Koishiwara Ware: The Pattern Nobody Draws

Watch a Koishiwara potter decorate a bowl and the odd thing is how little decorating happens.

The bowl is already coated in white slip — liquid clay, brushed or poured over the raw body — and left to firm up to the stiffness of cheese. The wheel spins. The potter brings a thin, springy steel blade down onto the turning surface at a shallow angle, and the blade starts to chatter: it bites, skips, bites again, bites, skips, and in a few seconds a band of short even dashes has appeared all the way around the pot, each one cutting through the white to the darker clay underneath.

Nobody drew that. The potter chose the wheel speed, the dryness of the slip and the temper of the steel, and the pattern fell out of the physics. It is called tobikanna — jumping plane — and it is the most recognisable surface in Japanese folk pottery.

A village with two kinds of pottery

Koishiwara is a district of Toho, a mountain village of fewer than two thousand people in the Asakura district of Fukuoka, up in the range that separates the Fukuoka plain from Ōita. Around fifty kilns work there. Two distinct traditions come off the same hillside, and the older one is the grander.

Takatori ware arrived first. After Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea, Kuroda Nagamasa — first lord of the Fukuoka domain — brought back a Korean potter known in Japan as Hachizō, who opened a kiln at the foot of Mount Takatori in 1606. The second lord sent him to study under Kobori Enshū, the tea master and garden designer whose taste defined an era, and Takatori came to be counted among the seven kilns associated with Enshū’s preferences: thin, dark, restrained, glazed in flowing amber and brown. Tea ware for people with opinions about tea ware. The kiln moved repeatedly with its patrons, and in 1665 a Takatori potter built one at Tsuzumi in Koishiwara. In 1669 his descendant found a good bed of potting clay at Sarayama, further up the same valley.

That clay is why the second tradition exists.

The porcelain that didn’t take

In 1682 the third Kuroda lord, Mitsuyuki, invited potters from Imari — across the mountains in what is now Saga, where Japanese porcelain had been running for two generations — to set up at Sarayama. It was the first kiln of its kind in the old province of Chikuzen, and it was aimed high: large porcelain jars, pots and sake bottles, made in the Chinese manner, under the name Nakano-yaki, after what the place was then called.

It did not become Arita. By the early eighteenth century the kilns had turned to stoneware — heavy, glazed, fired for people who needed storage jars and mixing bowls and pickling crocks — and the name changed with the product. Koishiwara ware is what Nakano ware became after it stopped reaching.

The decoration came with the change. Slip over a dark body, and then a small repertoire of ways of disturbing it: tobikanna, the chattered dashes; hakeme, sweeping brush marks; kushime, combed lines; nagashikake and uchikake, glaze poured or flung on in rhythmic runs and splashes. Every one of them is fast. Every one of them is a pattern a potter can put on the four hundredth bowl of the week without slowing down, and which will look slightly different on each. The glaze traditionally goes straight onto the unfired clay and the pot is fired once, with no bisque stage in between.

This is not modesty as an aesthetic pose. It is what the decoration of a working kiln looks like when the kiln has to make a living.

The kiln that left home

In 1705 a Koishiwara potter named Yanase San’emon crossed into Ōita at the invitation of a man from Hita, and with two local families founded a kiln in a fold of the mountains at Sarayama in Onta — about twenty-five kilometres away, and a branch of Koishiwara in everything but name.

Onta then did something Koishiwara did not: it stopped.

The clay is still dug from the hillside above the village and crushed by karausu, wooden trip-hammers driven by a diverted stream, which thud day and night and are the reason the valley sounds the way it does. The kilns pass down within the founding families — by custom one wheel to a household, and about ten households in all. Pieces are not signed by the potter; the mark is the village’s. Japan recognised the technique as an Important Intangible Cultural Property in 1995, and the valley itself as an Important Cultural Landscape in 2008.

And Onta is the one the world heard about. Yanagi Sōetsu, the founder of the mingei folk-craft movement, wrote about the village in 1931 and made it famous in Japan; Bernard Leach, the English potter who had done more than anyone to explain Japanese ceramics to the West, stayed there for three weeks in 1954 and said he had come to learn. A jug handle he demonstrated is reportedly still being made there.

The parent kiln, meanwhile, sat back over the ridge with more potters, more clay and less romance.

Beauty of use, and a medal for it

Koishiwara’s turn came through the same movement. Folk-craft people reappraised the ware around 1931, and the phrase that attached itself was yō no bi — the beauty of use: the argument that an honest tool, made in quantity by an unnamed hand for an ordinary kitchen, can be more beautiful than something made to be admired.

It travelled well. Koishiwara ware was shown at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair under exactly that banner and came away with a Grand Prix, which is a peculiar outcome for pickling crocks. Then, on 10 May 1975, Koishiwara was designated a Traditional Craft of Japan — by the village’s own account and by most Japanese sources, the first ceramic ware in the country to receive the designation, under a law that had only come into force the previous year.

There is an irony in it that the mingei theorists would have enjoyed and the potters probably ignored. A philosophy built on the anonymous, the unpretentious and the cheap ended up producing a national certificate, a trademark and a tourist route. The kilns kept making bowls.

5 July 2017

Then the rain.

On 5 July 2017 a stalled front fed by warm wet air parked a line of storms over northern Kyushu and would not move. Asakura, next door, recorded 545.5 mm of rain in twenty-four hours — an all-time record for the station. Toho was one of the three municipalities at the centre of it, with Asakura and Hita. Mountainsides came down as debris flows, rivers took out houses and bridges, and the railway line through the village was destroyed so thoroughly that it never returned as a railway; the route reopened in 2023 as a bus rapid transit line.

Onta was hit as well, from the other side of the same mountain: mud through the valley, the clay-digging ground collapsed, karausu and water channels broken. Both villages have spent the years since rebuilding, and Onta took further rain damage in 2023.

It is worth knowing when you buy one of these bowls. This is not a craft that survived by being precious. It is a mountain village that has been making cheap, tough, quickly-decorated stoneware for three hundred years, through the collapse of its porcelain ambitions, the arrival of industrial tableware, and a mountain coming down on top of it.

Living with a Koishiwara bowl

Koishiwara is stoneware: fired hard, glazed over most of its surface, and meant to be used daily rather than protected.

Rinse and soak before first use. Twenty minutes in plain water is enough. A stoneware body still has some porosity, and a piece that has already drunk clean water takes up less soy sauce and oil.

The foot ring is bare clay. That unglazed circle is the part that stains, and the part that stays damp. Dry the piece properly before it goes in a cupboard — face down on a rack for an hour, not straight onto a shelf.

Don’t scour the pattern. Chattered and combed decoration is texture, not paint: it cannot rub off, but a metal scourer will polish the ridges flat over years. A soft brush gets into the grooves better than a sponge anyway.

Skip the overnight soak in detergent. Porous ceramics hold the smell of soap, and there is no reason to give them the chance.

Check before microwaving or putting it in the dishwasher. Most plain glazed Koishiwara handles both, but individual kilns differ, and anything with metallic decoration should stay out of the microwave entirely.

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

Sources & Further Reading

• KOISHIWARA Yaki (Pottery) — Traditional Crafts Aoyama Square — The national traditional-crafts body: the 10 May 1975 designation, the production area in Toho, Asakura district, the seventeenth-century Kuroda kiln and the Nakano-yaki name, and the shift to pottery in the early eighteenth century.
• HISTORY — Koishiwara & Takatori official site, Toho Village — The local kilns’ own account: Hachizō and the 1606 Takatori kiln, Kobori Enshū’s seven kilns, the 1665 move to Koishiwara and the 1669 clay find at Sarayama, the 1682 invitation of Imari potters, the 1958 Brussels Grand Prix and yō no bi, and the claim to be the first ceramic ware designated a traditional craft.
• Koishiwara Ware — ACROS Fukuoka (Fukuoka Prefecture cultural foundation) — On the five decorative techniques (tobikanna, hakeme, kushime, nagashikake, uchikake), the single raw-glaze firing, the 1682 Imari potters, and the folk-craft reappraisal around 1931.
• 小鹿田焼の里 — Ōita Prefecture — The prefecture on Onta: the 1705 founding, the water-driven karausu that crush the clay, the 1995 Important Intangible Cultural Property and 2008 Important Cultural Landscape designations, and the storm damage. Bernard Leach’s 1954 stay is documented by the Kyushu Regional Development Bureau, MLIT.