Bizen Ware

Straw is wrapped around the piece before firing. Salt in the straw reacts with iron in the clay, leaving a red line exactly where the straw touched. That is hidasuki.

Where the lines will run is beyond the reading of even the person who loaded the kiln. Wrap it the same way twice and the same line will not appear again.

Look at where each line begins and ends. Colour appears only where the straw touched, so following a line tells you how the piece was stacked when it went into the kiln.

Where it stood in the kiln, how the flame passed, how much ash it caught. That alone brings different colours out of the same clay.

Blue-grey, red-brown, silver. In Bizen, where no glaze is used, colour is decided by where the piece was placed inside the kiln.

Look for where one colour turns into another. The border between blue-grey and red-brown marks the direction the flame travelled. Turn the piece in your hand and find where the fire came from.

Ash from the burning wood settles on the piece and melts in the heat into glassy specks. They look as though sesame had been scattered across the surface, which is where the name comes from.

Only the side that caught ash is marked, so the front and the back of the same piece can look quite different.

Look at how densely the specks fall. The side facing the fire and the wood catches more ash, so the goma there is thicker — sometimes thick enough to melt and run.

Where the piece lay buried in ash, it was fired with little oxygen, and the surface turned blue-grey or mouse-grey instead of red.

The border with the side the flame reached directly becomes the landscape itself.

Look for the dividing line. Where the piece sat in the ash and where the flame reached it directly meet in a clear edge, and the height of that edge tells you how deep the piece was buried.