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No glaze at all. Every colour on it was put there by the fire.
Would you like one like this? ↓Bizen is the kiln that refuses glaze. The pot goes into the fire bare and comes out dressed, and nothing you can see on it was painted, dipped or poured. It was burned on.
What the fire does has names. Goma — sesame — is pine ash that lands on the shoulder during the firing and melts into a glassy olive speckle. Hidasuki is the scarlet line left behind when rice straw wrapped round the piece burns away against the clay. Sangiri is the grey and blue-black on a piece that was buried in charcoal where the air could not reach it.
On the shelf now, from other workshops
Not this story's piece: new work from Japan's workshops that can be ordered today.
Kutani Ryusen Vasegold leaf pine crane flower vessel$189
Hakata Ningyo Monkey FigurineQueen Mother of the West peach$179
Oga Peninsula Namahage Wall HangingJapanese Red Oni Mask$109
Seibo Kitamura Fighting Spirit Bronze Bull SculptureYokozuna Ushi Cast Metal$465Pieces like this come and go, and most of what the house finds never goes online.
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Clay is dug from under the rice paddies and left to age, sometimes for years.
Thrown on the wheel. No glaze will ever be put on it.
Packed with straw and shells that will burn their marks into the surface.
Ten to fourteen days of red pine. Falling ash makes the only glaze there is.
None of these can be ordered. The potter decides only where in the kiln a piece will stand and how it is packed, and then feeds red pine into the mouth of the kiln for ten to fourteen days and waits. Some of what comes out is better than anything he could have designed. Some of it is a loss.
The clay is hiyose, a heavy iron-rich clay dug from beneath the rice paddies around Imbe and aged for years before it is thrown. It fires very hard, and the pieces are heavier than they look.
The kiln nearly died. By the early twentieth century almost nobody wanted unglazed ware, and the trade was down to roof tiles and drainpipes. Kaneshige Tōyō went back to the Momoyama-period Bizen in museum collections and rebuilt the style from it; in 1956 he was named a Living National Treasure, and five Bizen potters have held the title since.
They say in Okayama that beer keeps its head longer in a Bizen cup. Whether that is true is beside the point. It is the sort of thing a town says about something it has been making for eight hundred years.
Imbe is a small town with kiln chimneys standing between the houses and a railway station that smells faintly of woodsmoke in firing season. The clay comes from under the rice paddies around it — heavy, iron-rich, and left to age for years before anyone throws it.
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