Mashiko Ware: The Pot That Came With Lunch

Since 1958 a bento has been sold at Yokokawa, a station on the old Shin’etsu line in Gunma, in a small brown lidded clay pot. Rice, chicken, burdock, bamboo shoot, shiitake, a quail egg, a chestnut, a scrap of apricot, pickled ginger. The pot is not packaging in any useful sense — it is heavy, it costs money to make, and the sensible industry answer has always been a moulded tray.

The seller’s stated reasoning is that ceramic holds heat. So the pots were ordered from a kiln in another prefecture, well over a hundred kilometres away, in a town in Tochigi that had spent the previous century making exactly this kind of thing: cheap, thick, brown, functional stoneware for people who were going to use it and not think about it.

That is Mashiko ware. And the lunch pot is a fair introduction, because almost everything interesting about Mashiko comes from the same fact — the clay is not very good, and the town made a virtue of it.

The clay that won’t go thin

Dig in Mashiko and you get a sandy, iron-rich body. Fired, it comes out with a warm reddish cast. Thrown, it fights you.

The standard account from the national crafts body is that nothing is added to it — no blended porcelain stone, no imported ball clay to improve the working properties — and that Mashiko pieces come out thicker than those of comparable potteries as a direct result. Japanese sources are blunter: the clay is gritty, it carries air, it cracks, and it cannot be pulled thin without failing. So it is not pulled thin.

This is worth being precise about, because the marketing language around Mashiko tends toward pottery and warmth and hand-made charm, and the actual mechanism is duller and more interesting. A Mashiko rice bowl is chunky because a thin one would have come out of the kiln in pieces. The wall thickness is a material constraint that four generations of potters stopped fighting.

The glazes come off the same hillside logic. There are five in the traditional repertoire, and the Tochigi prefectural account gives their recipes plainly:

• Kaki-yū (柿釉), persimmon glaze — powdered ashinuma stone and nothing else. Fires to a deep, slightly matte brown. The signature Mashiko surface.
• Nukajiro-yū (糠白釉), bran-white — ash from burnt rice husks. Fires white.
• Namijiro-yū (並白釉), common white — Ōyatsu sand and lime. Fires transparent.
• Seiji-yū (青磁釉), celadon — bran-white with copper added. Fires blue-green.
• Hon-kuro-yū (本黒釉), true black — heavy in iron.

One stone, one crop residue, one local sand, some lime, some copper, some iron. No secret. The whole palette is what was lying around within a few kilometres of the kilns, which is also why the two most common Mashiko surfaces you will meet — brown and white — are brown and white.

A man, a domain, and a hillside

Mashiko as a pottery town is young. It starts in 1853.

Ōtsuka Keisaburō had married into a farming family in Mashiko and taken their name. He had learned to throw at the Kuno kiln over in Kasama, in what is now Ibaraki — a pottery town of the same technical family, twenty-odd kilometres east across the prefectural border. He found workable clay in Mashiko, and the Kurobane domain, which governed the area through a local magistrate’s office, gave him land at Negoya, at the foot of the hill behind that office, to build a kiln.

What he made was not art. It was water jars, teapots, graters, cooking pots, sake vessels — the Kasama product line, transplanted. Within a few years there were several kilns working the same hillside.

The location decided the rest. Mashiko sits about a hundred kilometres north of Tokyo, which in the Meiji and Taishō periods meant close enough to supply it. Mashiko and Kasama between them pushed durable, usable, cheap kitchen ceramics across eastern Japan with Tokyo at the centre of the trade — an ordinary industrial relationship, two country towns feeding a capital’s kitchens.

Then aluminium arrived, and enamel, and eventually plastic. A water jar is a solved problem once you can stamp one out of metal. By the early twentieth century Mashiko’s entire commercial reason for existing was being competed out of the market by materials that were lighter, cheaper and did not break.

Hamada arrives

Hamada Shōji had trained in ceramics in Tokyo, worked in Kyoto, and in 1920 gone to England with Bernard Leach to help set up the pottery at St Ives in Cornwall. He spent about three years there. In 1924, back in Japan, he settled in Mashiko.

He did not choose it because it was distinguished. He chose it, more or less, because it was a working country pottery with bad clay, simple glazes and no pretensions — which was the entire argument of the mingei folk-craft movement he and Yanagi Sōetsu were then building. The claim was that objects made in quantity by unnamed hands for ordinary use possessed a kind of beauty that self-conscious art could not reach. Mashiko was a town-sized demonstration of it.

What Hamada actually did there was narrower than the philosophy and more convincing. He threw on a hand wheel. He used the local clay at its natural thickness. He used kaki-yū and the ash glazes, and he poured them — nagashigake, glaze flung or trailed across a pot in a few seconds, leaving a mark that is unmistakably a gesture and unmistakably not a drawing. A Hamada plate is a brown plate with a white stripe thrown at it, and it is one of the most influential objects in twentieth-century ceramics.

He was designated a holder of Important Intangible Cultural Property for folk-craft ceramics in 1955 — a Living National Treasure. He became director of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in 1961, received the Order of Culture in 1968, and in April 1977 opened part of his own house in Mashiko as the Sankokan, a museum of the folk objects he had collected from around the world, for potters to study. He died in January 1978, aged eighty-three.

The Mashiko Ware Cooperative had been founded in 1951. Mashiko was designated a Traditional Craft of Japan on 3 August 1979.

The cords his father made

The other Mashiko figure worth knowing is the one who shows what happened after Hamada.

Shimaoka Tatsuzō was born in Tokyo in 1919, the son of a kumihimo maker — braided silk cord, three generations of it. He studied ceramics at Tokyo Institute of Technology, came to Mashiko in 1946 to work under Hamada, and set up his own kiln there in 1954.

Then he did something with his inheritance that nobody expected. He took his father’s braided cords, rolled them across wet clay to press a continuous woven texture into the surface, and filled the impressions with white slip — inlay, but inlaid into a pattern made by the family trade. He called it jōmon zōgan, cord-mark inlay, after the rope-impressed pottery of prehistoric Japan. He was designated a Living National Treasure for it on 10 May 1996, and died in 2007.

It is a neat rebuttal to the flatter version of the mingei story. The movement’s argument was about anonymity and repetition; the town it made famous then produced two named individuals with signature techniques. Mashiko has held both ideas at once ever since, without much apparent strain.

What a town does with a fair

The commercial fix for a craft town losing its industrial market turned out to be selling directly to visitors.

In April 1966 the newly formed Mashiko kiln cooperative sales centre ran a bargain sale as a promotion. It became the Mashiko Pottery Fair, now held twice a year — over Golden Week in spring and around 3 November in autumn. The town’s own figures put it at roughly seven hundred tents, around fifty participating shops, and something like four hundred thousand visitors in spring and two hundred thousand in autumn.

In June 2020 the Agency for Cultural Affairs recognised Kasamashiko — Kasama and Mashiko together — as a Japan Heritage story, on the grounds that the two towns had been in the same technical sphere since the Sue-ware kilns of the eighth to tenth centuries, long before either had a name as a pottery. The sibling relationship Ōtsuka Keisaburō used in 1853 turns out to be about a thousand years older than he was.

11 March 2011

Northern Tochigi shook hard in the Tōhoku earthquake, and Mashiko took it badly. Climbing kilns are long brick tunnels laid up a slope; they do not tolerate lateral shaking, and by contemporary accounts the town’s came down in large numbers. Finished work came off shelves by the shelf-load.

The kiln at Hamada’s Sankokan — the one he had fired himself — was among the damaged. It was rebuilt, and in 2015 it was fired again, as the Hamada Shōji Climbing Kiln Revival Project. It has since become a recurring event, held roughly every three years, in which potters from Mashiko and Kasama load and fire it together. One of the museum’s two climbing kilns is a town-designated cultural property; the other is a salt kiln Hamada was particularly attached to.

Down the road, the Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art, open since 1993 on the hill in the middle of town, has Hamada’s thatched house and one of his kilns moved onto its grounds, alongside work by Hamada, Shimaoka and Leach.

This is the context for the brown bowl you are considering. It is from a town that has been knocked flat twice — once commercially, by aluminium, and once physically, by an earthquake — and has each time kept making the same unglamorous thick-walled stoneware it started with.

Living with Mashiko

Mashiko is stoneware: thick, fired hard, glazed over most of its surface, and built for daily use rather than display.

Soak it before first use. Twenty minutes in plain water. The body retains some porosity, and a piece that has already taken up clean water takes up less soy sauce and oil.

Consider medome only if the piece is coarse or crazed. The rice-water method — simmer the piece gently in the cloudy water left from washing rice for fifteen to twenty minutes, cool it in the pot, then wash and dry it — seals the finest pores with starch. Most modern glazed Mashiko does not need it. If the glaze carries a visible crazed network, or a large area is unglazed, it is worth doing.

Warm it first if you care about the food. This is the one tip specific to Mashiko. Thick walls hold heat well and also take heat away from whatever you put on them. Rinse a bowl in hot water before soup goes in and you get the benefit of the mass instead of paying for it.

Dry it completely, every time. The foot ring is bare clay and it is the part that stays damp. Face down on a rack for an hour before it goes in a cupboard — not straight onto a shelf.

Stack with care, or don’t. These pieces are heavy and their unglazed feet are abrasive. A stack of Mashiko bowls grinds rings into the glaze of the bowl underneath over a few years. A cloth or a felt pad between them solves it.

Skip the overnight soak in detergent, and skip bleach. Porous ceramics take up both and keep them.

Ask about the microwave and the dishwasher. Plain glazed Mashiko generally handles both, but glazes and firing schedules vary kiln to kiln and the maker’s answer is the only reliable one. Anything with metallic decoration stays out of the microwave.

The lunch pot, incidentally, is the same proposition. People take them home from the station and use them for rice, or for pens. That was never the plan, and it is entirely in character.

Read: Japanese ceramics for every day, how to choose a rice bowl, or choosing a yunomi. Or browse hand-picked, Japan-shipped ceramics on The Table.

Sources & Further Reading

• Mashiko-yaki (Mashiko ware) — Tochigi Traditional Crafts, Tochigi Prefecture — The prefecture’s own English record: the 3 August 1979 designation as a nationally recognised traditional craft, the production area in Mashiko, Haga district, Ōtsuka Keisaburō’s kiln after training in Kasama, and the kaki and namijiro glazes. The prefecture’s schools portal gives the five glaze recipes in detail.
• Mashiko Ware — KOGEI JAPAN (Association for the Promotion of Traditional Craft Industries) — The national traditional-crafts body: the 1853 start under Ōtsuka Keisaburō, his training in what is now Kasama, the iron-rich clay used with nothing added to it, the resulting thicker walls, Hamada Shōji’s role, and the 1951 cooperative.
• かさましこ — Japan Heritage portal, Agency for Cultural Affairs — The national cultural-affairs agency on the Kasama–Mashiko story recognised in June 2020: the shared Sue-ware technical sphere of the eighth to tenth centuries, the Kuno kiln where Ōtsuka learned, the Meiji–Taishō trade in water jars, teapots and graters centred on Tokyo, and Hamada and the folk-craft movement. The story’s own site covers the Sankokan climbing kilns, their 2011 damage and 2015 rebuilding.
• 益子陶器市 — Mashiko Town official site — The town on its pottery fair: the 1966 start, the twice-yearly schedule over Golden Week and around 3 November, roughly 700 tents and 50 shops, and the spring and autumn visitor figures.