Otani Pottery

A Sake Cup and a Jar Taller Than a Man, Fired at the Same Kilns

Otani ware comes from Naruto, a city in Tokushima Prefecture on the island of Shikoku. The workshops there fire two very different kinds of object under one name: small sake vessels and bowls meant for a dinner table, and jars that can rise well past the height of the person who threw them. Both come off the same wheels, from the same local clay, in the same kilns, made by the same hands within the same week.

The clay itself is chosen for a specific job. Potters use a local clay valued for how well it resists heat and cracking under the pressure of holding its own weight at a large scale — a property that matters far more once a jar grows past what one pair of hands can easily lift, and past what an ordinary firing schedule can safely dry out without splitting the walls. The vessels are shaped on a kick wheel, worked further with a wooden paddle to firm and texture the walls from the outside while a hand supports the clay from within, and fired in a large climbing kiln built into a hillside, where the heat can reach the volume that scale demands without scorching the pieces closest to the flame. A salt-glaze finish, thrown into the kiln at high temperature, gives the surface its mottled, warm color, so that no two large jars come out looking quite identical.

For the biggest pieces, though, a kick wheel and a single pair of hands stop being enough. Past a certain diameter, one person cannot both keep the wheel spinning with their feet and shape walls that tall with their hands at the same time — the two jobs pull in different directions. That is where Otani's second wheel comes in: one worked lying down.

One Potter Lying Down, One Standing: The Nero-Rokuro

The technique is called nero-rokuro, the "lying-down wheel." One potter lies on their side and turns the wheel with their legs, freeing both hands for nothing but balance and small adjustments; a second potter stands over the clay and shapes it with both hands entirely free to push, pull, and lift the walls upward as they rise. Reported as an unusual approach among potting traditions worldwide, the method lets two people put more force and more reach into a single piece of clay than either could manage working alone — enough to raise a jar past the combined height of both of them, without either potter ever having to stop and rest a leg or a hand mid-piece.

The jars this technique built were not decorative pieces sitting on a shelf. They were indigo vats, sized to hold the dye used to color Awa cloth, the woven textile Tokushima was known for. A vat that size needed a wheel that size — which is really to say, it needed two people working as one, not a single potter working harder or longer. The skill sits less in either person's hands alone than in the coordination between them: the one lying down has to read, by feel through the wheel, exactly how the clay above is behaving, without ever actually seeing it directly.

Why did Naruto raise its jars while Andalusia buried them?

Otani is not alone in having to solve this particular problem. In Andalusia, in southern Spain, potters have long made tinaja — earthenware jars that also rise taller than a person, built to hold olive oil and wine rather than indigo dye. The starting problem is the one Naruto's potters faced too: a regional product exists in a volume that no ordinary vessel can hold, and someone has to throw something bigger to keep up with it.

The two traditions answered that shared problem in opposite ways. Otani jars are fired and then kept standing above ground, out in the open air of the workshop yard, relying on the thickness and quality of the clay itself to protect whatever is stored inside. Andalusian tinaja were traditionally set into the earth itself, buried up to their shoulders, so that the surrounding soil — not the thickness of the jar's own walls — keeps the oil or wine inside at a stable temperature through the heat of a Mediterranean summer. One tradition solved its scale problem with a wheel built for two hands and two more; the other solved it by handing the temperature problem to the ground beneath the workshop.

Why the split? Geography and trade, mostly. Naruto sat close to a major Awa indigo-growing area, and steady local demand for dye vats gave potters there a reason to keep building at that scale, kiln after kiln, generation after generation, until the nero-rokuro became simply the accepted way to do the job. Andalusia's potters were answering to a different climate and a different product entirely — oil and wine that spoil or turn under heat rather than dye that simply needs a large enough container — and burial solved their particular problem more directly than any change to the wheel or the firing ever could have.

A third region arrived at yet another answer to the same original question. In Ratchaburi Province, in Thailand, potters have long made large earthenware water jars recognized by the dragon designs carved and painted across their surfaces. Their jars hold water rather than dye or oil, and unlike Otani's plain, working vats, they are made to be looked at as much as used, decorated on the outside rather than left bare. Three regions, three liquids, three different solutions — dye, oil, water — to the same shortage of anything store-bought big enough to hold what a local economy actually produced.

Naruto, Since the Late Eighteenth Century

Otani ware is said to have begun in the mid-Edo period, in the Tenmei era, with one account placing its start around 1780. Production has centered on Naruto ever since, close enough to the Awa indigo-growing area that a jar thrown in Naruto's kilns did not have far to travel before it reached the dye vats it was built for, and close enough that the two industries — cloth and pottery — grew up answering to the same regional trade.

The craft's government designation was filed on September 10, 2003, and the designation record lists sake vessels, jars, and bowls made in the Naruto area as the recognized products of the tradition — the full working range of the craft, not only the large-scale jars it is best known for outside Tokushima.

What disappears when no one lies down at the wheel anymore?

The demand that built the nero-rokuro is largely gone. Indigo dyeing has shrunk as an industry over the decades, and with it the demand for vats sized to hold it, which leaves fewer reasons, year over year, for a workshop to keep two people trained and available for a wheel built for a job that mostly no longer arrives. A skill kept alive by daily use starts to erode once the use itself becomes occasional.

That shrinking demand runs alongside a second, separate problem: finding anyone willing to learn a technique that only pays off when a large vat needs making, and that cannot really be practiced solo. A single potter can sit down at an ordinary kick wheel and improve alone, one afternoon at a time. The nero-rokuro offers no such path — it only works, and can only be learned, with a second person already committed to lying down beside them.

Today, six to seven workshops continue firing Otani ware, according to the Tokushima prefectural government and the Otani-yaki kiln association (both checked 2026-08-18) — a population that has narrowed as the market for the jars it grew up around has narrowed with it.

What is at stake, then, is not only a style of pottery but a way of working it. The nero-rokuro asks for two people who trust each other's timing completely: one lying blind to the clay and steering the wheel by feel alone, the other shaping whatever the first one spins beneath their hands. If that pairing stops being taught, Otani does not simply lose a decoration or a glaze recipe. It loses the specific, two-person way its workshops currently know to raise a jar of that size at all — and with it, whatever still gets made only because someone learned, one afternoon at a time, to lie down at a wheel their grandfather also worked.