Mino Ware Guide: Oribe, Shino and Japan's Biggest Kiln

If you have eaten in a restaurant in Japan, you have almost certainly held Mino ware without noticing. Look at a Japanese household's table and roughly half the rice bowls, plates and soup bowls are Mino. In department stores, in hardware stores, in ramen shops, in the meals at fine inns. In a sense, Mino ware is Japanese daily life itself. But behind that universal presence lies the history of a revolution that rewrote Japanese ceramics more than 400 years ago. This guide covers the history and character of the ware made in Gifu Prefecture.

What Mino Ware Is

Mino ware is the collective name for ceramics produced in the Mino region of Gifu Prefecture — mainly Tajimi, Toki, Mizunami and Kani. This area is Japan's largest ceramic region, and roughly fifty per cent of all ceramics produced domestically are Mino. Shigaraki ware is made in Shigaraki in Koka City, Shiga, and Bizen ware in Bizen City, Okayama — each within one municipality. Mino ware is a collective name for pottery made across several cities.

Nor is Mino ware the name of a single style. Tea ceramics beginning in the sixteenth century, contemporary mass-produced tableware, tiles and sanitary ware — ceramics of entirely different character coexist under the name. What binds them is the place, Gifu, and the ceramic culture nurtured there for more than 1,400 years.

The History of Mino Ware

Ceramics in Mino go back to the fifth century. Potters who came to Japan then brought high-temperature firing technique, and with abundant clay and firewood the Mino region naturally became a centre of the industry.

The greatest turning point in its history is the sixteenth century. Over a few decades, an unprecedented creative explosion took place in the world of tea. Answering the aesthetics of the tea practitioners, Mino's potters produced four entirely new styles that had not existed in Japanese ceramics before: what came to be called the four great Momoyama tea wares — Shino, Ki-Seto, Seto-guro and Oribe.

The Four Great Momoyama Tea Wares

Shino: Japan's first white glaze

Shino is one of the most important innovations in the history of Japanese ceramics. Before it, Japanese pottery was dominated by the dark tones of iron and ash glaze. Shino adopted Japan's first white feldspar glaze, producing a milky, plump, almost skin-like glaze surface.

The glaze is thick and slightly porous. Where flame touched the piece during firing, red-orange hiiro flashing appears and gives the piece a distinctive surface. A soft white world whose face changes with the fall of light.

Shino is called the supreme achievement of Momoyama ceramics, and the famous bowl Unohanagaki is designated a National Treasure.

Ki-Seto: yellow glaze and iron painting

Ki-Seto takes its name from its characteristic yellow glaze — a warm amber produced by wood ash and iron. The glaze pools in the hollows and runs thin over the raised parts, creating natural gradations across each face of the piece.

One of its highlights is iron painting. Grasses, flowers and insects are drawn with a brush stroke that looks almost thrown away. Iron-brown painting on a yellow ground: this combination gives Ki-Seto a pictorial quality no other ware has.

It is beautiful as everyday tableware too, and the range to sit naturally in a tea gathering or on a dinner table is what makes Ki-Seto compelling.

Seto-guro: the black of the draw

Seto-guro is known for its deep black and for an unusual firing technique.

The glaze is a black one high in iron, but what makes Seto-guro itself is the firing. At the instant peak temperature is reached, the piece is drawn from the kiln and cooled rapidly — a technique called hikidashi-guro, the drawn-out black. Exposed to air while still hot, the glaze sets in the state it was in at the moment of melting. The result is a deep jet black that seems to absorb light, with faint blue and green tones.

Not merely black but a black with a quiet, taut depth. That still presence is surely why tea practitioners prized it as a bowl.

Oribe: a revolution of green and distortion

Oribe embodies the boldest aesthetic turn in the history of Mino ware. It is named for Furuta Oribe (1544–1615), a warrior and tea master who led the world of tea after Sen no Rikyu's death and opened a freer, bolder world of beauty than Rikyu's wabi.

Its symbol is a vivid copper-green glaze — a strong colour that had not existed in Japanese ceramics. And that green is not applied over the whole piece but poured boldly across one part only. The rest carries iron-brown geometric motifs and plants, so two heterogeneous surfaces coexist on one piece.

The form, too, is deliberately distorted. A plate that ought to be round is square. A handle is attached asymmetrically. Betraying the viewer's expectation is taken up as a principle of beauty. That is what makes Oribe revolutionary.

With four styles emerging simultaneously in the sixteenth century and winning recognition as tea ceramics, the region's importance rose further still.

Mino Ware Today

After the Momoyama period, Mino shifted its centre of gravity from tea ceramics to popular tableware production. Through modernisation and mass production, the Toki and Tajimi area today functions as the largest ceramic region in Asia.

What makes the area further compelling is that an active community of contemporary studio potters has also grown up here. So even alongside mass production, there is ground in which distinctive new work appears.

The Museum of Modern Ceramic Art, Gifu, in Tajimi is one of Japan's finest museums for surveying the whole of Mino ware, from Momoyama masterworks to the leading edge of contemporary ceramics.

Also in Tajimi is the Mosaic Tile Museum, designed by the architect Terunobu Fujimori (opened 2016). Introducing the other ceramic inheritance of the Mino region — the tile industry that developed from the Meiji period — it is a museum whose building is itself a work of art.

Visiting Mino and Tajimi

The Mino production area is about 45 to 60 minutes by train from Nagoya, toward Tajimi and Toki. Around Tajimi Station, ceramic galleries, artists' shops and the Museum of Modern Ceramic Art are gathered at a scale ideal for a full day.

Learn the history of Momoyama ceramics at the museum and then walk the town, and the pottery in the shops looks different. Setting foot on Mino ground, hearing a maker's words, holding a piece — that is the way into truly understanding Mino ware.

The Toki Mino Ceramics Festival, held in Toki City every October, is Japan's largest pottery market. It has something of a wholesale character, with direct-sale tableware laid out on a huge scale, while also carrying one-off work by studio potters. For assembling everyday tableware in one go, no venue in Japan matches its scale.

Diversity and Innovation, Supporting the Japanese Table

Mino ware, with around fifty per cent of Japan's ceramic production, is the byword for everyday pottery. Across a broad region including Tajimi and Toki in Gifu Prefecture, an astonishing range is produced daily: household production tableware, tiles, and artist work that captivates the world.

At the root of that richness is the dramatic ceramic revolution of the Momoyama period over 400 years ago. Shino, which expressed white in Japan for the first time; the warm amber of Ki-Seto; Seto-guro, pursuing black to its limit; and Oribe, which made distortion and vivid green into beauty. These four great Momoyama tea wares established a bold aesthetic that overturned every convention and carved an imperishable brilliance into the history of Japanese ceramics.

Mino ware today develops on two wheels: the energy of individual artists protecting that innovative tradition, and the industrial capacity to deliver high-quality pottery with the latest technology. That overwhelming range — able to make anything, able to become anything — is why Mino ware is loved across eras. Walk the streets of Tajimi and Toki, meet the breath of those old revolutionaries and the refined sensibility of the present, and you will certainly find the piece that brings colour to your daily life.

Related Guides

More on the culture and history of Japanese ceramics

• A Short History of Japanese Ceramics, Jomon to Now
• Reading Wabi-Sabi in a Single Bowl
• Ichigo Ichie: Why No Two Handmade Pieces Repeat
• Keshiki: How to Read the 'Landscape' on a Pot
• Tea Ceremony Ceramics: A Short History of the Chawan

More on Japan's pottery regions

• Japanese Pottery by Region: A Buyer's Map
• Bizen Ware: Pottery With No Glaze at All
• Shigaraki Ware: Why Its Clay Sparkles After 1,200 Years
• Seto Ware: The Kiln Town That Named Japanese Pottery
• Tajimi: Where Contemporary Mino Ceramics Are Made

How to choose Japanese ceramics

• Why Japanese Pottery Is Worth Buying (and Keeping)
• Stoneware vs Porcelain: How to Tell Them Apart
• Earthenware, Stoneware, Porcelain: The Real Differences
• How to Choose a Japanese Rice Bowl (Chawan)

How to buy Japanese ceramics

• About Us｜Japanese pottery & culture
• Buying Japanese Pottery Online: What to Check First
• New Arrivals