Shoji Hamada and Bernard Leach: How East Met West and Mingei Began

Talk about Japanese ware for long enough and the word "mingei" always comes up. What is rarely said is that the movement began with an English potter and the Japanese potter who crossed the sea with him.

Bernard Leach (1887–1979) and Shoji Hamada (1894–1978). In 1920 the two built a kiln at St Ives in Cornwall, England. It was not a case of a Japanese going west to learn. An Englishman learned pottery in Japan, and a Japanese put it into practice in England, and that is where the exchange between English and Japanese pottery began.

This article is written from two books at hand. One is Leach's own diary, A Potter in Japan, translated by Soetsu Yanagi with supplementary translation by Hiroshi Mizuo (Kodansha Gakujutsu Bunko). The other is Shoji Hamada: A Master Potter of Modern Japan, edited by Hiroshi Mizuo (Kodansha Culture Books).

The four places of Shoji Hamada

The subtitle of the Hamada book runs: "He found his way in Kyoto, began in England, learned in Okinawa, and grew up in Mashiko." This is known as Hamada's own repeated summary of his career. Those four place names are still regarded as sacred ground for ceramics, and many artisans work in them today.

In 1920, the two crossed to England

Leach was born in Hong Kong and spent his childhood in Kyoto. He returned to Japan in 1909 and began pottery under the sixth-generation Kenzan. For him Japan was not somewhere to study abroad but a second home.

In 1920, when Leach went back to England, Hamada went with him. At St Ives, a town on the Cornish coast, the two built a climbing kiln. It is said to have been the first Eastern-style climbing kiln raised in England.

What happened there ran in the opposite direction to the usual "study in the West."

• Technique went east to west　How to throw on the wheel, how a climbing kiln is built, how glazes are compounded. What had been learned in Japan crossed to England
• Form went west to east　Pitchers with handles, cups, egg bakers. In later years Leach brought these into the folk kilns of Japan
• Thought went both ways　Old English slipware, and the folk kilns of Japan and Korea. The two confirmed on the spot that the same health ran through both, and fused the techniques

What Leach said all his life was not that East is better than West. What the West lost after the industrial revolution still survives in the handwork of the East. So let us learn it again. He called this the West's "reintegration."

How the word "mingei" came to be

Hamada came home from England in 1924 and began living in Mashiko in Tochigi. Mashiko then was a young production area, begun at the end of the Edo period, a farming district turning out teapots and jars for the Tokyo market. It was not a kiln town with a name. And into it moved a potter back from England.

The following year Soetsu Yanagi, Shoji Hamada and Kanjiro Kawai made a word on a journey to see the Buddhist carvings of Mokujiki. They shortened "crafts of the people" to "mingei." The idea that beauty lives in what nameless artisans made for daily use had until then had no name.

Hamada as written in Leach's diary

In February 1953 Leach came back to Japan after nineteen years. He kept a diary with sketches through the one year and eight months to the autumn of 1954. That is A Potter in Japan. It began as letters run off on a mimeograph and sent to friends in Britain and America.

Of its ten chapters, the fifth is titled "Hamada's Mashiko." Not "Mashiko" but "Hamada's Mashiko." The interest lies in seeing a place through a single potter. Hamada held that the character of a place comes out precisely because of that place's clay and that place's kiln: use Mashiko clay in Kyoto and the character of Mashiko will not appear, and the same in reverse. He was the first to root that way of working in a place. Mashiko then had several potters at work, but it was not the home to many and varied ceramic artists that it is now.

The Onda chapter is the most closely written part of the book. Leach lived in the mountain village for about three weeks.

• Clay　Half-weathered granite from the hills, high in iron
• Karausu　A pestle set at the end of a beam some fifteen feet long, raised by water through a bamboo flume and dropped about every thirty seconds to crush the clay
• Kiln　The shared climbing kiln has eight chambers. Five hours of preheating, twenty-five hours of firing, averaging around 1,280°C. No saggars, no shelves
• Decoration　Tobikanna, cut by an iron blade skipping over the slip, and hakeme, comb marks and finger drawing

You start reading it as a record of impressions and partway through it turns into a technical notebook. The number of chambers, the firing hours, the temperature, all of it written down. The closeness of it shows that this is a book written by someone who makes ware, for people who make ware. How tobikanna and hakeme actually work is set out in the article on decorating techniques.

What East and West exchanged

Set out from the Western side, what Leach saw in the folk kilns of Japan brings the subject of the book into view.

At Onda, the governor of Oita once urged the potters to give themselves wholly to pottery. Leach argued against it. They should not abandon the fields. Beauty, he held, lies precisely in making pottery within a life. He called the work of Onda "a peasant art."

And another thing. Seeing his own forms and patterns copied in workshops everywhere, Leach did not think it dishonest. He took it as praise, and wrote that the very feeling that "a design belongs to me" is a product of nineteenth-century individualism. It is a sentence that names, from the Western side, what it means that Japanese production areas have gone on making the same forms for centuries.

And there is a warning addressed to Japan. Influence from outside is healthy at around ten percent, but postwar Japan was taking in seventy-five percent without resistance. It is written in the chapter of his departure. It is a remark from 1954, but it carries a different weight read seventy years on.

There are colors and values that only Japan can produce. That was true in the past and it is true now. Carrying that value on and delivering it to the world: this, it seems to me, is what matters.

What Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada left behind

Hamada went on making in Mashiko. Kaki glaze, nuka white glaze, and the poured glaze laid on by tipping a piece in one movement. He made with nothing but the ordinary materials of Mashiko. No rare clay, no expensive glaze. With what was in the production area, he made what no one in the production area had made.

Leach returned to England and carried on the kiln at St Ives. What he saw in Japan was published in English in 1960 as A Potter in Japan, and has been read for a long time by people who make pottery in the English-speaking world. He then traced the lineage of his own teacher, the sixth-generation Kenzan, back to the study of the first Ogata Kenzan.

If what the two did were put in one line, it would be this: they made an eye that looks at ware not by which country it comes from but by how it was made. When we choose handmade ware, we are still borrowing that eye.

The two books behind this article

• Bernard Leach, A Potter in Japan　Translated by Soetsu Yanagi, supplementary translation by Hiroshi Mizuo, Kodansha Gakujutsu Bunko 1569 (2002). Based on the 1955 Mainichi Shimbun edition and A Potter in Japan (Faber & Faber, 1960)
• Hiroshi Mizuo, ed., Shoji Hamada: A Master Potter of Modern Japan　Kodansha Culture Books. Subtitled "He found his way in Kyoto, began in England, learned in Okinawa, and grew up in Mashiko"

When introducing Japanese ware to people abroad, beginning not with "Japan is wonderful" but with "what an Englishman saw in Japan" makes the conversation easier. Leach's book works as that entrance, offering a hint as to how people abroad understood Japan, and it is just as useful for Japanese readers reinterpreting Japan from the inside.

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