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Arita: Where Japanese Porcelain Began

The Saga town that fired Japan's first porcelain, ate a mountain to do it, and sent its work to European palaces under another town's name.

THE JAPANESE TABLE · July 21, 2026

Every porcelain rice bowl in Japan traces back to one small valley in Saga. Before Arita, Japan made pottery — earthenware and stoneware, warm and opaque. After Arita, it made porcelain: white, hard, translucent at the rim, ringing when you tap it. That change happened here, in the first decades of the 1600s, and the town has been making the stuff ever since.

The mountain they turned into bowls

Porcelain needs a particular white stone, and for a long time Japan had no known source of it. The traditional story credits a Korean potter — Kanagae Sanbee, better known as Ri Sampei — with finding a deposit at Izumiyama, on the edge of Arita, in 1616. Historians now treat the date and the attribution cautiously; the earliest porcelain sherds excavated in Arita are somewhat later, and the founding story itself was written down generations after the fact. What is not in doubt is the stone, or what the town did with it.

They quarried it for close to four hundred years. For the first two centuries it came out by hand, with picks and wedges; machinery arrived only after the Meiji Restoration, and by 1897 the quarry was yielding around ten thousand tons a year. Work continued until 1995. There is no record of how big Mt. Izumiyama was to begin with, because the town ate it — what remains is a pair of open rock faces with tool marks still legible in them, designated a National Historic Site in 1980. A mountain became several centuries of tableware.

Porcelain that sailed as “Imari”

Arita’s timing was extraordinary. In the 1640s the Ming dynasty collapsed and China’s great kilns at Jingdezhen fell into disorder, cutting off the Dutch East India Company from the porcelain it had been shipping to Europe for decades. The Dutch turned to Kyushu, and from the late 1650s Arita’s kilns filled orders on a scale they had never seen.

The ware left Japan through the port of Imari, some fifteen kilometres away on the coast — and Europe, knowing the port and not the town, called all of it Imari. The name stuck for centuries. It is why the same porcelain is still labelled Imari-Arita ware today: one is where it was made, the other is where it got on the boat. (Arita’s neighbour Hasami spent its own centuries shipping under a borrowed name — that story is here.)

Three ways of decorating a white pot

Once you have a flawless white surface, the question becomes what to put on it. Arita answered three ways, and all three are still made:

  • Ko-Imari — dense, opulent decoration in underglaze blue, red enamel and gold, often covering the whole surface. This is the style that ended up in European palaces, bought by the shipload as a display of wealth.
  • Kakiemon — the opposite instinct. Sparse, precise painting in soft enamels on nigoshide, a warm milky-white body, with most of the pot left empty. European factories at Meissen and Chantilly copied it directly.
  • Nabeshima — made for no one but the powerful. The Saga domain moved its kiln to the steep valley of Okawachiyama, posted guards at the entrance and searched people on the way out, keeping the techniques from leaking. For roughly two centuries Nabeshima ware went to the shogunate and the daimyo and was never sold openly.

Many hands, one pot

Arita works the way the blade towns do: by division of labour. Refining the stone into clay, throwing or moulding the body, the first firing, the underglaze painting, glazing, the high firing at around 1,300°C, then overglaze enamels and a lower firing to fix them — these are largely separate specialists, sometimes separate businesses. Nobody makes an entire pot. It is an odd thing to say about a craft town, but the specialisation is the craft: each pair of hands does one job often enough to do it exceptionally well.

Bringing Arita home

Porcelain is vitrified, so unlike unglazed or porous stoneware it does not absorb water, odours or stains — no seasoning, no special drying routine. Plain and underglaze-blue Arita pieces are among the most forgiving Japanese ceramics to live with. Anything decorated with overglaze enamels or gold, though, wants washing by hand: dishwasher detergent and heat will dull and eventually wear away that decoration, which sits on top of the glaze rather than under it.

Read: Japanese ceramics for every day. Or browse hand-picked, Japan-shipped ceramics on The Table.

Sources & Further Reading

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