Cheap kitchenware for Tokyo — until a potter came home from Cornwall.
Mashiko began in 1853 making things nobody was meant to admire: water jars, mortars, teapots, cheap and thick and sent down to feed Edo. For seventy years that is all it was.
In 1924 Hamada Shōji settled there. He had just spent three years at St Ives in Cornwall building a Japanese climbing kiln with Bernard Leach, and he chose Mashiko precisely because it had no reputation to live up to — coarse local clay, four rough glazes, and a town that had never once been called artistic.
Local clay, heavy with iron and sand — it will not go thin or delicate.
Thrown for daily use: bowls, pots, plates, in numbers.
Persimmon red, rice-ash white, treacle brown — glazes made from what is to hand.
Fired once, and left plain. Mingei taste asks for nothing more.
With Yanagi Sōetsu and Kawai Kanjirō he gave the idea a name: mingei, the beauty of things made for use by people who were not trying to make art. Mashiko became its address. Hamada was named a Living National Treasure in 1955 and refused to sign his pots — a signature, he said, turns the pot into a name.
The glazes are local and there are not many: kaki, a persimmon-brown from iron; ame, amber; nuka, an opaque white from rice-husk ash; and a blue-black. The clay is sandy and full of iron and will not be thrown thin, which is why a Mashiko piece sits heavy in the hand and feels like it was meant to be picked up wet.
In March 2011 the earthquake brought down most of the kilns in the town. They were rebuilt, and the twice-yearly pottery fair still fills the main road.
Two hours north of Tokyo, and for its first seventy years that was the whole business model: coarse local clay, four glazes, and cheap useful pots sent down to the capital. Nobody came to look.
Pieces are found one at a time, in Japan, and photographed before they are listed. Tell us what you are looking for, and we will write when something arrives that answers it.
We write when there is something to write about — some months twice, some months not at all.
Noted. We will write when something arrives.