Visiting Four Japanese Potters

(From Ceramics Monthly, November 2001)
By Richard Busch

In 2000 I had the great good fortune visit Japan for several days on a self-imposed pottery mission, including visits to important galleries and museum collections—all fascinating and inspirational for me because of my appreciation for oriental ceramics and my involvement as a potter. But the biggest highlights of my trip were several meetings with notable potters in their homes and studios—priceless opportunities to learn something about their backgrounds, their techniques, and their philosophies.

The visits were arranged with the help of the Japan National Tourism Organization in New York, who also helped connect me with translators (see box). I started my visits in Hagi, a three-hour ride on the bullet train west from Kyoto to the island’s coast. It’s a pretty town, surrounded by a canal, with narrow streets, the remains of an ancient feudal lord’s castle, and dozens of well-preserved samurai houses from the 1800s—all well worth a visit for these attributes alone.

Hagi’s connection with historical Japanese pottery runs deep and relates directly to chanoyu, the tea ceremony. Tea drinking in Japan dates back to the 8th century, when tea was introduced from China. At first it became the exclusive rite of Buddhist monasteries; then, in the 13th century, was taken up by samurai, Japan’s warrior aristocracy. They began to transform tea drinking into a ritual in which the water was carefully heated in special iron kettles, powdered tea was whisked with special utensils, and the bright green brew was served to guests in special bowls reserved for the occasion.
During the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Hagi became one of several coastal 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, but also for their simple, unadorned vessels that the Japanese used for water jars and tea bowls.

In 1592 and again in 1597, Japanese samurai invaded Korea, and upon their return brought back potters—in some cases kidnapped them—to live in Hagi and elsewhere in Japan, and to 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 meet Saka Koraizaemon the 12th, current head of the Saka family, 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. We sat on tatami mats on the floor of his home as he related 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 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. 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 those Korean immigrants—anonymous craftsmen who made their ware without any purpose or pretense other than to make something efficiently, fashioned from local materials, without fuss, and for a specific functional purpose. Though appreciation for this esthetic waned in the mid-19th century—when emphasis was placed on mass producing pottery, much of it for export and lacking a handmade look and feel—a rewakening occurred in the 1930s, led by Yanagi Soetsu and followed by Kawai Kanjiro, Hamada Shoji, Shimaoka Tatsuzo, Bernard Leach, and others.]

On another day 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. As an example of how important pottery is here, there are two high schools in Tajimi—one regular high school, and one that specializes in teaching ceramics. There I visited with Ando Hidetaki, who comes from a pottery family going back to his grandfather who set up a noborigama kiln here in the late 1800s. They produced mainly tokkuri—sake bottles—and sake cups.

Ando-san, an intense but affable man in his late 50s, graduated from the ceramics high school and in 1960 was noticed by a famous potter from the nearby town of Seto, Tokuro Kato, who encouraged the young man to pursue his craft. ”In my mid-20s I decided to be an artist potter,” he explained to me, ”and I built my anagama kiln, which I named Sentarogama, which is the name my grandfather gave his kiln.

We were sitting around a table in his gallery, across the street from his home.

Surrounding us were pots from a recent firing. There were handsome bowls and rugged, angular enclosed forms with a green ash glaze, some resembling small boulders. The glaze, he said, was made from 50 percent red pine and 50 percent feldspar, plus ”a little red iron oxide.”

He told me he digs his own clay from a deposit not far from his kiln, in the mountains a few miles outside Hagi, with help from his son, Takumi, and one or two of his assistants. ”I’m a perfectionist,” he said, ”so I must oversee everything myself.” He asked me if I’d like to see his kiln and where he digs his clay if I promised not to reveal its exact location. I readily agreed. We piled into his four-wheel and Takumi drove us up into the mountains, on narrow dirt roads, until we turned into an almost invisible driveway that led to the kiln. As we approached I could see huge piles of stacked wood—some 3,000 bundles.

The kiln is quite small, perhaps 60 cubic feet, and holds about 200 pieces. ”We fire twice a year,” he explained, ”over a period of six days. We first take the temperature up to 950C, stoking every 30 to 40 minutes, and hold that temperature for three days. Then we go from 950 to 1250, stoking every four to five minutes. That takes another three days and nights. We go through approximately 1,000 bundles of wood. Out of the 200 pieces in the kiln, perhaps 20 are acceptable.”

Not surprisingly, his pots sell for thousands of dollars, though he supplements his income with a line of handsome production pots that he, his son, and his assistants produce in a large studio, fire in a conventional gas kiln, and sell in shops around town and elsewhere in the country.

In Tajimi I also met Wakao Toshisada, 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.”

As mentioned in the text, the Japan National Tourist Organization (JNTO) can help visitors set up a visit to Japan, including help in arranging for volunteer guides—generally retired men and women who, for no fee, will translate and help you get around. All they expect is that you will pick up their transportation costs to and from your hotel, plus lunch. It’s a great deal. JNTO can be reached at 1 Rockefeller Plaza, Suite 1250, New York, NY 10020; phone 212-757-5640.

Addresses and phones for the potters mentioned are as follows:

Saka Koraizaemon, 1922 Chinto, Hagi City 758-0011, Japan; phone 0838-22-0236

Hamanaka Gesson, 905 Oya, Hagi City 758-0000, Japan; phone 0838-22-7141

Ando Hidetake, 10-98 Ichinokura-cho, Tajimi City, Gifu Prefecture, Japan; phone 0572-22-3750

Wakao Toshisada, 2-152 Onada-cho, Tajimi City, Gifu Prefecture, Japan; phone 0572-22-0601