Story
Entrusting My Thoughts to White Clay
Ecchu-Seto ware begins with the sue ware of a thousand years ago and has continued for 430 years. That long history has been sustained by the many clays found at the foot of Mount Tateyama. Even now we dig and use them, sorted by color: brown, yellow, blue, red-brown.
Among them is one I would call special, and that is the white clay. It carries no iron, its particles are fine, and it withstands great heat. Fired in the hottest part of the climbing kiln, it remains earthenware and yet approaches the fineness of porcelain. White clay is recorded in documents 430 years old; in those earliest days its use was reserved for the official kiln of the Maeda house of Kaga.
Since my twenties I have been moved by the beauty of Chinese and Korean ceramics, and have gone to the old kiln sites of Korea to work. In the tea bowls made on the peninsula, the ones we call Goryeo tea bowls, it was not only the color the glaze gave up but the character each clay took on in the fire that drew me in.
Throwing a tea bowl on the potter's wheel, one clay will rise but resist spreading outward; every clay has its own temperament. And yet the more insistent the clay, the more compelling the face it shows. I believe the potter's essential work is to know what a clay holds, and to draw out its appeal by taking its virtues and its faults together.
Of late the conviction has deepened in me that the finest clay, for me, is the clay of Tateyama, where I was born and raised. As a small boy I followed my grandfather Shojiro into the spring hills once the snow had melted, to dig it. He would taste the clay to judge it, and I would be sent home with a small load on my back, feeling I had helped with the work.
When I take white clay in my hands, my mind travels out to the landscape that formed it, to the history and the culture it was raised in. What shall I express with this clay? There is no limit, above or below. Through making, I search my own mind, or settle it, and by going on expressing, reaching for a prayer that brings peace, I hope to raise myself a little higher.