Iga Ware: Pots from an Ancient Lakebed

Some pottery regions are defined by a glaze, or a lord, or a single famous kiln. Iga is defined by a lake that dried up four million years ago. The clay it left behind in this quiet valley in Mie Prefecture does one thing better than almost any other clay in Japan: it stands up to fire. Everything Iga has ever been known for — the fierce tea jars of the sixteenth century, the donabe simmering on a stove tonight — comes back to that.

The lake that made the clay

Long before there was an Iga, this basin was the floor of an ancient lake, the ancestor of today’s Lake Biwa. Silt settled on that lakebed for millions of years, and settling with it were plants and countless microscopic organisms.

That is what makes the clay unusual. Dug and fired hard, the organic matter trapped inside it burns away, and what remains is a body honeycombed with pores too small to see. The pottery is dense and stubborn against heat, yet full of tiny voids — which is exactly the combination you want in a pot meant to sit over a flame and hold its warmth afterwards.

The same old lakebed runs on westward, under Shigaraki just across the prefectural border in Shiga, and for a long time the two places made much the same rough ware. Iga’s own clay fires harder and a little heavier, and the two crafts eventually parted ways — with a proverb to mark the split, of which more below.

Pottery has been fired in this valley since the late 7th or 8th century, beginning with unglazed sueki: seed jars for farmers, and roof tiles for temples. Plain, useful things, made from clay that happened to be extraordinary.

The Momoyama moment

Then came tea. At the turn of the seventeenth century, when chanoyū had taken hold among the warrior class, the lords of Iga-Ueno turned their potters loose on tea ware — Tsutsui Sadatsugu (1562–1615) first, then Tōdō Takatora (1556–1630) and his heirs. The samurai tea master Furuta Oribe is said to have guided the work. What came out of those kilns is still called Ko-Iga, Old Iga, and it is some of the most violent-looking pottery Japan has ever made.

Water jars and vases were thrown well, then deliberately pushed out of true — dented, slumped, scored with wavelike scrapes from a spatula. They were fired long and hot in wood kilns, and the pine ash falling on them melted into runs of glassy green. That glaze has a borrowed name: biidoro, from the Portuguese vidro, glass.

And they had ears. Most Iga water jars carry a pair of lugs, one on each side — a detail so characteristic that it became the way to tell the two neighbours apart: Iga ni mimi ari, Shigaraki ni mimi nashi. Iga has ears; Shigaraki has none.

Down from the tea room

The tea kilns did not last. Production faded after 1600 and the valley went quiet for well over a century before firing resumed in the 1700s, this time with glazes and a different ambition. What revived Iga was not connoisseurship but the kitchen.

In 1832 a kiln called Nagatani-en was built at Marubashira, the pottery hamlet that is still the centre of the craft. It made donabe, yukihira saucepans, hōroku roasting dishes, dobin teapots — the ordinary flameware of ordinary households. The long climbing kiln from that period survives on the hillside there, sixteen chambers stepping up the slope, registered as a National Tangible Cultural Property; the pottery calls it the largest of its kind left in Japan.

Iga ware was designated a national Traditional Craft in 1982. The designated area covers the cities of Iga and Nabari.

Why an Iga pot cooks the way it does

All of it comes back to those microscopic pores. An Iga pot takes its time coming up to heat, and then gives that heat back slowly and evenly long after the burner is off — which is why rice cooked in one keeps steaming itself gently, and why a stew carried to the table is still working. The trade-off is honest: Iga is a little less rugged than the petalite-blended Banko clay that makes most of Japan’s everyday donabe. You buy Iga for the quality of the heat, not for indestructibility.

It is a strange lineage — from jars made to be admired by warlords to a pot you scrub out on a Tuesday night. But the clay never changed. It was always about fire.

Cooking on Iga

An Iga donabe rewards being broken in properly, and that first step — medome — is the one thing worth getting right before you cook in it.

Read: Donabe — choosing and breaking in a Japanese clay pot. Or browse hand-picked, Japan-shipped flameware on The Table.

Sources & Further Reading

IGA Yaki (Pottery) — Traditional Crafts Aoyama Square — The national traditional-crafts body: designation on 1 November 1982, the Iga and Nabari production area, 7th–8th century sueki origins, and clay harder and heavier than Shigaraki’s.
Iga Ware — KOGEI JAPAN — The craft-industry portal on the Momoyama tea kilns, the lords who backed them, the lapse after 1600 and the revival in the 1700s.
Iga Ware — Google Arts & Culture (Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University) — A curated look at Ko-Iga: the paired handles, spatula scraping, deliberate distortion and green ash glaze.
Nagatani-en — Official Site — The Marubashira pottery founded in 1832 on the ancient lakebed clay, its porous heat-retaining body, and the sixteen-chamber climbing kiln.