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Hasami: Porcelain for the People
How a small Nagasaki town spent four centuries making porcelain ordinary — from Edo-period bowls sold off riverboats to today's quietly modern tableware.
Hasami is a small town in the hills of Nagasaki with no railway station and, for most of its history, not even its own name on the pots it made. Yet for four hundred years it has done one thing better than almost anywhere else in Japan: make good porcelain cheap enough for everyone.
Porcelain without the pedigree
Kilns were established in Hasami around the turn of the 17th century, when potters from the Korean peninsula brought their techniques to Kyushu. The town sits next door to Arita, the famous birthplace of Japanese porcelain — but where Arita’s finest work went to lords and export ships, Hasami took the other road. Its potters built enormous climbing kilns up the hillsides — among the largest the world has known — and used that scale to fire porcelain in quantity, driving the price down to where ordinary households could afford it.
The kurawanka bowl
Hasami’s most famous product is a humble one. In the Edo period, vendors in small boats would pull alongside the passenger ferries on the Yodo River near Osaka, selling food and sake in sturdy porcelain bowls — bawling kurawanka!, roughly “eat, won’t you!”. The bowls, thick-walled and brushed with quick, simple patterns, came from Hasami. They were cheap enough that diners could keep them, and they carried porcelain — until then a luxury — into everyday Japanese life. The kurawanka bowl is still the town’s touchstone: unfussy, durable, priced to be used.
The town behind another town’s name
For generations, Hasami’s porcelain left town under its neighbour’s name — from the Meiji era onwards it was shipped out through Arita’s railway station and simply sold as Arita ware. Only around 2000, when Japan tightened its rules on labelling a product’s place of origin, did the town begin putting its own name forward. What might have been a crisis became a fresh start: freed from imitating anyone, Hasami’s makers leaned into what they had always been — makers of clean, contemporary, everyday tableware — and the Hasami name is now sought out in its own right.
Many hands, one pot
Like the great blade towns, Hasami works by division of labour. One workshop carves the moulds, another forms the unglazed bodies, the kilns glaze and fire, and trading houses carry the finished ware to market. Each specialist does one job at scale, which is how a piece of well-made Hasami porcelain stays affordable — the same logic as the kurawanka bowl, four centuries on.
Bringing Hasami home
Hasami ware asks little: it is porcelain made for daily use, not for the cabinet. If you are choosing everyday Japanese ceramics, start with the guide.
Read: Japanese ceramics for every day. Or browse hand-picked, Japan-shipped ceramics on The Table.
Sources & Further Reading
- Hasami Ware — Traditional Crafts Aoyama Square — The national traditional-crafts association’s page: kilns founded by Korean potters under the Omura domain, and the kurawanka bowls sold to boat passengers near Osaka.
- Arita and Hasami — Kyushu Tourism Organization — How the two neighbouring porcelain towns diverged: Arita’s refinement, Hasami’s affordability, and the shared label their wares once travelled under.
- Nakaoyama District of Hasami Town — Discover Nagasaki — Nagasaki’s official visitors’ guide on the kiln village whose 160-metre climbing kiln, among the world’s largest, made Edo-period mass production possible.
- Hasami Ware — Discover Nagasaki — On the first climbing kiln of 1599 and how Hasami’s porcelain brought everyday tableware to ordinary households.