Blue Japanese Tableware

Blue has been in use longer than any other colour on Japanese tableware. Laying indigo on a white ground is enough to pull a table together.

There are two ways to arrive at it. Blue that is painted, and blue that the glaze itself becomes. The first has an outline, like a drawing. The second spreads as a surface. Okinawan pieces offer a third: a dense blue laid over thick clay.

Drawing with gosu pigment, then covering it with clear glaze and firing, is sometsuke. The pigment itself is gosu, and painting beneath the glaze is shita-etsuke. When iron in the glaze turns blue-green in a reduction firing, that is seiji.