A quiet morning at Senryūzan: inside a Hagi kiln that has worked since 1826
Senryūzan (泉流山) is a Hagi-yaki kiln in Yamaguchi Prefecture founded in 1826, tracing its roots back further still to the late Edo-period Obata-yaki tradition. The kiln was led for decades by Yoshiga Taibi, a recognised Person of Cultural Merit, and is now run by his son Yoshiga Hatao. Senryūzan still fires in a wood-burning noborigama, one of the few climbing kilns in Hagi still worked this way.
I walked to Senryūzan, and the first thing I saw before anything else was the kiln itself, standing outside in the open air. A noborigama, the climbing kiln built up a slope in chambers, the kind of structure you recognise instantly even from a distance because nothing else looks quite like it.
The shop sits right beside it, full of pieces in every shape and finish Hagi-yaki makes: wide chawan, narrow yunomi, cups that lean slightly and others that sit perfectly round, more variety in one room than I usually see in a single visit anywhere. I ended up in conversation with someone there, the easy kind that happens when you are clearly interested rather than just browsing, and it turned into an invitation to see the workshop behind the shop.
That is where the morning actually opened up. Someone was kneading clay. A row of freshly made chawan sat drying nearby, already finished for the day, and at the wheel itself, yunomi were taking shape one at a time, thrown and set aside, thrown and set aside. There is a rhythm to watching that kind of repetition that photographs never quite capture. You have to stand there and watch the hands do it three or four times before it makes sense as a rhythm rather than a single gesture.
Outside again, under a small lean-to roof, clay in several different colours sat resting, ageing the way Hagi clay does before it is ever ready to throw. And in the kiln itself, not firing that day, I could see pieces still sitting inside. It looked recently finished rather than idle, the kind of quiet that comes right after a firing rather than before one.
A kiln older than most in Hagi
Senryūzan was founded in Bunsei 9, 1826, with roots that reach back even further into Obata-yaki, a pottery tradition from the very end of the Edo period. That makes it one of the older working kilns in Hagi, considerably older than the roughly 400-year mark most Hagi-yaki history starts counting from as a tradition, though young relative to the tradition's true beginnings under Korean potters in the sixteenth century.
For decades the kiln was led by Yoshiga Taibi (吉賀大眉), who took over Senryūzan in 1943. Taibi did not start out as a potter at all. He trained as a sculptor at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, graduating from the sculpture department in 1938, and only turned to ceramics in 1940. He adopted the name Taibi in 1945, borrowed specifically from an earlier respected figure connected to Senryūzan itself, so the name carries the kiln's own history rather than being a personal art name chosen from nowhere. Later in his career he grew fascinated with Greek and Egyptian alabaster vessels and began experimenting with translating that same quality into fired clay, work that developed into his Gyōun ("dawn cloud") series. That series won him the Prime Minister's Award at the Nitten exhibition in 1969 and the Japan Art Academy Award in 1971, one of the country's highest honours in the arts. He became a member of the Japan Art Academy in 1982 and was recognised as a Person of Cultural Merit in 1990, a year before his death in 1991. His son, Yoshiga Hatao (吉賀將夫), now runs the kiln. A museum stands on the same grounds dedicated to Taibi's own work, alongside pieces from other notable makers and historical Hagi ceramics, open to visitors alongside the workshop and kiln itself.
Senryūzan makes its own clay and its own glazes from scratch rather than buying them prepared, and still uses a kick wheel and a wood-fired noborigama for at least part of its output, a genuinely traditional way of working that fewer and fewer Hagi kilns keep up. Firing that noborigama occasionally produces goma, the natural ash-fall effect more associated with unglazed ware like Bizen than with a glazed tradition like Hagi, a small crossover between two very different ceramic worlds that only happens because the kiln still fires with wood.
Leaf-shaped dishes in the Senryūzan shop, the kind of variety that filled the shelves the morning I visited.
Why I keep recommending it
Senryūzan sits accessibly along the main road near Hagi's roadside station, and are open to walk through freely, no appointment needed, though they will happily accommodate a visit on a closed day if you contact them first.
That accessibility is exactly why I recommend it as readily as I recommend the Okada kiln elsewhere in Hagi. You do not need a connection or a translator arranged in advance to see genuine, working Hagi-yaki craft up close, clay being kneaded, a wheel actually turning, a kiln that was clearly just used.
What stayed with me afterward was less any single piece and more the quiet of the whole visit. Nobody was performing anything for a visitor. Someone was making yunomi because that is what needed making that morning, the same way it likely happened the morning before, and the morning before that, going back the better part of two centuries.
Read more
→ Curious about the wider Hagi tradition, kan'nyū, and how the glaze changes with years of use? Read the full story in the journal.
→ Three generations under one roof, a blue glaze that surprised me, and a cat I bought on the way out. Come with me to the Okada kiln.
→ Want to see what happens when water meets a porous Hagi-yaki chawan through its kan'nyū crackle glaze? I wrote a short piece on karahai.
→ Curious about the hands behind pieces like these? Meet the makers currently in the collection.
See all Hagi items
Notice: This chawan has found a new home. If you are looking for something similar, scroll down.
Held at an angle, this chawan catches the light differently every time. The pale, crackled glaze runs from a soft off-white into a warm, almost blush pink where it thins over the clay, a color Hagi potters call karahai, and it only appears where the firing has gone exactly right. The rim tilts and dips ever so slightly, a wall that never quite settles into a perfect circle, and that small imperfection is what makes it sit so naturally in the hand. It is a bowl built to be picked up, turned, and looked at again.
This bowl carries the tomobako signature of Matsuura Mugen, founder of the Shōunzan-gama kiln in Hagi, built on the very ground where Hagi-yaki itself began centuries ago. Mugen's work grew out of the tradition of Miwa Kyūwa, one of the defining masters of Hagi ware and a holder of Japan's Living National Treasure designation, and that lineage shows in the quiet, unforced warmth of this glaze. Its wide, shallow shape is a natsu-jawan, a summer bowl, made so the tea cools a little faster in the warmer months, which makes this the moment to bring it into use rather than let it wait. A signed, boxed chawan from this kiln is not something that turns up often outside Japan.
Hagi ware isn't meant to stay the same. Read how it grows with you, in my journal.
This bowl has a way of looking complete from any angle. The form is low and wide, the rim gently uneven in the way of something made by hand rather than adjusted toward perfection.
The glaze is a full, dense shining white over most of the body, with orange pushing through directly where the clay asserts itself. It stops you before you know why.
This chawan comes from an earlier generation of Taizan-gama, one of the kilns that has worked in the Tsubaki district of Hagi within a tradition tea masters have placed second only to Raku for four centuries.
The tomobako is inscribed 白萩 茶碗 and the bowl carries the full rectangular 泰山 seal, the older mark of the kiln used before the oven was incorporated as a company.
Five cups that move together without being identical. The glaze is the color of old paper washed with rust, white pooling in clouds where it thickens, warm terracotta clay pushing through where it thins. Each cup carries this differently. Set them on a table and the effect is immediate: a family of objects made from the same impulse, none of them the same.
These cups are wide and generous, substantial enough to hold with both hands and feel warmth come through the clay. Hagi-yaki has been placed second only to Raku by tea masters for four centuries. The shira-hagi glaze, made from rice straw ash fired until the carbon burns away, is among the most refined expressions of that tradition.
The set comes with its original signed and stamped tomobako and the kiln's own shiori, giving it a provenance completeness that is unusual for Shōwa-period teaware.
Hagi ware isn't meant to stay the same. Read how it grows with you, in my journal.
Six cups and a teapot, and the whole set reads as one breath. The glaze moves between pale blue-grey and soft salmon pink depending on where the light falls, and a fine web of craquelé runs across every surface.
Nothing is decorated. Nothing needs to be.
Sencha culture in Japan is quieter than the matcha ceremony but no less intentional. It is the daily practice of making something ordinary into something considered. Choosing the right pot, the right cup, the right temperature of water. Hagi ware has been part of that practice for over four centuries, prized for a clay body so porous and alive that the glaze slowly shifts in colour with each use.
A Hagi tea set does not stay the same. It becomes something over time.
→ Read how it grows with you, in my journal.
I work through my finds in small batches as each piece takes time to research, photograph and write properly. But some items are too good to sit invisible in the backlog, and if you have been looking for a Taizan klin Hagi-yaki yunomi meteo pair with their original box and documentation, I want you to know this one exists.
This is a meoto set, made for two, named 花容 on the tomobako. One cup runs warm with orange and rust, the other cooler with fine crazing across a celadon-grey glaze. Both from Taizan-gama in Tsubaki, Hagi, with the original signed tomobako and kiln documentation.
A meoto set, made for two, the slight difference in size a deliberate choice: the larger cup for him, the smaller for her. In Japan these sets are a traditional wedding gift, a pair of objects meant to be used together for a lifetime.
The full listing, photographs and price will follow. Want to know the moment it goes live? Scroll down.
👇
The glaze on this chawan is the quiet kind. Soft white shifting into blue-grey and pale lilac depending on the light, a surface that looks different in morning sun than in lamplight. The form is generous and low, the kind of bowl that settles into both hands rather than sitting in them.
Hagi ware asks to be held. In the tea ceremony it is the object that passes through the most hands, that is turned and considered from every angle, that is meant to reward this kind of attention over years and decades of use.
The porous clay body gradually absorbs tea, shifting slowly in color, deepening where the glaze cracks finest.
Moriwaki Fumitada made this bowl at his Chigiri-gama kiln in Seto, where a decades-long practice in the technical traditions of Japanese ceramics underlies work that carries Hagi-yaki's quieter, more intuitive qualities.
A Hagi-yaki glaze is never fully sealed. It develops a fine network of cracks called kan'nyū as it cools in the kiln, and through those cracks water, and later tea, slowly enters the clay beneath. What happens when water or tea meets Hagi-yaki: kan'nyū and nanabake, watched in real time → Read journal post.
This chawan is lighter than it looks, which is the first thing you notice picking it up. The rim stays fairly calm, an even white, but your eye drops toward the base and that is where the crackle really lives, dense and a little chaotic compared to the rim above it, tea stains settled into every line of it. Someone used this bowl, and used it often enough that its history is written right into the glaze. Outside there is less drama. The white just fades out unevenly on its way down, and somewhere before the foot it gives up entirely, leaving bare reddish clay that is rough enough to feel the difference with your thumb.
This piece carries the signature of Tamamura Shōgetsu, whose kiln in Hagi has stood since 1952. Hagi ware ages the way almost no other tea ceramic does, the glaze slowly taking on colour and character through use, something tea drinkers have a specific word for. The box has its own small story too: an inscription inside notes the bowl was given as a gift in May 1972, back when there was only one Shōgetsu working the kiln, since the name did not pass to a second generation until 1988.
The clay here is warm and gritty in a way that reads almost geological. The glaze deepens to amber-brown at the base and fades toward a pale sandy beige at the rim, and the transition between the two is not a line but a gradual dissolve. The form is slightly irregular, soft-shouldered, made without any ambition to be symmetrical.
This bowl comes from the founding generation of one of Hagi's most recognised kilns. The tomobako carries the hanko of Hirose Nanshū (南州), the man who established the Tsubaki-gama Tenpōzan in Hagi. The telephone notation on the shiori dates the documentation to before direct-dial lines existed in the city. Somewhere in the 1960s or earlier.
The shiori itself was signed by his son Hirose Tanga, who took over the kiln and continued his father's practice. That combination (the father's box and seal, the son's documentation) is a quiet record of how Japanese family kilns pass from one generation to the next. Hagi-yaki has held the second rank in the traditional tea master's hierarchy for centuries, behind only Raku. A bowl from the founding generation of a kiln in that tradition is not a common thing to find.
The glaze on this bowl sits differently from most Hagi ware you will encounter. It is pale, almost creamy, with a softness that makes the surface look slightly matte until the light catches it and you see the depth underneath. The craquelé is fine and even. The form is quieter and more settled than early Hagi ware. It is less raw, more considered.
By the time Hirose Tanga made this bowl, he had been working in Hagi for decades. His name had appeared in exhibitions across Kyūshū and Yamaguchi since the 1960s, he had received a national fine arts prize, and his kiln held an official government designation as a traditional craft. The tomobako for this bowl carries his personal signature alongside the kiln name, and the shiori inside contains his full printed biography. That combination of the signed box, named maker and documented career is what the Japanese tea world calls full provenance, and it is genuinely uncommon to find outside Japan.
I work through my finds in small batches as each piece takes time to research, photograph and write properly. But some items are too good to sit invisible in the backlog, and if you have been looking for a Hagi-yaki Ido chawan with full provenance, I want you to know this one exists.
This chawan comes from the Tokugetsu-gama kiln in Hagi, run by the Tamamura family whose lineage of master potters stretches back to the Edo period. The name Shōgetsu is a generation name passed down within this family line, which holds an exceptional reputation among tea ceremony practitioners in Japan. The original signed tomobako is included.
The full listing, photographs and price will follow. Want to know the moment it goes live? Scroll down.
👇
Six cups and a teapot, and the whole set reads as one breath. The glaze moves between pale blue-grey and soft salmon pink depending on where the light falls, and a fine web of craquelé runs across every surface.
Nothing is decorated. Nothing needs to be.
Sencha culture in Japan is quieter than the matcha ceremony but no less intentional. It is the daily practice of making something ordinary into something considered. Choosing the right pot, the right cup, the right temperature of water. Hagi ware has been part of that practice for over four centuries, prized for a clay body so porous and alive that the glaze slowly shifts in colour with each use.
Hagi ware isn't meant to stay the same. Read how it grows with you, in my journal.
These cups are from the Tenpō gama kiln in Hagi, Yamaguchi Prefecture, a kiln founded in 1973 that has built its reputation on classical Hagi technique: soft forms, understated glazes, and the porous clay that makes Hagi ware change with use.
The iron-bearing spots in the clay bleed through the white glaze during firing: no two cups come out the same. As tea slowly stains the clay through the craquelé over years of use, the cup deepens in colour and texture, a process the Japanese call nanabake, the seven transformations.
The craquelé covers the full surface in a fine irregular network. The form is round and low, wider at the lip than at the base, and each cup sits on the kiri-kodai foot: the triangular notch cut into the clay that has been a feature of quality Hagi ware for four centuries.
Notice: This chawan has found a new home. If you are looking for something similar, scroll down.
Soft. That is the first word for this bowl.
Not white exactly, more the pale warm tone of early morning light on clay, with a blush of peach that deepens toward the foot and fades near the rim. It shifts depending on where you hold it. In shade it reads warm and rosy. In direct light it almost disappears into the clay beneath it. The form is generous and low, the kind of chawan that settles into two hands naturally, and the rough dark foot ring anchors everything.
This is shira-Hagi, the white Hagi style, made with the characteristic straw ash glaze over Daido clay from Yamaguchi Prefecture. The glaze sits on the clay like a pale morning sky, rosy and warm, shifting between peach and white depending on the light.
This bowl was made by Yamato Yoshitaka (大和吉孝), tenth-generation master of Matsuroku-gama in Miyano, Yamaguchi, during the Taishō period. The kiln's lineage begins with the Mōri clan's official Tōkōji kiln in Hagi, one of the historically significant lines in Japanese ceramic history.
Complete with the original signed tomobako wooden storage box, the original printed kiln document, and a fitted silk drawstring pouch.
Read more journal posts
Tiny pinholes scattered across a thick glaze, a texture called su-ana, tell you more about Shino and Hagi ceramics than most people realise. Here's what causes it, and why potters never smoothed it away.
Senryūzan (泉流山) is a Hagi-yaki kiln in Yamaguchi Prefecture founded in 1826, tracing its roots back further still to the late Edo-period Obata-yaki tradition. The kiln was led for decades by Yoshiga Taibi, a recognised Person of Cultural Merit, and is now run by his son Yoshiga Hatao. Senryūzan still fires in a wood-burning noborigama, one of the few climbing kilns in Hagi still worked this way.
Oshinobi dōchū, travelling incognito, shows a Heian noblewoman shielding her face with a kasa hat while journeying in disguise. Two pieces in the collection, by Sato Suigai and Seiju Kon, show how differently that same story can be built in wood.
This chawan was fired at the Kakuzan-gama, a kiln built in 1959 inside the Kyoto headquarters of Ōmoto, a Japanese religious movement, by Kaneshige Sozan, a member of Bizen's most celebrated pottery family. It is signed by Deguchi Eiji, who served as Ōmoto's Sōchō (director) from 1958 to 1962. A single white glaze on this bowl developed rust, near-black and crystalline blue effects during firing, the result of flame position, ash deposit and heat variation inside a wood kiln, not of painting or decoration.
Bizen-yaki is never glazed and never painted. Everything visible on a finished piece was decided during the firing itself, by potters who spend two weeks feeding a kiln by hand, reading the fire instead of a dial. On a return visit to Shibaoka Tōsendō, the Kōzan-gama kiln in Imbe, here is what that actually looks like from the inside.
I filled a Hagi chawan with water and watched what happened. Within a minute, the glaze showed exactly how it will change with years of tea, and four other pieces revealed just how differently that process can unfold, starting long before the kiln, in the clay itself.
Every kokeshi carries the place it comes from before it carries anything else. A guide to the eleven regional traditions of Tōhoku, and how to recognise each one on sight.
Three generations under one roof, a blue glaze that surprised me, and a cat I bought on the way out. One of my favorite mornings in Hagi, at the Okada kiln.
Perched in the forested hills of Minoh, Katsuo-ji is known throughout Japan as the Daruma Temple, thousands of red daruma cascading down its steps, each one carrying someone's wish. A visit that changed how I see the wooden daruma in our own collection.
Every temple I visit in Japan has the same quality of quiet, and it starts with three things: scent, sound, and a presence that holds the space. Here is how to bring that same intention home, starting with a single kōro and the concept of ma.
Inside the Raku Museum in Kyoto during the Raku Successive Generations exhibition. Chawan from Chōjirō to the 16th Kichizaemon, a quiet garden, and one idea about tradition that stayed with me.
Urushi looks fragile and behaves like the opposite, until it meets a sunny windowsill or a winter radiator. Here is what actually damages lacquerware, what does not, and the handful of habits that keep a piece looking the way it did the day it was finished.
A kokeshi asks for very little once it has found the right spot. Grouped in threes on a shelf, alone on a windowsill out of direct sun, or standing next to something entirely unrelated, like a stack of books or a single dried branch. Here is what I have learned about placing them so they actually get looked at, instead of disappearing into a room.
Every ceramic piece I bring home has already been through decades of hands before mine. A chawan changes colour with tea over the years, a vase collects mineral marks if you let it, and neither of those things is damage. Here is what actually matters when you look after one.
A week in the heartland of kokeshi: Fukushima. From climbing Mount Bandai before sunrise to studying the unique facial expressions in the work of masters like Ichiro and Sato Fumio. Discover how the landscape and deep-rooted woodcarving traditions shape these authentic vintage treasures.
What draws you to a kokeshi is rarely the name on the base. It is the grain showing through the dark wood, the mark the tool left, and the two lines that somehow become a face. A close look at how makers like Usaburo and Sansaku Sekiguchi work with and against the wood itself.
Bizen-yaki has no glaze. Every color, every mark, every surface effect is made in the kiln by fire, ash, and position. This guide explains what hidasuki, goma, sangiri and shiro-Bizen actually are, how they are made, and what to look for when you buy.
There is a small tiger on my desk with gold worn down to almost nothing on its ears and shoulders. It was made for a Year of the Tiger, in Kyoto, by a kiln lineage going back to 1771. The wear is not damage. It is exactly what the gold was always going to do.
Behind the curtain at Raku Studio Waraku in Kyoto's Gion district. How aka-raku and kuro-raku tea bowls are hand-formed, fired, and finished with charcoal by 8th generation master Kawasaki Motoo. A sourcing diary entry from KAIKO&CO.
Furukawacho Shotengai in Higashiyama: an arcade frozen in the 1970s, a kimono specialist with six haori I had not expected to find, and a folder of 1895 Kyoto lithographs from an antique bookstore tucked behind a curtain. Day three of my Sourcing Week in Japan series in Kyoto and Okayama.
An antique market stall on temple grounds in Tokyo's Yanaka cat town, a lacquered doll pair from the ‘50’s with a story about a homesick bride, and a cat print.
A Kyoto potter stayed behind in Kanazawa in 1666, and the Raku family sent a glaze north with him, one built for the cold. Eleven generations later, that same amber glaze still catches the light.
Two kokeshi, eighty years apart. Same face, different hands. The story of the Sakurai family and five generations of Naruko tradition.
Some supplier relationships take years to build. In Osaka I have a meeting over tea and chawan pieces that never reach any public market. Day two of my Sourcing Week in Japan series in Kyoto and Okayama.
This is where the week begins. An early alarm, a heavy bag, and the first market of the trip: Kobo-san at Tōji Temple, Kyoto, at 5:30 in the morning. Day one of my Sourcing Week in Japan series in Kyoto and Okayama.
This is Hotei, the laughing god of contentment, made in soft Hagi-yaki. Hagi ware made by the hand of potter Okada Yutaka. He holds a single piece of incense. After that piece is placed near the charcoal, he sits empty for the rest of the session. Japan put its finest craft into this moment of emptying, and then into the silence after.
Before you taste the tea, you hold the bowl. Weight, diameter, the way the foot sits in your palm: these are not secondary details. They are the bowl. On what I look for when I source chawan in Japan, and why size tells you more than the glaze ever will.
A kokeshi placed well in a room is more powerful than five grouped without thought. Here is what I have learned about height, background, and the quiet effect of giving one figure enough space to simply stand.
Every time I return from Japan, I carry objects built around a ritual. Not decorative pieces, but things that were made to slow things down. This is what I look for in each one, and why.
Hagi-yaki has been made in western Japan for over 400 years. What makes it special is what happens after you buy it. The bowl changes with every cup of tea you drink from it. That is why hagi-yaki is so loveable.
Pick this bowl up and the shape answers a question before you ask it. One side of the rim sits straighter than the rest, a shallow, deliberate press into the wall that meets your fingers exactly where a hand naturally rests. The glaze is a soft grey-blue, smooth under the fingertips, and where it catches the light around scattered pinholes a faint pink blush shows through, the same warm pink that spreads openly across the whole interior. Fine crackle runs over every surface, the kind that only comes from decades of tea passing through it.
This bowl carries the signature of Nagasawa Minoru, third generation head of Izushi-gama, the Nagasawa family workshop that has worked in Izushi, Hyōgo Prefecture, since 1907. Minoru trained at the Kyoto Municipal Ceramics Training Institute before turning to painting under Akamatsu Unrei in Osaka, and went on to win the Hokuto Prize at the Nitten exhibition, serve as a Nitten judge, and receive Japan's National Yellow Ribbon Medal in 1974. Izushi-gama is best known for pure white porcelain, but Minoru was the generation who also worked in local clay, and this bowl, with its Hagi-like crackle and blush, is a rare piece of evidence of that side of his work.
Those small pinholes in the glaze aren't unique to Hagi and Shino wares alone. Curious what causes them, and why tea masters have prized them for centuries? Read more about su-ana, the "nest holes" of Japanese glaze here.