VIII. POTTERY

The Chinese stimulus—The potters of Hizen—Pottery and tea—How Goto Saijiro brought the art of porcelain from Hizen to Kaga—The nineteenth century

In a sense it is not quite just to Japan to speak of her importing civilization from Korea and China, except in the sense in which northwestern Europe took its civilization from Greece and Rome. We might also view all the peoples of the Far East as one ethnic and cultural unity, in which each part, like the provinces of one country, produced in its time and place an art and culture akin to and dependent upon the art and culture of the rest. So Japanese pottery is a part and phase of Far Eastern ceramics, fundamentally like the Chinese, and yet stamped with the characteristic delicacy and fineness of all Japanese work. Until the coming of the Korean artisans in the seventh century, Japanese pottery was merely an industry, moulding crude materials for common use; there was, apparently, no glazed pottery in the Far East before the eighth century, much less any porcelain.⁶⁶ The industry became an art largely as a result of the entrance of tea in the thirteenth century. Chinese tea-cups of Sung design came in with tea, and aroused the admiration of the Japanese. In the year 1223 Kato Shirozemon, a Japanese potter, made his way perilously to China, studied ceramics there for six years, returned to set up his own factory at Seto, and so far surpassed all preceding pottery in the islands that Seto-mono, or Seto-ware, became a generic name for all Japanese pottery, just as chinaware, in the seventeenth century, became the English term for porcelain. The Shogun Yoritomo made Shirozemon’s future by setting the fashion of rewarding minor services with presents of Shirozemon’s tea-jars, filled with the new marvel of powdered tea. Today the surviving specimens of this Toshiro-yaki* are accounted almost beyond price; they are swathed in costly brocade, and kept in boxes of the finest lacquer, while their owners are spoken of with bated breath as the aristocracy of connoisseurs.⁶⁷

Three hundred years later another Japanese, Shonzui, was lured to China to study its famous potteries. On his return he established a factory at Arita, in the province of Hizen. He was harassed, however, by the difficulty of finding in the soil of his country minerals as well adapted as those of China to make a fine pâte; and it was said of his products that one of their main ingredients was the bones of his artisans. Nevertheless Shonzui’s wares of Mohammedan blue were so excellent that the Chinese potters of the eighteenth century did their best to imitate them for export under his counterfeited name; and the extant examples of his work are now as highly valued as the rarest paintings of Japan’s greatest masters of the brush.⁶⁸ About 1605 a Korean, Risampei, discovered at Izumi-yama, in the Arita district, immense deposits of porcelain stone; and from that moment Hizen became the center of the ceramic industry in Japan. In Arita, too, labored the famous Kakiemon, who, after learning the art of enameling from a Chinese ship-master, made his name almost synonymous with delicately decorated enameled porcelain. Dutch merchants shipped large quantities of Hizen products to Europe from the port of Arita at Imari; 44,943 pieces went to Holland alone in the year 1664. This brilliantImari-yaki became the rage in Europe, and inspired Aebregt de Keiser to inaugurate the golden age of Dutch ceramics in his factories at Delft.

Meanwhile the rise of the tea ceremony had stimulated a further development in Japan. In 1578 Nobunaga, at the suggestion of the tea-master Rikyu, gave a large order for cups and other tea utensils to a family of Korean potters at Kyoto. A few years later Hideyoshi rewarded the family with a gold seal, and made its wares, the Raku-yaki, almost de rigueur for the ritual of drinking tea. Hideyoshi’s generals returned from their unsuccessful invasion of Korea with numerous captives, among whom, by a discrimination unusual in warriors, were many artists. In 1596 Shimazu Yoshihiro brought to Satsuma a hundred skilled Koreans, including seventeen potters; and these men, with their successors, established throughout the world the high reputation of Satsuma for that richly colored glazed ware to which an Italian town has given our name of faience. But the greatest Japanese master in this branch of the art was the Kyoto potter Ninsei. Not only did he originate enameled faience, but he gave to his products a grace and proud restraint that have made them precious to collectors ever since, so that his mark has been more often counterfeited than that of any other artist in Japan.⁶⁹ Because of his work, decorated faience mounted to the intensity of a craze in the capital, and in some quarters of Kyoto every second house was turned into a miniature pottery.⁷⁰ Only less famous than Ninsei was Kenzan, older brother of the painter Korin.

The romance that so often lurks behind ceramics appears in the story of how Goto Saijiro brought the art of porcelain from Hizen to Kaga. An excellent bed of potter’s stone having been discovered near the village of Kutani, the feudal lord of the province resolved to establish a porcelain industry there; and Goto was sent to Hizen to study its methods of firing and design. But the secrets of the potters were so carefully concealed from outsiders that Goto for a while was baffled. Finally he disguised himself as a servant, and accepted a menial place in the household of a potter. After three years his master admitted him to a pottery, and there Goto worked for four years more. Then he deserted the wife whom he had married at Hizen and the children whom she had borne to him, and fled to Kaga, where he gave his lord a full report of the methods he had learned. From that time on (1664) the potters of Kutani became masters, and Kutani-yaki rivaled the best wares of Japan.⁷¹

The Hizen potteries retained their leadership throughout the eighteenth century, largely as a result of the benevolent care which the feudal lord of Hirado lavished upon the workmen in his factories; for a century (1750-1843) the blue Michawaki wares of Hirado stood at the head of Japanese porcelains. In the nineteenth century Zengoro Hozen brought the leadership to Kyoto by clever imitations that often surpassed his models, so that sometimes it became impossible to decide which was the original and which was the copy. In the final quarter of the century Japan developed cloisonné enameling from the crude condition in which it had remained since its entry from China, and took the lead of the world in this field of ceramics.⁷² Other branches deteriorated during the same period, for the rising demand of Europe for Japanese pottery led to a style of exaggerated decoration alien to the native taste, and the habits engendered in meeting these foreign orders affected the skill and weakened the traditions of the art. Here, as everywhere, the coming of industry has been for a while a blight; mass production has taken the place of quality, and mass consumption has replaced discriminating taste. Perhaps, after invention has run its fertile course, and social organization and experience have spread the gift of leisure and taught its creative use, the curse may be turned into a blessing; industry may lavish comforts upon the majority of men, while the worker, after paying his lowered tribute of hours to the machine, may once again become an artisan, and turn the mechanical product, by loving individual treatment, into a work of personality and art.