The cup you hold the whole time

Most of what passes through here is looked at. A vase stands on a shelf. A scroll hangs and is read. You put them somewhere and then you look.

A guinomi is different. It is small enough to disappear inside a hand, and once the sake is poured you hold it until it is empty. Then you fill it again. Over an evening it spends more time against skin than on the table.

Potters know this, and it changes what they make. The foot is cut so the fingers find it. The rim is thinned where the lip goes. The weight is settled low. None of it shows in a photograph, and all of it is the reason a good one is hard to put down.

The same question, answered differently

What interests me is that every kiln answers it in its own way, and the answers do not agree.

Bizen, by Naoki Yokoyama. No glaze — the surface is what the fire left.

In Bizen there is no glaze at all. What you see on the surface is what the fire and the ash did over several days. Naoki Yokoyama, who trained under Fumio Kawabata and built his own climbing kiln in 2000, works in shizen neri-komi — the clay itself is marbled before it is thrown, so the pattern runs through the body rather than sitting on it.

Hagi goes the other way. The body is soft and open, the glaze crazes, and what you drink from it works its way in. Atsuyuki Ueda carved a wave into his and filled the carving with cobalt — somezogan, inlay by dyeing. It is a dark, tightly finished cup, which is not what most people expect from Hagi.

Iga, by Yosuke Kojima. Turn it and the view changes.

Iga is wood-fired and makes no attempt to be tidy. Yosuke Kojima fires in an anagama in Marubashira, where his family has worked since his father. What the flame leaves is called keshiki — landscape. The word is not decoration. You turn the cup and the view changes.

Karatsu paints. Munehiko Maruta, who studied under Atsuya Hamada, works in e-garatsu, iron oxide brushed onto rough clay and then glazed. The brushwork is quick and does not correct itself.

And then there is Shino

In 1930 a potter called Arakawa Toyozo found shards at Ogaya, in Gifu, and proved something the field had had wrong: Shino, Ki-Seto and Seto-guro came from Mino, not from Seto. He then spent the rest of his life making it. In 1955 he was designated a Living National Treasure for it.

Beni-Shino, by Arakawa Toyozo. The glaze he spent his life bringing back.

His beni-shino cup is here. Red Shino, in the glaze he gave his life to bringing back, with the box he signed.

There is also a set of three by the 13th Kakiemon, the 13th Nakazato Taroemon and the 12th Imaemon, each in its own box. Three houses, three answers, on one tray.

Sixteen of them

Bizen, Hagi, Karatsu, Iga, Shino, Kutani, Tamba. Most come with the wooden box the maker signed. Each is one piece and there is no second.

In the next piece I write about the people rather than the kilns.

Kei — Kura Finds