(coming soon) Meoto yunomi pair, Taizan kiln, Hagi-yaki, with tomobako box and shiori documentation, Shōwa - Heisei ca 1980-2000s

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

👇

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.

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.

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.

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.