Imari-Arita Ware

Arita Town spreads across a highland in western Saga, with Imari City to its northwest, and together their kilns make a pottery route that has carried on for more than four hundred years. In Arita, a hilltop complex called Arita Sera gathers twenty-two shops and galleries, each with its own buyers and brands; nearby, the cooperative's MONO・NO・SU gallery shows work drawn from about sixty kilns, with a café space to sit in and gosu-painted sometsuke to look at. A short walk past Tozan Shrine and the lane of Tonbai walls sets the name "Imari-Arita ware" back inside the towns and valleys it comes from. Imari City has a base of its own: a ceramics cooperative of twenty-one kilns there runs painting workshops and trains successors.

To understand the ware, start with its raw material. Among the potters said to have come from the Korean peninsula with the Nabeshima house of Hizen, Ri Sampei searched the Taku and Nabeshima domains for stone that could make white porcelain like that of Jingdezhen in China, and is said to have found good white porcelain stone at Izumiyama in Arita and succeeded in firing porcelain in 1616. The white, dense body comes from stone like that at Izumiyama. By around 1630, abundant Izumiyama stone supported larger-scale production across the Arita area, and porcelain moved from a rare object toward tableware that could be supplied in quantity.

The easiest thing to recognize on these vessels is the blue of gosu. Gosu is an underglaze pigment: brushed onto the body it is not yet blue, and it develops its blue color only after the piece has been through the kiln. In Arita, the Imari-Arita Ware traditional-industry hall opens this step up as a painting workshop, where visitors brush gosu onto an unfired body themselves and then have it fired. The white body and blue pattern of sometsuke run from fine floral work to clean everyday motifs, and the Saga ceramics cooperative holds regular wheel and painting sessions, so the technique keeps being practiced by hand rather than only shown in a case.

Heading from Arita toward Imari, Okawachiyama hides in a valley closed in by mountains on three sides. In the Edo period it was a kiln ground of the Nabeshima domain, firing presentation pieces, and to keep the techniques from leaking out the kilns were kept inside this enclosed terrain; the selection of finished pieces is said to have been judged partly by tapping them and listening to the sound. About thirty kilns still fire in Okawachiyama today, and the valley is scattered with kiln remains, a climbing kiln, and traces of old potters' houses; the Nabeshima kiln bridge and kiln park keep that domain history in the place names along the path.

What holds the area together is a handful of groups that connect people and skills. The cooperative of twenty-one kilns in Imari City runs painting workshops and trains successors. The larger Saga Prefectural Ceramics Industry Cooperative, founded in 1949, covers the kilns of Imari, Arita, Ureshino, and Takeo, has grown in recent years to around seventy-odd members, and works to maintain the quality of Arita, Imari, and Hizen Yoshida ware. Imari-Arita ware is recognized as a traditional craft, and the successor training the cooperative runs on that basis passes painting, wheel work, and plaster-mold forming from one generation to the next. Alongside them, the Imari-Arita Ware Traditional Craftworkers' Association and the Saga Ceramics Technicians' Federation have shown the work of eighty-three traditional craftworkers and twenty-five skill holders together at the Saga Prefectural Kyushu Ceramic Museum, with their own stated aims: to raise successors, sharpen skills, and promote the craft.

After the detour through geology and kiln fire, the ware comes back to the table. The Saga ceramics cooperative writes "tableware that supports food culture" into its own purpose, and alongside traditional patterns it adds designs built for function and daily use: white-and-indigo modern motifs that keep a table clean and easy to set, and finely painted sometsuke pieces, each with its own expression. In Arita, a brand like 2016/, born in the four-hundredth year of Arita ware, hands the ideas of designers from Japan and abroad to skilled kilns to turn into vessels, in a space you can also sit and use as a café. From the display case to the coffee cup, from the history of presentation pieces to a single meal or drink, the most solid form of Imari-Arita ware is a piece held in the hand with food on it.