The Inland Sea

In the old calendar the tenth month is kannazuki, the month with no gods, because they have all gone to Izumo. In Izumo alone it is called kamiarizuki, the month with gods. They meet at Izumo Taisha to settle the coming year’s marriages, which is why people go there to ask for a partner and not for money.

The sea itself was holy. At Miyajima the island was sacred enough that a shrine could not stand on its soil, so it was built out over the water on piles and the great gate stands in the tide. Sailors going down the Inland Sea prayed to Konpira on the Sanuki shore, whose shrine is at the top of seven hundred and eighty-five stone steps. They climbed them.

Shikoku has a ring of eighty-eight temples around its coast, walked since the ninth century for the monk Kūkai, who was born on the island. Pilgrims write four characters on their hats: two travelling together. The second is Kūkai, who is not regarded as dead.

Before there were roads there was the Inland Sea, and everything moved on it: rice to the capital, salt, iron, and later the kitamaebune ships that ran all the way round the country to Hokkaidō. Whoever held the straits held the trade. For two centuries that was the Murakami — sailors the Portuguese called pirates, who sold safe passage and flew their crest from the mast of any ship that had paid for it.

The mountains behind produced the iron. The tatara furnaces of the Chūgoku range smelted iron sand into steel, and Bizen in Okayama grew into the largest school of swordsmiths in Japan; at its height the town of Osafune held hundreds of smiths at once.

Hagi is on the far western tip, facing away from everything. The Mōri were sent there in 1600 after backing the losing side at Sekigahara, and they stayed there, poorer and quieter, for two hundred and sixty years. Then Chōshū — Hagi’s domain — brought the shogunate down.

Bizen ware has no glaze. None. The pots go into a climbing kiln for ten to fourteen days and everything on the surface is an accident of where each one stood: pine ash melting onto a shoulder, rice straw wrapped round a jar leaving red scars, one pot shielding another from the fire. It has been done this way since the Heian period without a break.

Hagi does have a glaze, but it is made to fail. The clay and the glaze shrink at different rates, so the surface crazes into a net of fine cracks and tea seeps into them. A Hagi bowl used every day for years changes colour. They call it the seven changes of Hagi, and it is the reason to own one.

There is a notch cut into the foot ring of most Hagi bowls. The usual explanation is that a lord’s ware could not be sold to commoners unless it was flawed, so the potters put the flaw in themselves. Whether or not that is really where it came from, they still cut the notch.