Mashiko and Hamada

Despite its ceramic history, Mashiko truly gained fame after Shoji Hamada (1894-1978), established his studio there in 1924. Born in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture, Hamada studied the technical and chemical aspects of ceramics at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Not coming from a potters’ family lineage and interested in becoming an artist-potter instead of a traditional craftsman (shokunin), Hamada moved to Kyoto to work at the city’s Municipal Ceramic Laboratory together with Kawai Kanjiro, who had been his senior during his ceramic studies. There, they met philosopher Soetsu Yanagi and potter Kenkichi Tomimoto, who was familiar with the Arts and Crafts movement after having traveled to England in 1908.

In 1919, Hamada met English potter and etching artist Bernard Leach at one of his exhibitions in Tokyo and the two quickly developed a close friendship. In 1920, Hamada was invited by Leach to help build his pottery’s studio in St. Ives, a seaside town located in the Cornwall peninsula in the southwest of England, about 600 kilometers west of London. While the area started off as an artists' colony in the late nineteenth century, it later became a famous summer holiday and tourist area.

Hamada stayed in St. Ives with Leach for three years, between 1920 and 1923, where he supervised the building of what is known as the first East-Asian style climbing kiln (noborigama) of the West. The rapid extinction of the British traditional craftsman as a result of industrialization, mechanization and urbanization led Bernard Leach to resort to groups of Japanese artists and potters brought to St. Ives for reference.

Before returning to Japan, Hamada had his first one-man exhibition in London and traveled around Europe. After returning to Japan, he spent several weeks in Okinawa and was deeply influenced by the region’s pottery tradition, which inspired to want to work in the countryside with locally sourced materials. In fact, contrary to many of his artist-potters friends who established their studio potteries in urban centers, Hamada

chose the rural region of Mashiko, attracted by the simple countryside life, to develop his work.

After moving to Mashiko in 1924, Hamada borrowed a kiln from Okoshigama, now located at the Mashiko Pottery Cooperation Center. There, he worked with Totaro Sakuma (1900-1976), who, as the story goes, thought of him as a strange man with Westernized manners. In 1925, Hamada held the first of many annual one-man shows in Tokyo and in 1930, he bought a traditional farmers’ residence in the neighboring town of Ichikai, where he established his home and studio, building his first wood-fired climbing kiln (noborigama).

In 1926, Hamada, Yanagi and Kawai officially founded the mingei movement during a meeting at a temple in the Buddhist pilgrimage region of Mount Koya. In 1929 and 1931, Hamada traveled to England again to exhibit at the Paterson's Gallery in London and, in 1932, he went with Leach to the United States, where he would return several times during the following decades. In 1934, Leach visited Hamada in Mashiko for the first time and they made a joint firing, receiving hundreds of visitors from Tokyo for its opening. Due to Hamada and Leach and their connection to the mingei movement, Mashiko became a place of peregrination for folk pottery in Japan, receiving visitors from all around Japan and the world. Some of them Hamada would host at his house, which became a gathering ground for cultural and artistic exchanges.

While there was a pottery tradition already established in Mashiko by the time Hamada opened his studio in the region, the artist-potter searched for new materials and developed new glazes and techniques, while taking inspiration from the traditional Mashiko style known for the use of local red-brown clay decorated with red and iron glaze. Furthermore, Hamada drew inspiration from other pottery traditions such as the ceramics of Chinese Sung dynasty, simple Korean folk wares, Okinawa traditional pottery and English medieval slipware, showing the transnational origins and hybridized features of what has now become the standard of the Japanese folk pottery style.

Furthermore, when Hamada established his studio in Mashiko in the 1920s, increasing industrialization together with the growing demand for pottery from urban areas, where an emergent middle-class was feeding the expansion of Japanese consumer society, was encouraging traditional workshops to turn into factories and abandon traditional local methods and materials for industrial ones. While the presence

of Hamada and his endorsement and propagation of the mingei philosophy eventually contributed to slowing down this process, it also led to the standardization of Mashiko pottery, with Hamada’s original style being copied, produced and sold by factories in the region in high quantities at low quality standards. Thus, after the Second World War and the subsequent mingei boom of the 1960s and 1970s, many of Mashiko’s ceramic manufacturers changed from the production of traditional goods to the making of Hamada-style folk pottery.

Nonetheless, even though Hamada was an outsider to Mashiko and the traditional Japanese pottery system (as mentioned before, he did not come from a lineage of craftsman and had not been trained in the traditional master-apprentice organization), he taught many young potters and also hired apprentices (deshi) and craftsman (shokunin) who helped with different stages of his production in a system known as bungyou (specialized labor division). However, he is considered one of the pioneers in the establishment of studio pottery in Japan, characterized by the small-scale production of objects by one or a small group of artists without relying on other professionals for the execution of different stages of production. This style of work contrasted with the system of the traditional pottery workshops known kamamoto, whose dynamics were similar to Europe’s medieval craft guilds.

Thus, in his workshop in Mashiko, Hamada established a system that mixed the newly created studio pottery tradition with the kamamoto, where the transmission of techniques and business ownership was passed down from father to son (either biological or adopted), following the system of the iemoto. In this system, even though the master usually passed the business on to his eldest son, he would often hire apprentices from other families. These would be provided with accommodation, meals and training in his master’s trade in exchange for labor, for a period between three and ten years. Hence, the apprentice was expected to learn the master’s business and leave to set up his own individual pottery elsewhere, while the master’s son would apprentice under another master and come back to take over his father’s business after a few years.

In fact, while Hamada’s workshop was passed down to his grandson Tomoo Hamada (1961-), he taught many apprentices, including Tatsuzo Shimaoka, who would become the second Living National Treasure of Mashiko in 1996, after Hamada being awarded the title in 1955.

Despite his national and international recognition, Hamada made mostly unsigned functional wares with local clay and raw materials for glazes and grew his own vegetables in the land surrounding his studio, thus miming the traditional farmer-potters of the past. American artist and ceramic teacher Susan Peterson, who visited Hamada in Mashiko many times him, writing several books about him, describes his life and work as follows:

Hamada was a scholar who brought works made by the world's anonymous craftsmen to put in museums in Japan so that his countrymen could see the "daily work" of the centuries. He emulated the life of a peasant farmer, growing much of his own foodstuff with the same care and on the same land as the clay was refined, and as the pots were made and fired. He worked in the village tradition but his wares were exhibited internationally in fine galleries. He did not sign his pots, but he did sign specially made boxes into which the pot fit if the collector paid extra for the box (Peterson, 1990: 13).

In 1942, Hamada moved to a new residence in Mashiko town, where he established a new home and studio and built several wood-fired climbing kilns. In 1977, he opened the place as a museum, which is now known as the Shoji Hamada Memorial Museum. There, visitors can tour his personal collection of pottery and other craft objects from around the world, including China, Korea, Taiwan, the Pacific Islands, Middle East, Europe and South America, both ancient and modern. In fact, Hamada was also an enthusiast of modern design and owned one of the famed lounge chairs made by American designers Charles and Ray Eames, a gift from them to Hamada and now exhibited at his Memorial Museum. In 2015, the place hosted the Shoji Hamada Noborigama Revival project, in which sixty Mashiko potters fired their works in Hamada's kiln for the first time in forty years. The project had its second edition in February 2018, which allowed for the participation of more than eighty Japanese and non-Japanese potters working in Mashiko and Kasama, firing more than 5,000 clay works.

Hamada passed away in 1978 at the age of eighty-three years old. During his lifetime, he received numerous cultural honors in Japan, the United States and Britain

and was one of the first artists to receive the title of Living National Treasure from the Japanese government. In 1968, he was awarded the Order of Culture and, in 1979, one year after his death, Mashiko style was designated as a Traditional Craft Product of Japan.

Figure 2.7: Hamada’s old house turned into the Hamada Shoji Memorial Mashiko Sankokan Museum. Photo by the author.

Figure 2.8: Replica of Hamada’s noborigama kiln at the Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art. Photo by the author.