Kutani: The Porcelain That Vanished and Came Back

Most Japanese ceramics whisper. Kutani does not. Deep green, egg yolk yellow, iron red, aubergine purple and a dark mineral blue, laid on thick enough to catch the light — it is the loudest porcelain Japan makes, and it comes from a mountain village so remote that the kilns there could disappear for a hundred years without anyone quite establishing why.

A mine at the head of a river

The story starts in 1655, in the valley of the upper Daishōji River in what is now Kaga City, Ishikawa. Porcelain stone had turned up in a mine at the village of Kutani — literally “nine valleys” — and Maeda Toshiharu, first lord of the Daishōji domain, wanted to do something with it. He sent his retainer Gotō Saijirō west to Hizen, to the porcelain town of Arita, to learn how the work was done. Gotō came back with the technique and the kilns were lit.

We know they were burning almost immediately, because the ground remembers. Excavation of the site turned up a iromi — a small colour-test piece — inscribed Meireki 2, eighth month, sixth day, Kutani: the sixth day of the eighth month of 1656, written on a scrap of the actual work. The kiln remains up the valley were designated a National Historic Site in 1979.

The location is worth a moment. Kutani village sits above Yamanaka Onsen, the same hot-spring valley whose woodturners were already supplying Japan with lacquer bases — that story is here. One narrow stretch of Ishikawa mountain, two of the country’s great crafts.

Then the kilns went quiet

They ran for roughly half a century and stopped. Ishikawa’s record of the site puts the early kilns at about 1656 to 1710; other accounts stretch them a little later. What every account agrees on is that nobody knows the reason. No fire, no edict, no recorded bankruptcy — the work simply ends, and the valley goes quiet for about a hundred years.

What was made in those decades is called Ko-Kutani, Old Kutani, and it is among the most prized porcelain in Japan. It is also among the most argued over. For nearly a century scholars have debated whether the pieces museums label Ko-Kutani were actually fired at Kutani at all, or in Arita — kiln-site excavations in Hizen have produced sherds in the same style, and some major museums now catalogue such pieces as Arita ware. The question is still open. It is a strange thing for a craft town to live with: the ware that made its name may not, in every case, have been made there.

Five colours, and one style that refuses one of them

What is not in dispute is the palette. Kutani gosai — the five Kutani colours — are green, yellow, red, purple and dark blue, mineral enamels painted on top of the fired glaze and set in a second, cooler firing. That is the whole technical logic of the ware: the body is fired to around 1,300°C, glazed and hard; then the colour goes on and returns to the kiln at 800–1,000°C, low enough to keep the enamels glassy and raised. Run a finger across good Kutani and you can feel the painting standing off the surface.

Two approaches come out of this, and both are still made:

• Iroe (also called gosaite) — all five colours, used fully, with a painted motif in the centre handled like a picture rather than a pattern.
• Aote, “green style” — the harder, stranger one. It leaves red out entirely, working in green, yellow, purple and blue, and covers the piece edge to edge with almost no white porcelain left showing. A dish in aote looks less like decorated tableware than like something enamelled solid.

Red gets its own tradition too: akae saibyō, red-line drawing, in which the entire surface is worked in fine red brush lines, hair-thin and packed close, often with gold over the top.

The revival

In 1807, a century after the silence, the Kaga domain brought Aoki Mokubei down from Kyoto — already a famous potter — to open the Kasugayama kiln in Kanazawa. It worked. Wakasugi followed in 1811, Ono in 1819, and in the 1820s a wealthy merchant trading as Yoshidaya built a kiln in Kutani village itself, beside the old site, before moving the operation to Yamashiro Onsen. This whole period is called saikō Kutani, revived Kutani, and each kiln left a named style behind it — Mokubei’s Chinese-scholar figures on a red ground, Yoshidaya’s deliberate return to aote.

The revival also solved the raw-material problem for good. Honda Teikichi, a potter invited from Hizen, searched Kanazawa and then Komatsu and found good porcelain stone at Hanasaka. Kutani has been made from Hanasaka stone ever since — a slightly iron-rich material that fires to a warm greyish white rather than a cold one, and throws unusually well. It is one of the few porcelain-stone sources still worked in Japan.

The name that left the country

The Meiji Restoration cut the kilns loose from their domain patrons, and they turned outward. The central figure was Kutani Shōza, who folded the revival styles together — Ko-Kutani, Yoshidaya, red-line work, gold — and added imported Western pigments to reach colours the old palette could not. Kutani went to the 1873 Vienna World Exposition, won attention there, and left as an export industry. Europe and America bought it under the name Japan Kutani, and for a long stretch of the late 19th century that gaudy, gold-heavy export ware was what the West believed Japanese porcelain to be.

The craft was designated a traditional craft of Japan on 10 May 1975. It is made today in four Ishikawa cities — Kanazawa, Komatsu, Kaga and Nomi.

Bringing Kutani home

The one thing to understand is that the colour sits on top. Overglaze enamel is durable in normal use but it is not armoured the way underglaze blue is, so wash Kutani by hand with a soft sponge and a mild detergent; a dishwasher’s heat, jets and harsh detergent will dull and eventually wear the painting. Anything with gold or silver must stay out of the microwave altogether — metallic decoration arcs and sparks, which ruins the piece and is no good for the microwave either. Plain porcelain body aside, treat the decorated face as the fragile part, and it will outlast you.

Read: Japanese ceramics for every day, or Arita, where Japanese porcelain began. Or browse hand-picked, Japan-shipped ceramics on The Table.

Sources & Further Reading

• KUTANI Yaki (Porcelain) — Traditional Crafts Aoyama Square — The national traditional-crafts association: the five colours, the firing temperatures, the four production cities, and the 10 May 1975 designation.
• Kutani-yaki Kiln Museum — Visit Kaga (Kaga City Tourism) — Kaga’s own account of the 1655 founding under Maeda Toshiharu, the kilns’ sudden disappearance, and the Yoshidaya revival kiln.
• 九谷磁器窯跡 — Ishikawa Prefecture Board of Education — The prefecture on the kiln site: the 1979 National Historic Site designation, the kilns’ c.1656–1710 span, and the colour-test sherd inscribed with the date in 1656.
• Kutani Ware — Google Arts & Culture (Ritsumeikan University) — On Gotō Saijirō, the unexplained closure, the revival kilns from Kasugayama in 1807, and Hanasaka porcelain stone.