The potter does not choose the colour. The fire does.
The clay is dug from the bed of a lake that dried up long ago. It is coarse and full of feldspar, and in the heat the grains burst white through the surface like grit through bread.
Shigaraki uses no glaze. Pine ash rises inside the kiln, settles on the shoulder of the pot and melts there into glass. Where the flame has actually licked the clay, the surface turns scarlet.
Local clay full of feldspar grit that will burst white through the surface.
Built or thrown thick enough to survive a very long firing.
Days in an anagama. Wood ash melts on the shoulders into green glass.
Where the flame licked the clay it comes out orange-red. Nobody places that.
So the potter builds the form, lights the kiln, and waits three days to find out what was made. No two pieces come out the same, and the potters made peace with that six hundred years ago.
The tanuki is the village's other export. In 1951 the Emperor Shōwa visited, the villagers lined the road with the tanuki they had made, and he wrote a poem about the sight. From that year everyone in Japan knew what a Shigaraki tanuki was.
He wears a straw hat, carries a flask, and is a shapeshifter — cheerful, clever, not much interested in a fight. Write his name a different way, 他抜き, and it reads "to outdo the others". That is why he stands outside so many shops.
One more thing about this village. After the war a training centre opened here, Shigaraki Seinenryō, teaching pottery to young people with intellectual disabilities from the age of fifteen. It was not welcomed at first; a resident named Ishino Daisuke argued that they were adults, that the difference was small, and that there was work here they could do well. They learned to throw and to fire, and the work paid. We cannot tell you that any piece here came from their hands — we buy from private collections and the record rarely reaches that far. We can tell you this is the village, and this is part of what the village is.
One of the Six Ancient Kilns, and the clay is the reason. Shigaraki sits on the bed of a lake that dried up several million years ago, and the clay under the town is coarse, full of feldspar, and stands up to heat that would slump anything finer.
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.