Shigaraki Pottery

What kind of jar survives a wood fire with no glaze at all?

Shigaraki potters throw with clay dug locally, around Koka, that carries an unusually high load of iron and coarse, gritty particles, according to the craft record. That grit is what keeps a large jar from slumping when it reaches the heat of a climbing kiln, a noborigama. Nothing gets glazed. The wheel shapes the piece, a slab board called a tataraita builds out the wider walls, and then the fire finishes the surface on its own: ash drifting off burning wood lands on the shoulder of a pot and melts into a natural glaze wherever it happens to settle, leaving streaks and scorch marks no brush ever touched.

The same clay and the same fire produce two very different kinds of object, per the source material: garden jars, planters, and umbrella stands built to stand outside for years, and the tanuki, the pot-bellied raccoon dog figurine that has become one of the craft's most recognized exports. One is architecture. The other is a charm. Both come off the same wheel, out of the same kiln, with the same refusal to hide behind a glaze.

Tableware and small objects come off the same production line too, per the record, but it is the large-format work — the jars a person can barely lift, the planters that outlive the plant inside them — where the coarse, refractory clay actually earns its keep. A finer, cleaner clay body would be easier to throw and easier to sell as tableware. It would also be far more likely to crack apart under the stress of firing something that size.

The same idea, worked out on another peninsula

Potters in Impruneta, in the hills south of Florence, have been doing something recognizably similar since the Etruscan and Roman period: firing local clay into large, unglazed earthenware meant to live in a garden or lean against a building. The purpose lines up closely with Shigaraki's — big, tough pottery meant to be seen outdoors, not kept behind glass.

Where the two traditions diverge is in how far each one pushes the fire. Terracotta, as the word says, is essentially a bisque-fired body: it holds its shape but stays comparatively soft, and its appeal sits in the honesty of the raw clay left plain. Shigaraki's process, yakishime, asks more of the kiln. The ware is fired hot enough that the clay body itself hardens toward stone, and the ash-glaze effect arrives as an accident of the wood fire rather than as anything brushed on. Both potters agreed to leave the surface bare. They disagree about how far to cook it before calling it finished.

A third point sits on the same spectrum, further east again: the unglazed, high-fired stoneware traditions of Vietnam and Thailand, which share Shigaraki's instinct to let heat and clay do the work rather than a glaze coat. Line the three up and a single question — "how do you make a big pot without covering it up" — starts to look less like one craft and more like a family of separate answers to it.

None of the three workshops arrived at that family resemblance by copying one another. Tuscany had its own clay and its own gardens to fill. Southeast Asia's kilns answered to their own climate and their own storage needs. What lines them up is not contact between them but the fact that an unglazed, high-fired jar solves the same short list of problems wherever it is made: it survives being left outside, it does not need a second firing for a glaze coat, and it looks like exactly what it is — fired earth, nothing painted over it.

Why did a palace roof and a lucky charm come out of the same kiln?

According to the craft record, Shigaraki's kilns first proved themselves in 742, when they fired roof tiles for Emperor Shomu's Shigarakinomiya palace. That commission handed the local potters a specific, unglamorous problem: how to fire large, heavy ceramic forms without cracking or collapsing them in the kiln. The answers built up over the centuries that followed, and Shigaraki eventually took its place among what the record calls Japan's Six Ancient Kilns.

Once a workshop can reliably fire something the size of a roof tile, it can just as reliably fire something playful. The tanuki figurine, produced prolifically once that large-vessel know-how existed, drew on a separate thread entirely — a folk belief in the tanuki as a bringer of good fortune — and grafted it onto a kiln that already knew how to handle scale and heat.

Impruneta split off along a different set of causes. Its clay beds predate the Roman era, and the demand that shaped the craft came from the culture of the Italian garden, which wanted large, weather-hardened pots to line a terrace or frame a doorway. A palace roof pushed one tradition toward scale and superstition; a garden aesthetic pushed the other toward scale and restraint. Same raw material, two very different clients asking for it.

Koka, Shiga, since the Nara period

The designation places the craft in Shiga Prefecture, with production centered in Koka City, and traces its origin to the Nara period — the same 742 tiles fired for the Shigarakinomiya palace. The official craft designation itself is far more recent: it was registered on September 4 in the fiftieth year of Showa, 1975. Between those two dates sits the same clay, coming out of the same hills, for well over a thousand years.

What is happening to the workshop count?

The Shigaraki Ceramics Industry Cooperative Association's own figures, cited in a Shiga prefectural report on the region's local industries, put the number of workshops at 157 in 1992, of which 108 — about 68.8 percent — ran with five employees or fewer. By 2011, the report's most recent base year, that count had fallen to 79 workshops, 56 of them (70.9 percent) still at five employees or under. The same report frames the 2011 total as roughly a third of the craft's peak.

The pressures behind that decline are structural rather than sudden, per the same source: demand for the building-material side of the business moves with construction and landscaping cycles, and that swing sits on top of a shortage of people willing to take up the trade. A workshop running on five people or fewer has little room to absorb both problems at once.

What goes quiet if the kiln does?

Losing Shigaraki would not simply mean losing a place name stamped on a pot. It would close one lineage of what the record calls Japan's Six Ancient Kilns, a production base the record traces back to those 742 palace tiles. And it would take with it a surface no other kiln produces quite the same way — the scorched, ash-streaked, unglazed skin of yakishime ware, the same texture that turned a raccoon dog figurine into one of the most recognized objects to come out of a Japanese kiln.

What would not disappear, at least not from this particular loss, is the underlying idea. Impruneta's potters would keep firing their terracotta whether or not a single Shigaraki kiln stayed lit, and the pit-fired stoneware traditions further east would keep going too. The specific accident of ash falling on a specific clay, dug from a specific set of hills in Koka, is the part that only exists in one place.