Why size matters: what a chawan feels like before you drink from it
A chawan is held before it is drunk from, and that first contact matters as much as the glaze. Weight gives a bowl presence in the hand. Diameter determines whether the chasen has room to move and how fast the tea cools, wider bowls (hirachawan) for summer, narrower ones (tsutsu-chawan) for winter. The foot, lip and interior curve shape how the bowl actually feels and performs, details no photograph can show.
Before you taste the tea, you hold the bowl.
That sounds obvious, and yet it is the part almost everyone skips when they choose a chawan. They fall for the glaze, the colour, the little seal pressed into the base. Then they actually pick it up, and the bowl either backs up everything their eyes just promised, or quietly betrays it.
Weight. Diameter. The way the foot settles into a palm. Not footnotes. This is the bowl.
Eight bowls, same stand, same light. The difference in form speaks for itself
Weight: presence before the tea is even poured
A good chawan has weight, but never burden. Lift it with both hands and you should feel it is there, not so heavy your wrist starts complaining, just enough that you notice you are holding something.
The featherlight ones, thin-walled and delicate, photograph beautifully. In the hand they can feel almost apologetic, like they might not fully commit to existing. Tea ceremony asks you to be present. A bowl with no weight makes that oddly hard to do.
The bowls I keep coming back to have walls that wobble slightly in glaze thickness, thicker here, thinner there. Not carelessness. A hand at work, paying attention to something other than perfect evenness. That small inconsistency is exactly where the weight lives, and honestly, exactly where the charm lives too.
Three distinct textures, three entirely different experiences in your hands. From soft Hagi-yaki to heavy drip glaze and organic shapes, every bowl brings its own weight to the ritual.
Diameter: room to whisk, room to actually drink
For matcha, diameter is not aesthetic preference, it is physics. Wide enough and the chasen moves freely. Too narrow and you spend the whole whisk fighting the walls instead of the tea. Too wide and the matcha cools before it reaches you.
Whisk freedom. Finding that sweet spot where the diameter is just wide enough for the chasen to move freely, without letting the tea cool too quickly.
Somewhere between eleven and sixteen centimetres is the working range. Inside that range, the real choice is about what kind of experience you are after.
A wider bowl, a hirachawan, is built for summer. Heat escapes fast, the tea cools on purpose, and there is something generous about that openness, you see the whole surface, the foam, the colour, laid out in front of you.
A narrower, deeper bowl, a tsutsu-chawan, is built for winter. The shape traps warmth and holds it. It feels more private too, more like the tea belongs to just you. Same leaves, same water, a completely different afternoon.
I source both, and every single time I pick one up I notice how fast the shape tells you which season it was made for, no label required.
Form: the foot, the lip, the belly
Three parts of a chawan most buyers never think about twice, and that I always focus on, because each one has a story to tell.
The foot, the kodai, is where the bowl meets the table and where it meets your palm the moment you pick it up properly. A well-made foot gives your hand somewhere to land. Too flat, and the bowl feels like it wants to slide off your fingers. Too high, and it feels like it might tip. The good ones just settle, no negotiation required.
The lip, the kuchizukuri, is where the tea actually reaches your mouth. In formal ceremony the bowl gets turned before drinking, so you never sip from the front. But the lip still matters everywhere else: too thin and it can feel sharp against your mouth, too thick and it gets in the way of the liquid. The best ones practically disappear, you forget they are even there.
The belly, the curve in the middle, decides how the tea behaves when you whisk it. A rounded interior is forgiving, the whisk glides. A flat bottom with a sharp turn up to the walls fights back, the whisk keeps catching on the corner. You cannot see this from a photo. You only find out once you actually use the thing.
Beyond aesthetic preference, a perfect chawan is a balance of function and feel. Here you see a range of forms, but notice how each has its own characteristic foot for stability, a refined lip for that comfortable sip, and a forgiving curve for easy whisking and holding. These are the details I always look for when sourcing.
The hand knows before the eye does.
What this means when you buy
A photograph will tell you plenty about colour and glaze. It will tell you almost nothing about weight, about whether the foot sits right, about whether the lip gets in the way.
Which is exactly why I hold every single bowl before it goes on the site. I am the one who picks it up, checks the foot, feels out the lip. I take that part of the decision off your hands, quite literally. What I can do instead is be honest about it, give you the real dimensions, and tell you exactly what I noticed the moment I held it.
A bowl that feels right in the hand is almost always the right bowl, even when the photo cannot quite explain why.
One practical note
Buying a chawan for everyday tea rather than formal ceremony? The rules relax considerably. A yunomi, a taller everyday cup, does the job for most daily tea just fine. But if you want to whisk matcha at home, diameter and depth still matter, for the simple reason that the chasen needs somewhere to actually move. Too shallow or too narrow and the whisking turns clumsy, and clumsy whisking makes flat, sad tea.
Start around twelve to fifteen centimetres in diameter, walls tall enough that you are not splashing matcha across the counter. Beyond that, it is entirely up to you.
All chawan in the shop were personally held before they were listed. The look and feel up close are included in every listing.
Here’s our chawan collection
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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.
The glaze moves across this bowl like weather crossing a landscape, white where it lies thick, sliding into a soft blue grey where it thins, with a line of warm rust colored fire blush running unevenly along the rim where the clay broke through during firing. A carved geometric pattern circles the exterior, cut through the dark iron ground before the glaze was applied, so the pale clay shows through in a repeating motif that catches the light differently depending on where you stand. Small dark specks surface throughout the glaze, scattered without any pattern, the kind of detail that only shows itself once you start looking closely.
This bowl comes from the Han'emon-gama, a kiln in the Mino region of Gifu Prefecture whose own written history traces its family back through generations of potters working in the Shino tradition, one of the oldest white glaze traditions in Japanese ceramics and still closely tied to the tea ceremony today. The piece is signed with the kiln's stamp on the foot, and it comes with its original tomobako and an accompanying document that lays out the family's own account of its lineage. Owning it means owning a small, physical piece of that continuity.
New to chawan and wondering what to look for? Read about why size and weight change everything in my journal.
Notice: This chawan has found a new home. If you are looking for something similar, scroll down.
Nearly the entire surface disappears into black, a glaze so deep it seems to swallow the light around it. Then, sweeping across one side, a pale arc of ash white clay breaks through, and from that ground three cherry blossom branches rise. The blossoms are carved into the clay itself, the branches traced in warm gold. The bowl is compact, a little heavier than it looks, and it settles into two cupped hands as though it were made for exactly this grip.
Okugawa Katsuomi built his reputation the hard way, striking out on his own rather than working under an established kiln name, and the confidence in this piece shows why that risk paid off. A potter working independently answers to no house style, only to his own hand, and a cherry blossom cut this precisely into a glaze this dark is the kind of detail that gets noticed. This bowl comes with its full history attached, both in the tomobako it still carries and in a maker whose name is now well documented.
The first time I held this bowl, I turned it slowly in both hands and tried to work out what I was looking at. Purple, deep crimson, ashy grey, a band of pale white on the inside where the heat had settled differently. None of it looked applied. It looked like something that had happened to the clay rather than something done to it.
That is, more or less, exactly what yakishime is.
Yakishime is the practice of placing unglazed clay in a wood-fired kiln and letting the fire decide the rest. In the Bizen tradition this has been practiced for over a thousand years, and the surfaces it produces, rough clay, fire-born colour, marks that record the firing like a landscape, became one of the foundations of Japanese tea ceremony aesthetics. A bowl made this way was not decorated. It was shaped, placed in a kiln, and submitted to fire.
Read more about Bizen yaki here.
The glaze is the first thing. One side of this bowl is warm amber-caramel, the colour of old honey in light. Turn it and the same glaze has pooled darker, almost brown-black, as if the bowl remembers the heat of the kiln unevenly. The interior deepens toward the base. The form is round and full, wide in the hand, settled rather than imposing.
Ōbi-yaki has been made in Kanazawa since 1666, when a Kyoto potter accompanied a tea master to the court of the Maeda clan and began making tea bowls with clay from the village of Ōbi. This bowl comes from the Nakamura Chōami kiln, a workshop within that same tradition, established in Kanazawa in Taishō 14 (1925).
The ame-yu glaze, that amber caramel tone, was a gift from the Raku family itself: an iron-rich glaze said to carry a warmth suited to Kanazawa's snow country winters, unlike the red and black glazes Kyoto kept for its own kilns. This bowl has never been used.
Curious about this lesser-known tea bowl traditions? Ōbi-yaki has one of the best stories of them all. Read it in my journal.
The glaze sits pale and quiet at first, almost plain, until the light catches it at an angle and the pink shows through. Not painted on, not uniform, just soft blush drifting through the white where the kiln decided to leave it. A fine network of crackle runs the length of the bowl, more visible in some spots than others, like the surface has been quietly aging since the day it left the wheel.
This is Hagi ware, one of Japan's oldest tea ceremony clays, prized for centuries specifically because it never stays the same. The gohonde spotting happens on its own during firing, no two bowls carry it in the same place, and the crackle glaze is built to change with use: tea seeps into the fine lines over years and slowly deepens their colour. A chawan like this isn't finished when it leaves the kiln. You keep making it.
Read more about how Hagi ware grows with you in my journal here.
Intro paragraphs
The first thing you notice is the collision of opposites. On one face, bold dark figures stride across a cream ground in a repeating procession, painted with the kind of confidence that does not hesitate. Turn the bowl and the motif shifts entirely: a scrolling vine arabesque in the same iron brushwork, curling and looping across the surface. Then the green glaze interrupts everything. It tips over the rim from both sides, drips down the wall, and floods the interior with a deep copper-green that shifts toward teal where it pools thickest. The form does not behave either: the rim is uneven, the walls slightly irregular, the whole shape carrying a deliberate looseness that makes it feel alive in the hand.
This is a chawan in the Ao-Oribe tradition, one of the most irreverent ceramic styles Japan produced. From the Mino region of Gifu Prefecture, Ao-Oribe takes its name from tea master Furuta Oribe (古田 織部), whose aesthetic philosophy embraced asymmetry, bold brushwork, and what he called hyōge: a spirit of wit and ease. A bowl made in this tradition was never meant to be precious. It was made to be picked up without ceremony, to improve with handling, and to grow more interesting the longer it is used.
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.
Red and grey, warm in the hand before you even pour the water. This is a fuyugata, a winter bowl, and the shape tells you that immediately: tall sides that draw upward, walls thick enough to hold heat, a form that closes slightly around the matcha rather than letting it spread. On the table it looks purposeful. In your hands it feels present.
Raku-yaki is the oldest named tradition in Japanese tea ceramics, developed in Kyoto in the sixteenth century specifically for the tea ceremony. Aka-raku, the red variant, gets its colour not from glaze but from the clay itself: iron in the body oxidising during the low-temperature firing, turning the surface to the warm terracotta you see here.
The tradition was never about decoration. It was about what a bowl feels like to hold and drink from, and whether it brings you quietly into the moment.
New to chawan and wondering what to look for? Read about why size and weight change everything in my journal.
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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.
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A rare and deeply beautiful Japanese handmade chawan is a classic Japanese tea ceremony winter tea bowl. The narrower opening and thick walls retain the warmth of the matcha longer.
What immediately catches the eye is the beautiful glaze on the inside, which resembles freshly broken ice. This contrasts beautifully with the deep iron-red exterior. The green effect of the glaze is characteristic of Kyoto-yaki with layered glazes. The inside also has a lovely gradation from brown to orange. The bowl is signed by Sōchi, a master from the Kyoto tea tradition.
The details:
- 🍵 Maker: Sōchi
- Style: Kyo-yaki
- Age: Shōwa period ca. 1950 to 1975
- 🔥 Technique: Tetsukaishu glaze, iron and ash fired together, with kannyu craquelure
- 📏 Dimensions: ca. 12.5 cm diameter, 7 cm tall, 405 grams
- ✨ Condition: Vintage, honest wear consistent with ceremonial use, no cracks, no repairs, no restoration
Notes: The base carries an incised atelier monogram and an impressed circular seal on the lower body. The set is complete with the original signed wooden tomobako storage box.
Charmng detail: The maker gave this bowl the poetic name まどか Madoka, meaning "round, harmonious and complete." This is written on the inside of the box lid. In the world of the tea ceremony, every significant bowl receives its own name.
Deep, dark glaze pools thick around the base of this bowl, catching amber and rust where the light hits it at an angle. The drip is heavy and slightly uneven, the kind of effect that only comes from letting the glaze run right to the edge of what the kiln can hold before it sticks. In the hand it has real presence, a weight that settles rather than balances.
The maker Katsukazu is particularly admired for the thick application of glaze. In the world of Tenmoku, getting that heavy, "frozen-in-motion" drip without it sticking to the kiln floor is a sign of a true expert who knows exactly when to cut the heat.
The deep, chocolate-brown tones of the glaze provide a rich, lustrous backdrop that contrasts beautifully with the vibrant green of freshly whisked matcha. It comes with its original wooden tomobako box, carefully signed by the maker, adding provenance and ceremony to the piece.
Curious what to look for beyond the glaze? I wrote about why a chawan's weight and shape matter more than people expect. Read it here in my journal.
Notice: This chawan has found a new home. If you are looking for something similar, scroll down.
This matcha bowl was made by Matsubara Yasuhiro (松原保宏), a Seto ceramicist whose work was selected five times for the Nitten, Japan's most prestigious national art exhibition. The surface carries madara-yu glaze, fired in a traditional noborigama climbing kiln on pine wood in the 1970s. What you see on the surface is a direct record of that process: warm copper-brown spotting against a grey-blue ground, not decoration but the fire itself made permanent. The original signed tomobako and maker's shiori are included.
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.
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The bowl is white in the way that morning light is white: soft, warm, with something orange underneath. Ivory at a distance, and then, where the fire touched it directly during the long wood firing, a deep crimson that bleeds into the clay and stays. No glaze, no pigment. Just white clay and fire.
This is shirobizen (white bizen ware). This is a yakishime technique using white clay with very low iron content, fired without glaze at over 1200°C for days on end. The crimson markings, called hiiro (火色, fire color), appear where the flames of the wood kiln reached the surface directly. Their shape and intensity depend entirely on where the bowl sat in the kiln and how the fire moved.
The potter guides this, but cannot control it.
No glaze, no paint, just fire. I wrote about how Bizen gets its color, in my journal.
The color sits somewhere between powder and petal: a pale pinkish-lavender that doesn't announce itself, just settles quietly across the surface of the bowl. The form is low and rounded, slightly uneven in the way that hands always leave their trace. This is the kind of chawan that makes you want to hold it before you decide whether you like it.
Hagi ware has been considered the finest tradition for tea ceremony bowls for centuries, second only to Raku in the classic tea hierarchy. What earns it that position is not decoration but material: the soft, porous clay absorbs tea over years of use, slowly shifting in color and depth in a process Japanese tea culture calls shichi-bake, the seven transformations.
You buy a Hagi chawan not as a finished object but as one that keeps changing. Moriwaki Fumitada spent years learning the technical foundations of Japanese ceramics in Seto before bringing those skills to the more intuitive language of Hagi-yaki, earning full membership in the Japan Craft Association in 1982.
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.
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.
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This is a hand-formed chawan, it is made without a wheel. It is wide and low, the kind of form that spreads across your palms when you hold it. The glaze runs from deep coral at the base up through raspberry to a pale rose-cream at the rim, and against this a wash of dark grey pools on the exterior, unplanned, the mark of fire rather than hand. No two aka-raku bowls come out of the kiln with the same surface. This one carries its firing like a weather event.
Raku-yaki (楽焼) is the oldest ceramic tradition in Japan made entirely for the tea ceremony. Each bowl is built by hand without a wheel, fired alone at low temperature, and pulled from the kiln while still glowing. The result is a clay that carries the fingerprints of its making in every surface. Ōno Kyūkō (大野九行) is a studio potter working in this tradition, with the personal seal 九行 pressed into the clay near the foot.
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Every raku bowl is pulled from the kiln while still glowing, and cooled in open air. That moment of thermal shock is where this bowl was made. The crackle pattern on the exterior, a dense mosaic of warm brown, orange and olive, each fragment outlined in dark where the glaze contracted and split, is that process made visible and permanent.
This chawan was made in the raku tradition (楽焼) by a Shōwa-period potter working under the art name 仙巌 (Sengan). The bowl's name is 玄 (Gen), meaning dark, mysterious, or profound: a classical character in Japanese aesthetics used to describe depth and the quality of something that cannot be fully seen or grasped at once.
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Item details
A hand-formed Kyo-yaki matcha bowl by Uno Tōru (宇野徹), Kyoto, ca. 1980. The form is wide and low with angled, faceted walls cut from the clay by hand, sitting on a tall exposed foot ring in warm red-orange. The glaze runs from a dusty blue-lavender at the rim into deeper violet and brown tones toward the base, pooling slightly where it met the foot. The outer surface is rough and textured; the interior is smoother, with a fine craquelé that catches the light.
Uno Tōru was a recognised figure in Kyoto's mid-century craft world. His work was purchased by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the official state gift collection, he received the Minister of International Trade and Industry Prize, and he was consecutively selected for the Nitten, Japan's most prestigious annual fine arts exhibition. He trained under Kanō Mitsuo, a former Nitten councilor, and under a member of the Japan Art Academy.
Signed with maker's seal on the base. Sold with original wooden tomobako and shiori documenting his full credentials. Late Shōwa period, Kyo-yaki (京焼), yōhen (窯変) glaze technique.
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Item details
A Tenmoku glazed chawan by Teramae Tameichi (寺前為一), working under the artistic name Aomi (青美), Kutani Ittō kiln, Yamasiro Onsen, Kaga, Ishikawa Prefecture. Ca. 1960 to 1980, late Shōwa period. The bowl appears unused, with deep brown-black glaze streaked with warm amber tones and a glossy drip running to the foot with blue-green notes where the glaze pooled.
Teramae Tameichi studied at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and spent years researching folk ceramics across Japan, northern China, Korea, and Manchuria. His work is documented in an accompanying shiori that quotes the Living National Treasure and woodblock print master Munakata Shikō (棟方志功), who praised Teramae's work for its purity of intention. This is not a routine endorsement: Munakata Shikō is one of the defining figures in twentieth-century Japanese art.
Kutani-yaki (九谷焼) is Ishikawa Prefecture's most celebrated ceramic tradition, known for bold colour and refined technique. Tenmoku glaze within this tradition carries a long lineage rooted in tea ceremony aesthetics.
Maker's seal pressed into the base. Sold with original wooden tomobako, maker's signature and seal on the lid, and original shiori. Late Shōwa period, Kutani-yaki (九谷焼), Tenmoku (天目) glaze technique.
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.
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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.
There is a moment, turning this bowl slowly for the first time, where you stop trusting your own eyes. From one side, the glaze looks almost calm, a pale, crackled white. Look closer and that white is covered edge to edge in a fine web of cracks, catching the light like a cracked windshield. Turn it a few degrees and that same surface has turned to rust, deep orange bleeding into near black at the rim. Then you tip it, and the inside pools into a deep, mossy green touched with gold, a colour neither side of the outside ever hints at. Somewhere along the thick, generous rim sits a small patch that has turned an unexplained grey-blue, rougher under the thumb than the glaze around it. This is not a bowl that settled on one thing.
This chawan was made at the Kakuzan-gama in Ayabe, a kiln built in 1959 at the headquarters of the Ōmoto religious organisation, and it is signed by Deguchi Eiji, who married into the family that founded Ōmoto and served as its Sōchō, its director, from 1958 to 1962. He was not a professional potter by trade. He was someone close to the centre of a movement that treated making things by hand as part of its own philosophy, working in an ash-glaze tradition brought to the kiln by its founder, the Bizen master Kaneshige Sozan. This bowl is what that looked like when it left his hands. A signed, boxed chawan from a maker with this kind of documented history rarely surfaces outside Japan.
→ Curious about the glaze on this matcha bowl? One glaze, three lives: a wood-fired chawan from a kiln built by a religion is in my journal.