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Cheap kitchenware for Tokyo — until a potter came home from Cornwall.
Would you like one like this? ↓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.
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.
5.0 · Star Seller on Etsy ↗Pick a budget and who it is for — that is enough. We write back with photographs, condition and a price.
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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.
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