Kyo Ware: The Pottery Town With No Clay of Its Own

Every other pottery town in Japan is, underneath, a geological accident. Arita had a mountain of porcelain stone. Tokoname had iron-red clay under the whole peninsula. Iga had an ancient lakebed whose buried organic matter burns out in the kiln and leaves the clay honeycombed with pores. Dig, and the ware follows from what comes up.

Kyoto has almost nothing. The clay for Kyo ware today is trucked in — from Amakusa in Kumamoto, from Shigaraki over the hills in Shiga, from wherever a body with the right behaviour can be bought. The most famous ceramic name in Japan is made of other people’s earth.

What Kyoto had instead was customers.

A capital, not a clay bed

For a thousand years the court was here, and the great temples, and — from the sixteenth century — the tea masters, who were the most particular clients any craftsman has ever had to satisfy. A tea master does not want a good bowl. He wants this bowl, for this season, this guest, this alcove. That is not a market you serve with a house style. It is a market you serve by being able to make anything.

So Kyoto never developed one. The word Kyō-yaki — literally just “fired in Kyoto” — appears in writing for the first time in 1605, in a tea diary, and it has always meant exactly what it says: pottery from Kyoto, of no particular kind. Porcelain and stoneware, painted and plain, thrown and hand-built, Chinese revivals and Korean revivals and things nobody had made before. The national crafts association’s phrase for the trade today is many kinds, small quantity, and puts the share that is still made by hand at around 90 percent. It is a description of a craft that never industrialised because it never made the same thing twice.

The man who signed his name

In 1647 a potter from Tanba built a kiln at Omuro, in the northwest of the city, in front of the great temple of Ninna-ji. The temple granted him a seal. He took one character from the temple’s name and one from his own — Seiemon — and became Nonomura Ninsei.

He is generally credited as the first Japanese potter to put his own mark on his work. That sounds like a small administrative change. It was not. Before Ninsei, pots were the output of a kiln; after him, they were the work of a person, and the person could be famous. Everything about how Japan values ceramics today — the named artist, the box signed by the maker, the price attached to a name — starts on that hill.

His actual pots earned it. Ninsei worked in overglaze enamels, painting on top of fired glaze in red, green, blue, purple, gold and silver, and he composed them like paintings rather than patterns. His tea-leaf jar painted with wisteria is a National Treasure of Japan.

The painter’s brother

Ogata Kenzan (1663–1743) came out of the same lineage — he learned the Ninsei workshop’s methods — and opened his own kiln at Narutaki, northwest of the city, in 1699. He is the other half of the Kyoto idea.

Kenzan’s pots are frequently, deliberately, a bit crude as pots. Slightly off, thickly slipped, the glaze doing something imperfect at the rim. What is not crude is the design, which is often startling: a square dish that is really a picture surface, a bold Rinpa-school composition running straight off the edge. His older brother was Ogata Kōrin, one of the great painters of the age, and the two collaborated — Kōrin painting, Kenzan potting and inscribing.

That is the second half of the Kyoto answer to having no clay. If the material is not the point, the drawing had better be.

Three hills

The kilns clustered where the fuel and the pilgrims were, on the eastern slopes. Awataguchi, at the mouth of the road in from the east, lit its kilns in the 1620s and became the city’s biggest ceramic district. Kiyomizu and Gojōzaka, on the approach to Kiyomizu-dera temple, made the tea and sencha wares that eventually gave the whole trade its second name — Kiyomizu-yaki, still the term most people reach for.

The Gojōzaka kilns produced the one genuine technical breakthrough. Okuda Eisen (1753–1811) fired porcelain in Kyoto for the first time, generations after Arita had worked it out — Kyoto, having no stone of its own, had simply never bothered. Eisen’s workshop then turned out an implausible run of students. One of them, Aoki Mokubei, was hired away by the lord of Kaga in 1807 to open the Kasugayama kiln and restart a craft that had been dead for a century; that story is here. Kyoto had become the place other domains went shopping for potters.

The century that made and unmade Awata

Then the capital moved to Tokyo, the domains were abolished, and the patrons vanished at once. Awataguchi’s answer was to sell abroad.

Original Satsuma ware from Kagoshima — ivory-bodied, minutely painted, gilded — had astonished visitors at the Paris exposition of 1867. Kyoto watched the reaction and built its own version. Kinkōzan Sōbei VI perfected a painting technique for it by around 1870; full-scale export began in 1872, and Kyō-Satsuma went out by the crate. The Kinkōzan works alone eventually ran to over 700 workers on more than 4,000 square metres, and Kyoto’s output overtook the Kagoshima ware it was imitating. Victorian and Edwardian drawing rooms filled with it.

Export booms end. European demand fell away, quality slid, and as Japan turned toward war in the late 1930s the orders stopped altogether. The fires at Awataguchi — the district that had burned day and night — went out and did not come back.

The kilns leave the hill

The Kiyomizu side survived, but not in place. By the twentieth century the old climbing kilns were sitting in a dense residential city, throwing smoke over their neighbours, and there was nowhere left to expand. In 1962 a new ceramics estate was laid out several kilometres east, over the ridge in Yamashina: the Kiyomizu-yaki Danchi, where some seventy pottery businesses moved. Others went south to Sumiyama in Uji. No climbing kiln was ever built at the new site — the moves coincided with the switch to electric and gas kilns, which is why the smoke problem solved itself and why the name outlived the hill it came from. Kiyomizu ware is now mostly not made at Kiyomizu.

Kyo ware and Kiyomizu ware were designated a traditional craft of Japan, jointly and under one name, on 20 March 1977. The recognised production area is six cities: Kyoto, Uji, Jōyō, Mukō, Kameoka and Nagaokakyō.

Bringing Kyo ware home

Because Kyo ware is a place and not a material, the first thing to establish about any piece is what it actually is.

If it is porcelain — white, dense, ringing when tapped, cool to the touch — it is vitrified and absorbs nothing. No preparation, no special routine.

If it is stoneware or earthenware — what Kyoto potters call tsuchimono, “earth things”, often with a fine web of crackle called kannyū running through the glaze — it is slightly porous, and it will drink. Tea, soy sauce and oil work into the crackle and stain it. Many Japanese makers advise sealing such a piece before first use by simmering it gently in the starchy water left from rinsing rice, then cooling and drying it completely; soaking it in plain water for several hours is the simpler version. Neither is mandatory — the staining is cosmetic, and plenty of owners want it — but do it before the first use or not at all.

For anything with overglaze enamel or gold, which is a great deal of Kyo ware: wash by hand with a soft sponge. That decoration sits on top of the glaze, and dishwasher heat, jets and detergent will dull it and eventually take it off. Gold and silver must stay out of the microwave entirely — metallic decoration arcs.

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

• KYO-KIYOMIZU Yaki (Ceramics) — Traditional Crafts Aoyama Square — The national traditional-crafts association: the 20 March 1977 designation, the six production cities, the clay bought in from Amakusa and Shigaraki, and the roughly 90% handmade figure.
• Kyoto Ware — Google Arts & Culture (Ritsumeikan University Art Research Center) — Academic overview: the 1605 first written use of Kyō-yaki, Ninsei’s Omuro kiln in 1647, Kenzan at Narutaki in 1699, Okuda Eisen’s first Kyoto porcelain, and the Awataguchi / Kiyomizu / Gojōzaka districts.
• Kyō Satsuma Ware — Google Arts & Culture (Ritsumeikan University Art Research Center) — On the export era: Kinkōzan Sōbei VI, the 1872 start of full-scale export, the scale of the Awata works, and the kilns going dark in the late 1930s.
• Kiyomizuyaki Pottery Complex — Japan National Tourism Organization — Government tourism body on the 1962 estate in Yamashina, the roughly seventy businesses there, and the fact that the kilns no longer fire on the original site.