The decline of Mashiko ceramic industry

Presided by Satoshi Yokoo and with Yoshiko Fudeya as its Vice-Chairman, MCAA now has Mashiko-based American potters Andrew Gemrich and Douglas Black as two of its seven official directors. The association headquarters include an exhibition space and shop located in the center of Mashiko, which is opened from Friday to Sunday every week. In 2016, MCAA held a joint exhibition with the Oregon Ceramic Artists' Association (OPA) at the Portland Japanese Garden in the United States and, in 2016, it co-organized the Korea Japan exchange exhibition in Icheon. In addition, MCAA has also been developing a Mashiko database project in order to identify

and keep track of all potters working in Mashiko in case of catastrophe.

The nuclear disaster following the earthquake has also generated a visible decline in the number of visitors to Mashiko, especially of those coming from abroad. This translated into an abrupt decrease of ceramics sales in the months following the disaster.

Since the area continued to experience aftershocks, people also stopped buying breakable things like pottery. Moreover, radiation has affected local raw materials used for pottery making and thus, wood logs and wood ash coming from the region had to be tested, a procedure which continued for several years after the disaster. Potters were asked by the authorities not to use wood from the region, not only for safety reasons but because if radioactivity were to be found in any pot, the reputation of the whole Mashiko ceramic industry would be at stake.

Now you can’t use the wood from around here because of the radiation. You can but it’s probably worse for the potter than the product, but they’re scared that if

Figure 2.14 (top): Satoshi Yoko, president of MCAA holding a clay sculpture by Oregon-based Japanese artist Ruri. Photo by the author, November 2015.

Figure 2.15 (bottom): Social gathering at Mashiko Ceramic Art Association. Photo by the author, December 2015.

the work of one person is found to be radioactive, people would think there’s a problem with Mashiko pottery and we will have a bad reputation, so the local government wants people to be very careful with the wood they use. But most people use wood from far away now, mostly from the south (Andrew Gemrich, July 2016).

However, the economic decline of Mashiko’s ceramic industry had started long before the 2011 disaster. Andrew Gemrich recalls how different Mashiko Pottery Cooperation Center was when he started working there in the early nineties. He recalls it often packed with people who wanted to have a pottery making experience, especially during the summer, when there used to be twelve workers, whereas now there are only two. Many other potters also mentioned how easy it was to sell ceramics until the early nineties. Issei Furuki, who is in his thirties, manager of the Mashiko Ceramic Club, told me the stories of the “bubble years” that he has heard since he was a child. Yet, he criticizes older generations for not adjusting to the new era:

During the bubble, the economy was good and potters sold anything, but with the recession, older potters didn't change their style and their marketing methods.

Young potters use social networks and know how to market their works for younger customers. (…) [At that time] there were a lot of potters and a lot of people became famous. And there were a lot of foreigners too. But it's becoming better now. Lots of young people are coming to Mashiko again. Doing pottery while doing part-time jobs. Potters don't pay a salary anymore, the system of apprenticeship also started dying because potters don't sell, thus they don't need apprentices. But young potters are doing pottery and selling by themselves (Issei Furuki, November 2016, translated from Japanese by the author).

Those who remember the bubble years from personal experience also told me their stories with a bit of nostalgia. Ceramic artist Akane Niwa and her partner Spanish potter Jesualdo Fernández-Bravo remember how easy it was to sell ceramics back then:

During the bubble, in Tokiichi [Pottery Fair], people sold everything. They sold until they had no pots left. They would put the money in a vase and had to hold it so it wouldn't fly because it was full up to the top. But this happened not because people liked pottery more than now, but because everybody had money and they thought that, with money, they had also achieved a status that wouldn’t change.

Those potters, who have about sixty years old now, they put their prices up high and now they're the ones who are suffering more. People put all their prices up and things sold anyways. They would fire a load of pieces and the next day they had nothing left (Akane Niwa and Jesualdo Fernández-Bravo, February 2017, translated from Japanese and Spanish by the author).

According to the accounts of several subjects, until the early nineties, shops and galleries in Mashiko would buy directly from the producers, usually going to their studios every two months and take boxes full of works, sometimes without even looking at the contents. Stores and restaurants from Tokyo would also come to the potters’ kiln openings and sometimes the whole batch would sell in just one day. They say this hardly never happens anymore, since most shops and galleries now work through consignment, keep between forty and fifty percent of the sales. The quote below describes the situation before and after the bubble, which was kept anonymous.

[In] Mashiko [the percentage] used to be sixty-forty, but nowadays is fifty-fifty.

And some of them [pottery shops and galleries] used to pay cash. They wouldn't even look inside the box, I would just write it all up and then they would give me cash. So, the economy was better and galleries were in a hurry too. They knew when I’d open my kiln and they wanted to be the first gallery to get the stuff out of the kiln and they wouldn't even look. I would just give them boxes of work and they just looked at the last number and paid me in cash. But now it's almost all consignment (…). There are no more orders. Those days are gone. Most potters I know have part-time jobs now. The young potters are mass producing for very cheap. And people are lowering their prices.

American potter Douglas Black recounted how, in the 1990s, when he was just starting off his career, he would go to the galleries, show them his work and sell it on the spot without needing anyone’s endorsement. This rarely happens nowadays given the general climate of recession, with most places now only accepting works in consignation and young potters having to work part-time at non-ceramic-related jobs.

American Doris Watanabe also mentions that between the 1970s and the 1990s it was possible to make a living just from pottery.

If you were not especially interested in becoming "famous or successful" (I wasn’t) it was not that difficult to work with ceramics in Mashiko, if you kept your prices low. I can't speak for all of Japan. I am talking about the '70s, '80s and '90s when I worked with clay. As I said before, the selling and exhibiting infrastructure is already in place, so you can make a living, though with difficulty. Eventually, I felt burned out from the work involved in producing pottery at such low prices (Doris Watanabe, February 2014, written questionnaire).

Because of this situation, a few potters have stopped leaving their pieces in consignment and opted instead to sell their works directly to the customer at exhibitions, fairs and their individual studios. However, some have pointed out the positive aspects behind the end of the economic bubble, which was dominated by materialism and low standards, as expressed in the anonymous quote below:

The public is more discerning than it used to be. During the 1980s, apparently, and during the bubble period, you could sell just about anything and people would buy just about anything. At good prices. When the bubble burst people weren't willing to pay high prices for things that weren't really worth it and so a lot of people in Mashiko who had been selling pots for quite good prices were no longer able to sell their expensive pots. And they couldn't bring their prices down. So a lot of potters went out of business. It's much harder than it used to be to make a living as a potter. It's important to make really high-quality work at a reasonable price now.

Another informant criticized potters and famous galleries for becoming “too greedy” during the bubble years, increasing their prices so much that they started to alienate even their most loyal customers:

Basically, potters cut their own throats. Some of the pride went out of it. Because anything would sell and because there was so much of it, because prices had gotten out of hand, especially in the big galleries, big-name people, it turned the customers off. It just got old. It had been very fashionable and then suddenly… For example, the big galleries in Tokyo, in those days it was department store galleries like Takashimaya or Mitsukoshi and a few private galleries like Kurodatoen in Ginza and the Green Gallery... There were some really good galleries in Tokyo, but they had been riding the wave and kept increasing the prices. In fact, the department stores were notorious for, actually, when they had a show on, if one of their old customers didn't come to see the show, they would take the pot to the customer and sort of force them to buy it, and so the customers just disappeared from the big galleries. And over the last twenty years, I have just watched galleries closing all over the place, decent galleries that had decent shows and had knowledgeable owners have just about disappeared. Its real amateurs now. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but in Tokyo, it's very hard to find a gallery where you might want to have an exhibition.

The changing tastes also seem to be one of the reasons for the decline of Mashiko ceramic industry. Some of the subjects mentioned how Japanese customers are now more interested in white and clean-looking pieces inspired by Scandinavian design, rather than the traditional dark, heavy and rough Mashiko style, which doesn’t fit the lifestyle of young urban consumers, as mentioned by Brazilian Regina Goto below:

Today, Japanese people like clean, modern, design pieces. But foreigners prefer the exotic traditional Japanese style. It’s like fashion, always changing. Japanese traditional style is now seen as old-fashioned. It’s also too big and heavy and people don’t have space in small urban apartments (…). Japanese people are tired of heavy and colorful pottery. They want something simpler, lighter and practical;

something that can be used by any class, that matches people’s lifestyle, decoration, sense of fashion; something that matches everything, that you can mix with wood or glass (Regina Goto, August 2016, translated from Portuguese by the author).

Since the brand image of Mashiko as folk pottery doesn’t attract Japanese consumers as much as before, younger potters are now producing simple white pieces that match the current urban trends. Yet, they are criticized by the older generations for not wanting to be trained as craftsmen, choosing instead to develop their own individual style without focusing too much on the technical skills. In fact, many open their own pottery studios as soon as they finish their arts university degrees without going through the apprenticeship system. “Everyone wants to be an artist” is a sentence said by the older generations. This is in part because they are not willing to exchange menial tasks for training. When they do, they usually stay no longer than one year, during which time they expect to learn the skills needed to become independent. Yet, for most potters, it is not worth investing in training someone who will leave just when they “finally start to become useful”. Thus, it seems that intergenerational conflicts within Mashiko are a bigger problem than the strains between “insiders” and “outsiders” often seen in other traditional pottery production areas in Japan.

Due to this state of affairs, the Industrial Technology Center, a tuition-free ceramic training center located in Mashiko and supported by the Tochigi prefecture, is also struggling with a lack of students. With a two-year course focusing on the development of technical skills for the formation of ceramic specialists, its curriculum contrasts with Ibaraki prefecture’s Kasama College of Ceramic Art, which has been investing in the education of ceramic artists through a two-year program that focuses both on technique and creativity, receiving ten students per year.