Karatsu Ware: The Port That Became the Word for Pottery

Ask for crockery in Osaka a few centuries ago and you asked for karatsumono — Karatsu things. Ask in Edo and you asked for setomono — Seto things. Two towns some seven hundred kilometres apart, each of which had so thoroughly saturated its half of the country that its name stopped being a place and became a noun.

Seto had been at it since the Kamakura period. Karatsu managed the same trick inside a century.

The port for the continent

The name is the first clue. Kara is the character for the continent — Tang China, and by extension the Korean peninsula beyond it. Tsu is a harbour. Karatsu is the port you sailed from to reach the other side, and it has been that since long before anyone fired a pot there. Northwest Kyushu is the corner of Japan that faces away from Japan.

So when pottery arrived, it arrived the way everything else did: by boat, from over there.

Current accounts put the start in the 1580s, in the territory of the Hata clan, lords of Kishidake — a mountain castle about three hundred metres up, held by one of the families of the Matsuura league. Potters from the Korean peninsula were brought to the foot of that mountain and set to work. The kiln sites they left behind at Kishidake — Hobashira, the upper and lower Handōgame kilns, the Saraya kilns — are counted among the oldest climbing kilns in Japan, and were added in 2005 to the nationally designated Hizen Pottery Kiln Sites.

Note the date. Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea began in 1592, and the standard story of Kyushu ceramics — the one that produced Arita, Hasami and the rest — starts with potters brought back from those campaigns. Karatsu appears to have got there first, by invitation rather than by force, and the invasions then poured fuel on a fire already lit.

What actually crossed the water

Two pieces of equipment, and they are the whole story.

The first is the waritake-shiki noborigama — the split-bamboo climbing kiln. Imagine a length of bamboo sliced down its long axis and laid on a hillside: a single continuous tunnel, sloping upward, fired from the bottom so that heat and flame pull through the whole length of it. Load it once and you fire a hillside’s worth of pots at a time. The Kishidake kilns were of this type, which by itself tells you who built them.

The second is the keri-rokuro, the kick wheel — a wheel the potter drives with a foot while both hands stay on the clay. Before it, throwing in Japan meant a hand-turned wheel that had to be restarted every few revolutions.

Neither is a style. Neither is an aesthetic. They are throughput. Together they took the pottery of northwestern Kyushu from a village operation to something that could fill a ship, and the ships left from Karatsu harbour. The ware went out through the Seto Inland Sea to Kyoto and Osaka and everywhere west, in such quantity that the shipping label became the generic term.

This is worth sitting with, because it is the opposite of how craft stories usually go. Karatsu did not become famous for a secret glaze or a guarded technique. It became famous for volume.

And then the tea people turned up

Which makes what happened next slightly absurd.

The tea masters of the Momoyama period — the same people whose taste had already elevated a rough Korean rice bowl into the most valuable object in a room — looked at this mass-produced, sandy, iron-dark, unpretentious stoneware and found in it exactly what they had been arguing for. Karatsu became tea ware. The national crafts body ranks it among the three most important kinds of tea bowl, alongside Raku and Hagi, a judgement preserved in the old formula ichi Raku, ni Hagi, san Karatsu — first Raku, second Hagi, third Karatsu. (An older variant of the saying puts Ido bowls first and demotes Hagi entirely, which tells you these rankings were arguments, not facts.)

What the tea people were responding to is what Karatsu potters call tsuchi — the clay itself. The local material, dug from the Matsuura, Arita and Shiota–Rokkaku river systems, is sandy and high in iron. It does not go smooth. It does not go white. Fired in a wood kiln at somewhere around 1,250 to 1,300°C, it comes out warm, gritty, uneven and quietly various, and the decoration sits on it rather than covering it.

The decorative vocabulary is small and each entry is a named thing:

• E-garatsu (絵唐津), painted Karatsu — grasses, reeds, birds, a spray of something, drawn in iron pigment under a thin ash glaze. The drawing is usually fast and often nearly abstract.
• Madara-garatsu (斑唐津), mottled Karatsu — a straw-ash glaze over iron-rich clay, firing to a milky white broken by blue and black speckling where the iron pushes through.
• Chōsen-garatsu (朝鮮唐津), Korean Karatsu — a black iron glaze and a white straw-ash glaze applied to different parts of the same pot and allowed to run into each other. The most dramatic surface in the repertoire.
• Kuro-garatsu, ki-garatsu, ao-garatsu — black, yellow, blue, all from iron and ash behaving differently.
• Mishima and kohiki, both Korean inheritances: stamped patterns inlaid with white slip, and a plain coat of white slip over a dark body.
• Muji-garatsu, plain Karatsu — glaze and nothing else.

The porcelain problem

Karatsu’s collapse came from about thirty kilometres inland, and it was partly its own doing.

Porcelain stone was found at Izumiyama in Arita in the early seventeenth century, by Korean-descended potters of the same Hizen community that had built the Karatsu kilns. Porcelain is whiter, thinner, harder, cheaper to decorate and far easier to sell. The Saga domain, which held Arita and Imari, understood what it had: in 1637 it consolidated the kilns under its control, shut down a large number of them, expelled potters in quantity and directed what remained toward porcelain. Fuel and clay and labour went where the money was.

Old Karatsu — the Momoyama stoneware the tea masters had wanted — contracted sharply. What survived was narrower and more official. The Karatsu domain kept its own kiln, run by the Nakazato family, producing presentation ware for the lord and for the shogunate; the Ochawan-gama in Karatsu town, built in 1734, stayed in use until the Taishō era and is a designated historic site today.

Everyone knew Karatsu ware existed. Almost nobody could still make the version worth wanting.

Digging up his own ancestors

Nakazato Shigeo became the twelfth Nakazato Tarōemon in 1927, at thirty-two, inheriting a domain kiln with no domain.

From the late 1920s he started excavating. Not metaphorically — he went to the old kiln sites across Saga and Nagasaki, dug up the shards, and worked backwards from the physical evidence to the methods: how the clay had been prepared, how the glazes had been laid on, and in particular tataki, the paddled construction technique in which a pot is beaten into shape between an outer paddle and an inner anvil rather than thrown, leaving the wall faintly ribbed. He rebuilt the vocabulary of Old Karatsu from its own debris, then spent the rest of his working life making new work in it — struck jars, struck water containers, madara and ao surfaces.

In 1976 he was designated a holder of Important Intangible Cultural Property for Karatsu ware — a Living National Treasure. He had taken the name Muan late in life, after ordaining at Daitoku-ji in Kyoto, and he died in 1985, aged eighty-nine. The kiln is now in its fourteenth generation.

Karatsu ware was designated a Traditional Craft of Japan on 9 June 1988. The recognised area covers Karatsu, Takeo, Taku, Imari, Ureshino, Genkai, Arita and Shiroishi, and something like seventy kilns work in and around Karatsu today. The climbing kilns that still fire run roughly a day and a half to two days on pine, then cool for about three days before anyone opens them.

Eight parts maker, two parts user

There is a phrase you will hear in Karatsu shops: tsukurite hachibu, tsukaite nibu. The maker does eight parts, the user does two. It is not modesty. It is a statement about what the pot is when you buy it, which is unfinished.

Karatsu is stoneware, porous under its glaze, and the glaze usually carries kannyū — the fine crazed network of cracks that forms because the clay body and the glaze shrink at different rates. Tea and broth and sake work into those cracks over years. The piece darkens, warms and settles. That is the two parts.

Season it before first use. The standard method is medome: submerge the piece in the cloudy water left from rinsing rice, bring it to a gentle simmer for fifteen to twenty minutes, let it cool in the pot, then wash and dry it completely. The starch seals the finest pores and slows the staining down to a rate you will enjoy rather than regret. If simmering is impractical, soaking the piece in plain water for half a day gets you part of the way.

Wet it before each use, too. A few minutes in water before food goes on it means less oil and less soy sauce taken up, and the clay colour comes up noticeably.

Dry it completely, every time. This is the one that matters. Porous stoneware put away damp will hold odour and can grow mould in the foot ring. Face down on a rack for an hour before it goes in a cupboard.

Skip the overnight soak in detergent, and skip bleach. Both go into the pores and stay there.

Hand wash; ask before microwaving or using a dishwasher. Porous, crazed stoneware is not the same proposition as porcelain, and individual kilns and glazes differ enough that the maker’s answer is the only reliable one. Hand washing is the safe default.

A break is not the end. Karatsu is a ware with a long-standing relationship to kintsugi, the lacquer-and-gold repair. A mended Karatsu bowl is not a damaged one.

Which is the point, really. You are not buying a finished object from the sixteenth century. You are buying the first eight parts of one.

Read: Japanese ceramics for every day, how to choose a rice bowl, or choosing sake cups. Or browse hand-picked, Japan-shipped ceramics on The Table.

Sources & Further Reading

• KARATSU Yaki (Pottery) — Traditional Crafts Aoyama Square — The national traditional-crafts body: the 9 June 1988 designation, the eight-municipality production area, the Matsuura / Arita / Shiota–Rokkaku clays, the climbing-kiln firing schedule and temperature, and the ranking alongside Raku and Hagi.
• 唐津焼 — Karatsu Tourism Association — The local tourism body: the 1580s start under the Hata clan of Kishidake, the Korean potters who brought the kick wheel and the climbing kiln, karatsumono as the western Japanese word for crockery, the tsukurite hachibu, tsukaite nibu saying, and the roughly seventy kilns working today.
• 肥前陶器窯跡 — Japan Heritage portal, Agency for Cultural Affairs — The national cultural-affairs agency on the designated kiln sites: the Kishidake group (Hobashira, Handōgame, Saraya) added in 2005, the split-bamboo and multi-chambered climbing kilns of Korean derivation, the late-sixteenth-century start, and the Ochawan-gama in Karatsu town.
• 中里無庵 — Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties — The national research institute’s obituary archive: Nakazato Muan’s 1895 birth, his succession as twelfth Tarōemon in 1927, the kiln-site excavations and tataki research from the late 1920s, the Muan name, and his death in 1985.