Tokoname: The Town That Makes Japan's Teapots

If you have ever brewed loose-leaf Japanese green tea from a small, unglazed red teapot with a side handle, it almost certainly came from Tokoname — a pottery town on the Chita Peninsula, south of Nagoya in Aichi. Tokoname makes the great majority of Japan’s kyusu, to the point where the two words have nearly become one. But the teapot is a recent chapter in a very long story.

A thousand years of clay

Tokoname is one of Japan’s Six Ancient Kilns — the handful of pottery centres that have fired continuously since medieval times, the others being Bizen, Echizen, Seto, Shigaraki and Tamba. Of the six, Tokoname was the largest. Pottery began here in the late Heian period, around the year 1100, drawing on the iron-rich clay of the peninsula, and at its height some three thousand kilns are thought to have dotted the hillsides. For centuries the town made big, sturdy things — storage jars, water pipes, crocks — and shipped them by sea up and down the coast, from Tohoku in the north to Kyushu in the south.

The teapot, in other words, came late. It grew out of a thousand years of knowing exactly what this particular clay would do in the fire.

Why the pot is red

Tokoname’s local clay is unusually rich in iron. Fired unglazed, it turns a warm reddish-brown, and this bare iron-red body is called shudei — literally “vermilion clay”. Leaving the clay unglazed is the whole point: with no glassy barrier between the pot and the tea, the fired clay itself is in contact with the brew.

That contact is said to matter. The iron in shudei is traditionally held to smooth the bitterness and astringency of green tea, rounding out the cup — a claim you will hear from tea sellers and potters alike, though it is a subtle effect rather than a dramatic one, and much depends on the tea and the brewer. What is not in doubt is the fit for Japanese tea: a small, thin-walled, unglazed pot holds heat gently and pours cleanly, which is exactly what delicate sencha and gyokuro ask for.

A lesson from Yixing

Small teapots became Tokoname’s calling in the late Edo period, when sencha — steeped leaf tea, as opposed to whisked matcha — swept through Japan and households wanted a pot to make it in. Local potters were shaping red-clay teapots by the mid-nineteenth century.

The craft then took a decisive turn from abroad. Yixing, in China, had long been famous for unglazed, iron-rich purple-clay teapots, and in the second half of the nineteenth century a Yixing potter, Jin Shiheng (also read Kin Shikō), came to Tokoname and taught his hand-forming methods to the local makers — a signed teapot places him working in the town by 1878. Tokoname’s potters absorbed the Chinese techniques, married them to their own wheel-based traditions and their remarkable clay, and from that meeting the modern Tokoname kyusu took its shape.

The pot in your hand today

A good Tokoname kyusu is a quietly clever object. Many are thrown thin and light; the classic form sets the handle at a right angle to the spout, so a right-hander can pour with one relaxed hand. Inside, generations of potters have refined the strainer — from a few drilled holes to the fine built-in ceramic mesh that lets fannings-heavy sencha flow freely without clogging. None of it is decorated for its own sake. It is a tool, made by a town that has been making tools out of this clay for a very long time.

Explore hand-picked, Japan-shipped tea tools on The Table, or read the guide to Japanese ceramics for every day.

Sources & Further Reading

• Tokoname Ware — KOGEI JAPAN — The traditional-craft profile: origins in the late Heian period, Tokoname as the largest of the Six Ancient Kilns, the iron-rich shudei clay, and the note that the iron “is said to” smooth the bitterness of tea.
• Tokoname — The Six Ancient Kilns — The official Japan Heritage site: pottery from around the year 1100, up to 3,000 kilns on the Chita Peninsula, sencha driving teapot production in the late Edo period, and the red-brown shudei teapot’s roots in Chinese Yixing ware.