A Potter's Pilgrimage- Japan (Part 1)

In August this year I had the immense fortune to travel to Japan. My partner was out there already and the Royal Navy enabled spouses to visit due to the length of deployment. I got to finally see Hugo and I got to explore some of Japan's most incredible pottery places. What a dream!

Growing up in Australia, Japanese is a common language to learn at school thanks to our global proximity. I studied Japanese from Year 6 through to Year 12 and got to stay with a host family in Tokyo back in 2010, then visit again with my sister in 2014. It's safe to say I adore Japan and have done for a really long time, long before I was even aware of ceramics as a craft form. Now that I'm a ceramicist my love for Japan is kind of exponentially growing. When this opportunity came up to visit Hugo while he was stationed there, I was inconsolably excited and Hugo gave me full control of the itinerary (this may have been because their wifi is so bad on ship that he didn't have a choice).

Having been to Tokyo before and knowing it's not really Hugo and my preferred way to holiday, I skipped out on all the typical Tokyo things and focused our 11 day trip on the crafts we both love; ceramics and wood working. If you know anything about Japan you're probably aware of the standards and quality of their craftsmanship. Everything they do, they do to the heighest level of perfection and this trip was all about celebrating that and learning as much as we could.

KOBE

Our first stop was the city of Kobe, south of Osaka and a short 3 hr shinkansen from Tokyo. Kobe is most famous for it's wagyu beef however that wasn't why we visited. This is also the home of the country's best woodworking museum, the Takenaka Carpentary Tools Museum.

Filled with the most exquisite examples of joinery, the story of the manufacturing of the tools and how each carpenter made his own and as he progressed in his trade (it was invariably 'he'), he'd make more elaborate and beautiful tools. There were hundreds of unique planes, ink pots for expansive measuring for temples and shrines, old blue prints from hand drawn, sometimes to-scale facets of buildings and so many incredible examples of native woods. I loved how the wood was celebrated as much as the craftsmanship and how closely the makers observed each tree's unique grains and properties that'd be best for each job they were working on.

The precision and pride really blew us away. Hugo was in heaven. There was a really strong theme of the wood being celebrated for it's natural beauty rather than extreme decoration and elaborate showing off of skills unlike in western woodworking. Where we went through the Baroque and rococo movements of more-is-more, the tightness and weightlessness of Japanese carpentary spoke more than any level of detail could. It was really moving and definitely a lesson in working with your material rather than bending it to fit your ideals. Also... the smell. By god I won't ever forget the smell of that museum! If you get to visit Japan House in London and their wood exhibition is still on I highly recommend it - it's a tiny proximation of the Takenaka museum and you get to smell the woods.

Kobe also saw us hiking up Nunobiki Waterfalls and Herb Garden - one of three sacred falls of Japan. I got to taste my first Kobe beef up there, we strolled the exquisite gardens and had a really relaxed and wonderful time in Kobe. It's a small city, really walkable and I'd highly recommend it! We stayed in an area close to the Ijinkan region which we had no idea existed until we arrived. Turns out that Kobe was one of the most significant trading ports of Japan before the Mingei Restoration when western trade was still very closely monitored and kept small and exclusive. A whole portion of the city of Kobe was reserved for the western merchants at the base of Mt Rokko and away from the local merchants and port. This area is really well preserved in Kobe and has a lot of the traditional and western style houses still standing as museums, restaurants and hotels. It was fascinating and the Kobe City Museum was fantastic to explain why on earth we were seeing such familiar architecture!

The final thing to remark about Kobe city was the exhibition about Jomon Pottery in the City Museum. 20,000 years ago, people were making exceptional pottery in this region of Japan and there's pots remaining in tact today you can see. My jaw hit the floor. I knew pottery was one of the most ancient crafts we have evidence of and I knew Japan had a long legacy of making pots but to actually be there, walking on land that produced the clay and to see the pots that peoples hands from 20,000 years ago made and treasured and used every day was absolutely staggering.

We talk a lot in the ceramics community about the energy usage of the industry and how we can make it more efficient and less harmful... cost per use of a 20,000 year old pot kind of rewired my brain a little bit.

I find it a curious fault in my mind and I think it might be common, that we expect artisanal work from the way, way back to be simplistic and function-focused but my gosh the pots were beautifull ydecorated. With delicate rims and lugs and textured patterns, with great consideration of beauty as well as form and ornamentation that was purely aesthetic it put me in my place a little bit. Humans have striven for beauty for tens of thousands of years and I find it so heartwarming thinking of each maker spending time on such 'frivilous' tasks. But really if we've been seeking beauty and expending energy and resources in that persuit, is it frivilous? Clearly we have a deep need for it.

TAMBA

Firstly - before going to Japan I point blank refused to drive there. Having seen the intense city driving of Tokyo I said to Hugo if we can't get him to hire a car then we'll sacrifice the hours to public transport and that's that.

I ended up doing about 10 hours of driving in the country and take it all back. Yes the city driving was a little stressful but overall it was a super easy country to navigate and the roads were great. It's significantly easier to hire a car there than it is in England too, you just need to get an international driver's license before going.

Anywho, we hired a car last minute so that we could have a day trip from Kobe out to a town called Tamba. Japan has 6 ancient kilns, used throughout Japan's long history of making pottery and one of them is in Tamba, just an hour and a bit North West of Kobe. I'd heard of Tamba because of my job at St Ives Ceramics; a potter we stocked, James Erasmus, had a full exhibition of work from Tamba that he'd made and wood fired and I've loved and coveted his pieces for years now. I put Tamba on the list as soon as I knew we were going to Japan and I'm so glad I did.

So far it seems like this is unique to Japan, where whole villages are entirely dedicated to one craft. Predominantly every single shop and residence was a pottery. The village had maybe 200 houses and honestly nearly every single one we saw had a studio within. There were signs of pottery every step of the way. Buckets and buckets of clay, drying moulds, racks for drying pieces, kiln furniture, tools and tell tale splashes of clay on walls and driveways. It was at once familiar and also so jarring in it's scale.

We began our journey at the Museum of Ceramic Art. We parked up and walked to the door....closed. Bummer. Not to be deterred, we drove to the next (and main large attraction), the Tamba Traditional Crafts Park. Open! Boy was it another jaw dropping moment. We entered the retail space and it was like stepping into the past. The building had been designed to feel like alleyways of traditional shacks and cubbys as if it were a 1700s marketplace. Each 'stall' had a different potters' works in it. All local artists, all using local clay and fired in Tamba whether in electric, wood or gas kilns. The work was varied in both style and price but overall shockingly cheap by UK standards.

I did about 4 laps and didn't really want to leave. Hugo and I are obsessing about how to recreate this kind of feeling and design in the UK. We each bought a little something and moved on to explore the rest of the park. It seems that August and Mondays in Japan aren't the hip and happening times - the exhibition space was being refitted and the classrooms were closed but we enjoyed exploring the old Noborigama kiln which was just ... just there. Open to be explored and touched and marvelled at. The infrastructure of a Noborigama (climbing kiln) boggles my mind. I've fired two Anagama kilns (cave kiln) now and they require a ridiculous amount of labour but they're nothing compared to the scale of these Noborigama. It makes sense why they do ony one firing a year; the amount of pots alone would take months and months to produce, then the labour being so intense you'd only be physically able to do one a year!

Hugo, sadly, came down with a cold pretty much as soon as I landed and he was particularly rough the day we visited Tamba. We had to stop and get him to cool down and eat some food so we visited the one open place we could find - Sakurai. Of all things... they were serving french gallettes. My Japanese got us a table, beautiful food and some drinks all presented on local ceramics and the quality of eveyrthing was wildly impressive. Turns out we love gallettes.

After Hugo recovered a little, we set to exploring the town proper and visiting as many of the studios as we possibly could. Each was run by the artist, they would often bustle in from their studio to greet us then bustle back out to keep making while Hugo and I browsed. It was beyond charming and super aspirational. The pots ... the pots. The pots were everything you could imagine and more. A significant amount were wood fired, using only natural ash and straw to give delicate and poetic effects but there was also a surprising amount of electric and gas fired work with bright colours, illustration and modern design. I was expecting pretty much only traditional wood fired pieces so it was a fun surprise to find modern work. We spoke to a tourism office worker (with the cutest New Zealand accent) who said the only paramaters that 'Tamba ware' has to follow is to use the local clay and to make and fire it locally. No guidelines on design meant that the region was full of really different and broad aesthetics.

The highlight was finding a studio up the far end of the town, when we were feeling over hot and exhausted, who gave us a full tour of their making space, introduced us to their father and told us stories about how Bernard Leach visited once, 70+ years ago and how he was the talk of the town. Christian, his mum and his dad all showed us the three gas kilns they had, the mini noborigama kiln and the pottery wheels they'd been using for decades. There were pots made by Christian, the head potter now, from when he was a small child making alongside his dad. His dad had suffered a massive stroke and couldn't make the incredible large scale pots he used to anymore, but he was making teabowls while we spoke to him and was so charming as he told us stories of the pottery.

I could have wept with how kind and generous they were, showing us their space and giving us their time. We bought two plates from them though I really deeply fell in love with a wood fired vase... It was just too far out of budget and impossible to pack safely in a suitcase. Alas.

We headed back to Kobe after this meeting and while Hugo had a doze I journalled and tried to wrap my head around everything we'd seen. I still can't really fathom it. 20,000 years of heritage. Holding clay in our hands that was walked on, used and fired that many years ago and to be amongst makers who are actively contributing to this legacy and also just so damn lovely and humble and generous... it's a lot for a little old me to emotionallly handle!

Tamba was staggering and really inspiring and aspirational for me. We were both overcome by the notion of whole villages dedicated to the same craft. Where community is integral to the success of firings and to the continuation of something so significant in a country's culture and identity. I don't see western societies operating in this way. I don't know how that develops so differently but I'm envious of Japan's way of working. The community I've found around ceramics is strong and supportive and wonderful if not a bit disparate. I think this trip has made me want to bed in deeper and really reach out to fellow makers and centre community and collaboration more and more. Food for thought.

The next chapter of the Japan trip features the nation's craft capital and the one and only Mashiko...