Fourteen pieces, each with a place, a period and a wall label. This is the index; the exhibition itself runs along the scroll.
A museum collection. Each piece is catalogued, not priced.
It arrives with no eyes. You are expected to finish it.
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The one craft this house can walk to.
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The black spots are smallpox. The toy was meant to take them instead of the child.
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A basket on a dog's head is a pun, and the pun is a wish.
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Nothing here was left to chance. Not one whisker.
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The potter does not choose the colour. The fire does.
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No glaze at all. Every colour on it was put there by the fire.
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Japan made no porcelain at all until a Korean potter found a white hill here.
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Cheap kitchenware for Tokyo — until a potter came home from Cornwall.
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No glaze inside the pot. That is not an oversight — it is the point.
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The bowl is not finished when you buy it. You finish it, over about ten years.
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You are not meant to look at it. You are meant to shake it.
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Not a demon. A god who comes down the mountain once a year to check on you.
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It bites people on the head. Being bitten is the good part.
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Hokkaidō's most famous carving was copied from a Swiss souvenir.
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The white is not paint. It is shell, ground fine and laid on ten times over.
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Turn the head and it squeaks. That squeak is how you know where it was made.
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The knife marks are not sanded away. They are the finish.
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A kimono has no pockets. That is the entire reason this exists.
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Two rooms have to share it, so it is carved through — from both sides.
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Not one colour in it is a dye. Every shade is a different tree.
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The gold wears thin at the crown and the knuckles. That is where hands go.
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Bought for a boy in May, kept in its box for the other eleven months.
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A helmet with no head in it, set out for one month a year.
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Chinese zodiac, twelfth sign: a pig. Japanese zodiac, twelfth sign: this.
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Seven gods in one boat, and only one of them is Japanese.
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Cast iron, not bronze — and the water it boils is not the same water.
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The obi that does not come undone. That is the whole reputation.
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Worked out by a twelve-year-old girl who was looking at a worn-out cloth.
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Twelve layers of court robe between them, and not one visible stitch on either.
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A fan painter worked out how to stop one colour running into the next, and silk became a canvas.
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Peasants were forbidden cotton. So they stitched cotton into hemp until it was warm.
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The name means bath spread. You stood on it while you undressed, then wrapped your clothes in it.
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