No glaze inside the pot. That is not an oversight — it is the point.
Tokoname sits on the Chita peninsula in Aichi, on clay so full of iron that everything made from it comes out red. It is the oldest and by far the largest of the Six Ancient Kilns: by the late Heian period there were some three thousand kilns scattered over these hills, firing great storage jars that went out along the coast by boat.
What the town is known for now is much smaller. The kyūsu — the teapot with the handle set at right angles to the spout — arrived late. In the Meiji period a Chinese potter, Jin Shiheng, was brought to Tokoname and taught the local men the Yixing manner of working unglazed red clay, and the small red teapot has been the town's work ever since.
Iron-rich red clay, the reason the pot is this colour and never glazed.
Body, spout and handle thrown separately, then joined.
The strainer is pierced from inside, hole by hole, before the clay dries.
Fired unglazed until it vitrifies. The iron then softens the tannin in the tea.
The important thing about it is what is missing. There is no glaze inside. The iron in the bare clay meets the tannin in the tea, and Japanese tea drinkers will tell you it takes the edge off the bitterness in sencha. Believe that or not — the pot does change. After a few hundred brews the inside darkens, the outside takes a soft shine from being handled, and it is no longer the pot you bought.
Which is why it must never be washed with soap. Hot water, then leave it to dry. A Tokoname kyūsu scrubbed clean has been put back to the beginning.
The town makes something else in far greater quantity, and has for a century: ceramic drainage pipe. There is a lane there called Dōkan-zaka, pipe slope, where the retaining walls are built of stacked pipes and shōchū bottles set into the clay. It is the least precious thing in this house and one of the best.
A peninsula town built on iron-red clay, and the oldest of the Six Ancient Kilns. At its height in the twelfth century there were some three thousand kilns on these hills turning out storage jars, and the jars went everywhere the coastal boats went — Tokoname pots have been dug up the length of Japan.
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.