ubiquitous of all, pottery.

I had come to Japan on a pottery mission. As a part-time potter and someone who holds traditional Japanese pottery in high regard, I wanted to immerse myself for a few days and explore pottery towns, museums, galleries, craft shops, department stores—anywhere that good traditional handmade pottery can be seen and appreciated. I hoped to gain some small measure of insight into what it is about Japanese pottery that I find so special, so appealing, so beautiful. I also hoped to meet a few potters and with luck gain some modest understanding of their approach and thinking.

With help from the Japan National Tourist Organization, I was able to arrange an itinerary that included introductions to several potters, plus the aid of volunteer guides who were able to translate when necessary, as well as negotiate me around various cities and towns. (See box for more information.) My wanderings took me to the cities of Tokyo and Kyoto, the ancient pottery town of Hagi on the west coast of Honshu, and to Tajimi, near Nagoya, another place where potters have been turning out work for many centuries.

During my wanderings I was impressed by the role that pottery plays in everyday life in this fascinating country. Virtually every Japanese I met, it seems, had a basic appreciation for good pottery, and regularly uses a mix of attractive handmade vessels for food serving, as well as for flower arranging and for the tea ceremony. And while I found pottery prices on the high side, compared to here in the U.S., even for dinner ware and other functional purposes, I was dazzled by the prices paid by serious collectors for the work made by Japan’s potter artists—far higher than anything I’d seen anywhere else in the world.

My first shocking encounter with this came on the 6th floor—the sign read ”lifestyle and art floor”—of the Takashimaya department store near Tokyo’s Ginza. Like other department stores throughout Japan, Takashimaya is one of the places where many of the country’s best potters show their work. On display in a glass case were 11 mostly medium-size pieces—bowls, jars, lidded containers—by a potter named Sugimoto Teiko, who, said the notice, was born in 1935 and lives near Osaka. His prices ranged from 550,000 yen (roughly $5,200) for a small teabowl to 1,500,000 yen (about $14,500) for a tea-ceremony water jar. All told, the 11 pieces added up to 8,250,000 yen (just under $79,000). They had been fired for several days in a woodburning anagama kiln, and the thick natural-ash glazes were stunningly beautiful. The prices, though, I found astonishing.

In another case a few yards away sat a single tea bowl, perhaps six inches in diameter, with a reddish white shino glaze. The sign said it was a ”snow cup,” and that the potter’s name was Suzuki Kura. Price tag: 3,250,000 yen—$30,500.
Prices like these, of course, are at the extreme high end of the market, and are commanded only by Japan’s top potters, whose work is considered as much an art as painting and sculpture. Some of these men (there are few female potters in this society) have officially been designated ”Living National Treasures,” and have attained a kind of celebrity status.

Though much of the work produced by top-end potters is nonfunctional, some of the high-priced pieces, such as the aforementioned tea bowls and lidded water jars, are made for use in chanoyu, the tea ceremony, whose roots lie deep in the soil of Japanese history and culture. Tea drinking in Japan dates back to the 8th century, when tea was introduced from China. At first it became the exclusive rite of Zen monasteries; then, in the 13th century, was taken up by samurai, Japan’s warrior aristocracy. They began to transform tea drinking into a ritual, carefully heating the water in special jars, whisking powered tea using special utensils, and serving the bright green brew to guests in special bowls reserved for the occasion.

By the 16th century, the practice had spread to the merchant class, and the ideal vessels sought after by tea masters became the simple, unpretentious, unglazed earthenware vessels made in the countryside by anonymous farmers for use as water buckets, storage jars, and ordinary food bowls. The clay was unprocessed and the pots were fired in crude tunnel kilns scooped out of the ground. The results were rough but colorful—an effect that early tea masters revered and poetically called ”landscape.”

The 16th century was a watershed period in the development of Japanese ceramics, and part of that history led me to Kyoto. It was here, in the middle of the century, that Raku bowls came into use—a tradition that continues to this day. Developed by a Kyoto artisan named Chojiro, these are fashioned quickly by hand, without a wheel, their shapes deliberately uneven and thick, their textures rough. Full of visual and tactile character, the small bowls became favored for the tea ceremony, and generations of Raku masters have followed Chojiro through the centuries.

In one of Kyoto’s narrow backstreets I visited the Raku Museum, located next to the workshop and kiln of Raku Kichizaemon, the 17th and current master in the family line. There I beheld, with no small degree of awe, priceless tea bowls going back to the mid-1500s. One of them, by Chojiro himself, was named ”Hatsuyuki,” (bowls, I learned, were often given names) meaning ”first snow of the season.”

On display by the door I opened a pamphlet by Kichizaemon and happened upon a Zen-like passage he recently wrote about his approach to making pots: ”…to go beyond the limits of expression…to let oneself be led by one’s tactile senses, and to accept the inevitability of incompleteness….” As I was coming to realize, the concept of incompleteness, of imperfection, lay at the heart not only of Raku bowls, but of much of Japanese pottery in general, both historical and contemporary.

One day I followed the path of tea, and of pottery, to Hagi, a three-hour ride on the bullet train from Kyoto. It’s a pretty town, surounded by a canal, with narrow streets, the remains of a feudal lord’s castle, and dozens of well-preserved samurai houses from the 1800s—well worth a visit for these attributes alone. During the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Hagi became one of several west-coast villages to benefit from the influence of Korean potters, who had long been admired by Japanese tea-ceremony practitioners for their advanced skills and technical knowledge, particularly in the art of kiln building.

In 1592 and again in 1597, Japanese warriors invaded Korea, and upon their return brought back potters—in many cases kidnapped them—to live in Japan and work for the local daimyo, feudal lords. These military actions became known as the ”Pottery Wars.” The daimyo, who, like the samurai, were passionate about the tea ceremony, provided these potters with homes, workshops, facilities for building kilns, and stipends of rice—all in exchange for the work they would produce, which would become the exclusive property of the lord. It was during this era that the local Hagi daimyo, Mori Terumoto, appropriated the services of a Korean potter named Ri-kei, and gave him the name Saka Koraizaemon. He also gave him three servants plus nine koku of rice per year. (A koku was 180 liters, approximately enough to feed one person for one year.)

Though he may have been brought to Japan against his will, it was certainly a good deal for Ri-kei, and speaks to the respect and value the Japanese attached to the skills of the Korean potters of the day. And from that auspicious beginning, the Saka family has continued to produce pottery in Hagi, especially tea bowls, for almost another 400 years. I was fortunate to gain an introduction to Saka Koraizaemon the 12th, current head of the Saka clan, who was trained as a fine-arts painter, but took up pottery at age 33 to continue the family tradition.

Saka-san’s pots are highly valued and sell for steep prices, and he has even achieved celebrity status for having recently been featured in a TV special on his work. He related to me the family history, spoke of his love for both painting and pottery, and offered his views on the differences. ”I think that making ceramic work is much more difficult technically than painting,” he offered. ”With painting you have much more control. With pottery you don’t know for certain what will come out of the kiln. I can fire 100 bowls and get only ten good ones. That’s typical. But I feel that pottery is very high-level work. I believe it is worth doing.”

He led me to a room on the second floor of his home and studio where he exhibits family tea bowls from the 17th century to the present day. They were all different, though there was a similar stylistic feeling throughout. He allowed me to hold in my hands a bowl made by the first Saka Koraizaemon some 380 years ago. It was gray and plain and roughly shaped, not beautiful by any conventional standards, and looked well used. I knelt on the floor, carefully cupped my hands around it, and felt a slight shiver at the thought of touching a pot that had been fashioned by the hands of that Korean immigrant such a long time ago.

In Hagi I was also introduced Hamanaka Gesson, whose pedigree as a potter/artist is just 30 years (he comes from a family of doctors), but whose work reflects the generations-old tradition of earthiness and simplicity. He has set aside a room in his home as a gallery space, and welcomes visitors. As was done in the 16th century, he uses local clays and fires his work in a wood-burning kiln, sometimes for as long as three days to get the colors and ash-glaze effects he wants. Hamanaka has exhibited widely, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Gallery Dai Ichi in Tokyo, as well as in other galleries throughout Japan.

”I learned by training with a master potter for seven years,” he told me, ”the way most potters here learn. It was hard work, and after a short period of time I wanted to quit. But my mother wouldn’t let me. She told me I needed the discipline. So I stayed. When I reached the age of 25 I set up my own studio.” The bowls, vases, jars, and platters that I saw in his home, with their subtle colors and richly textured surfaces, had the look of pots made with ease, with a feeling of spontaneity.

In a way, they reminded me of pots I had seen in Tokyo at the Mingeikan, Mingei Museum—an important stop for anyone who wants to gain an understanding of 20th century Japanese pottery and its historical influences. Mingei is a word for folk art, which harks back to the simple, unpretentious pots that were made centuries ago by the likes of farmers and Korean immigrants—the kind of pottery that is widely appreciated in Japan today, but which for a time had been lost.

As Japan emerged from the feudal period in the mid-1800s, emphasis was placed on mass producing pottery, much of it for export and lacking a handmade look and feel. Consequently many of the old traditions went by the wayside, but in the 1920s a renewed appreciation for the old methods took hold. The folk-art movement drew attention back to the quiet, unassuming beauty of pottery made in earlier times by anonymous craftsmen without any purpose or pretense other than to make something efficiently, fashioned from local materials, without fuss, and for a specific functional purpose.

The Mingeikan was founded in 1936 by one of the movement’s leaders, Yanagi Soetsu. Housed in a handsome wooden building on a small street in the southwest part of Tokyo, it’s a peaceful and compelling place to see fine examples of both historic pottery dating back thousands of years, as well as 20th-century pots produced by men whose work has been profoundly influenced by ancient traditions—Kawai Kangiro, Shimaoka Tatsuo, Hamada Shoji, and others, including the Englishman Bernard Leach who was close friends with many Japanese potters, and who played an important role in the mingei movement.
Being there reminded me of a wonderful passage in Yanagi’s book, The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty, which offers insight into the thinking of this influential man, his movement, and of a particularly Japanese sense of the nature of beauty as it relates to pottery. The passage deals with his first encounter with the 16th-century Kizaemon tea bowl, made by an unknown Korean potter and without doubt the most famous and highly revered historic pot in all of Japan. (It got its name from an Osaka merchant who owned it.) Yanagi noted that for years he had anticipated seeing this bowl, which, as he wrote, had the reputation for being ”the embodiment in miniature of beauty, of the love of beauty, of the philosohy of beauty, and of the relationship of beauty and life.”

But upon seeing it for the first time, Yanagi was momentarily startled by its ordinariness. It was ”just a Korean food bowl,” he wrote, ”a bowl, moreover, that a poor man would use every day—commonest crockery.”

He saw it as ”an article without the flavor of personality; used carelessly by its owner; something anyone could have bought anywhere and everywhere…. The shape revealed no particular thought; it was one of many. The work had been fast; the turning was rough, done with dirty hands; the throwing slipshod; the glaze had run over the foot…. Sand had stuck to the pot, but nobody minded; no one invested the thing with any dreams.”

Yanagi goes on at length to describe the common, unremarkable nature of the bowl. ”But,” he concludes, ”that was as it should be. The plain and unagitated, the uncalculated, the harmless, the straightforward, the natural, the innocent, the humble, the modest: where does beauty lie if not in these qualities?”

While in Tokyo, I spent an enjoyable afternoon in pursuit of other examples of simple, unadorned beauty in two of the city’s museums known for their excellent pottery collections. One was the Tokyo National Museum and its extensive ceramics gallery that traces the history and development of pottery in Japan, with pots that date back some 4,500 years. Among the standouts for me were several 16th-century pots with ash-glaze drips and wonderfully aysmmetrical shapes, some from Shigaraki, and one water jar from Bizen—two of Japan’s oldest and most famous pottery towns.

Another interesting stop in Tokyo was the Idemitsu museum, which has not only a nice collection of historical pots, but a large roomful of pottery shards gathered from various historic kiln sites throughout Japan.

Shards?

At first thought, one might wonder who would want to look at pieces of broken pots—but the fact is, lots of people. Dozens wandered in while I was there, walking slowly among the glass cases, discussing particular specimens with companions, obviously fascinated. And as I inspected the collection, I too could see that many of the pieces revealed quite beautiful textures and patterns. Certainly the Idemitsu reveals something about the Japanese interest level in pottery: where else in the world would a collection of broken pots draw crowds?

Another strong indication to me of the Japanese fascination with handmade ceramics was its widespread use in restaurants. Almost wherever I had a meal, it seemed, the food was served on attractive vessels. Perhaps the best example of this was at a restaurant called Kozue—widely considered one of the best Japanese restaurants in Tokyo—located on the 40th floor of the Park Hyatt Hotel with a stunning view of Mt. Fuji out the window to the west. Long before the restaurant opened, head chef Kenichiro Ooe embarked on a pottery-finding mission. He spent four months and thousands of dollars traveling around Japan visiting potters at their studios in a relentless quest for the perfect bowls, platters, and serving dishes for his culinary creations.

”I think that beautiful presentation of food is as important as the food itself,” Ooe-san explained. ”I want our guests to be impressed by both. Each course—an appetiser, soup, something steamed, grilled fish, and so on—demands the right kind of vessel, with the right size and shape and textures and colors. So I have paid a lot of attention to that.”
That attention was clearly evident: during my meal there I found myself focusing as much attention on the bowls, platters, and plates—most of them made in the classic earthy style, with its emphasis on texture and asymmetry that seemed particularly appropriate for the purpose—as I did on each of his varied and visually appealing courses.

A few days later, while in Kyoto, I gained further insight into the Japanese pottery esthetic with a visit to the former home and kiln of Kawai Kanjiro, one of the founders of the mingei movement and one of the most famous and highly respected of all Japanese potters. The wooden home, which he designed to resemble a rural cottage, is now a museum (Kawai died in 1966) and is full of his belongings, including many of his excellent pots. A few steps from the house is his studio and, out back, his multi-chamber noborigama climbing kiln. His granddaughter, Sagi—who was nine when Kawai died, but remembers him well and fondly for allowing her to toddle around the home and studio as a little girl—gave me a spirited and informative tour of the property.

Kawai was something of a poet and philosopher, as well as a potter, and some of his poems and thoughts are published in a small pamphlet titled We Do Not Work Alone, that I found at the front desk. In it, Kawai tells a revealing story about the nature of beauty as he saw it. The story also offers insight into the nature of beauty as understood by many Japanese potters and those who appreciate pottery:

”It is a story of olden times,” he explains, ”of the days when men did not display their wealth with jewels or such splendid things, but instead bought a moss-covered stone or the gnarled stump of a tree for their gardens. In such a time there was a man who bought a vase.

”It was a beautiful thing—new and without a flaw. He wanted to show this vase to a friend who was coming to call, but he was embarrassed with it. It was too new and perfect. So he took a brush and dipped it into gilt lacquer, which was used in those days to mend pieces of broken pottery. Then he drew a crooked line across the face of the brand new vase.

”Now the line on the vase made it look old and mended. It was no longer perfect. The man was satisfied and he showed it to his friend. The friend understood. He admired the vase and appreciated what this man had done.

”Isn’t that a wonderful story?” Kawaai said. ”That is a real Japanese story. If you can understand that, you can understand how the Japanese have found beauty in what may seem imperfect to man, but which is perfect by the standards of nature.”

On my last day in Japan I took a train to Tajimi, a small pottery town north of Nagoya, between Kyoto and Tokyo, in an area that has been producing pottery for many centuries and where the majority of residents are either potters or have something to do with pottery. There I visited with Toshisada Wakao, whose ancestors, many of them potters, go back more than 700 years. Wakao-san is in his 60s and has been making pottery most of his life. Though trained as a production potter, turning out functional pieces—dinner ware and such, for sale in stores—he later developed into a highly acclaimed artist whose stunning work, mainly using a reddish white shino glaze common to the region, has been exhibited at the Smithsonian, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and the Royal Albert Museum in London, among others. His tea bowls sell for thousands of dollars, and larger pieces for much more.

Wakao is a soft-spoken man with a warm, kindly face and manner. ”My father was a potter,” he explained to me. ”He made tokkuri, sake bottles, for which Tajimi is famous, and other functional ware. After the war, we were very poor and I left school to help my father to make ends meet.”

But Wakao-san had other ambitions—”to make something special,” as he puts it. ”So at night, after working all day with my father, I went back to the studio and made things purely for artistic expression.”

Over the years Wakao has developed a unique approach to his pottery, using wax resist to apply designs on his pots, and firing them for 120 hours in his kiln behind his house. He has been tinkering with the kiln design for more than 30 years now, and feels that he has finally ”got it right—more or less.”

In a book of his work, he has written: ”Peach and chestnut trees bear fruit in three years, persimmon trees in eight. Skill comes in a decade, and art in a lifetime. Pottery takes a lifetime and a half. Pottery making is difficult. I need half of my lifetime in my next existence. It is really difficult.” Though it has taken him much of his life to develop the technical skills to control what he is doing, he quickly admits that when it comes to making pottery, complete control is impossible. ”In the end,” he says, ”we must be humble, and realize that other forces are at work. Nature, clay, stone, fire, and many other things help me do my job.”

When I asked him for a copy of his resume, he told me he didn’t have one. ”I don’t care about—what I’ve done in the past,” he said. ”I only care about what I do now.”