Article 025: The Faces of Hagi Ware, and the Art of Mending
Article Summary
After walking beneath a canopy of early-blooming cherry trees along the waterfront in Hagi, Yamaguchi Prefecture, I found myself standing in a kiln workshop, lost in deliberation between two bowls for longer than I care to admit.
A particular piece — one with a surface texture the Japanese call nezumi-hada, mouse-skin grey — still visits me in quiet moments.
The longing it left behind became, unexpectedly, a lesson: that the sensibility alive in me right now is worth listening to.
The yunomi on my shelf has changed over the course of a year, a third of its surface gradually surrendering to a soft wisteria blue, and I find myself marveling again at how Hagi ware chooses its own becoming.
These days I repair chipped bowls with lacquer, learning to read each mend as a new landscape rather than a flaw — while continuing, with no small amount of stubbornness, to practice the art of kintsugi.
Category
Tableware
Within Japan's long conversation with food and the objects that hold it, I want to set down a few of the moments that have found their way into my own daily life.
I hope you'll read this the way you might sit beside a low fire — without hurry, without purpose, simply present.
1. The Sky Before Color Returns — Amanotae — あまのたえ
February had kept the cold close. But somewhere in the first days of March, I noticed the north wind had changed its mind — or perhaps I had simply stopped bracing against it.
The air along the Hagi shoreline carried salt, and my wife and I had been craving exactly that: the smell of open water. So we made the trip, folding in visits to several pottery workshops along the way.
Near the roadside station Hagi Shī-māto, beside a small water park, there is a row of Kawazu-zakura — cherry trees that bloom earlier than any other variety, their blossoms a shade of pink too decisive for February, too knowing.
We walked the length of them slowly. The petals had already opened fully, which is how I prefer to see them: not the anticipation but the thing itself, the extravagance already spent.
Afterward, I was given what I can only describe as a gift — time, unhurried, inside one of the kilns to choose a piece of pottery. I stood there with a bowl in each hand, thinking.
- Kawazu-zakura: an early-blooming variety of cherry, known for its deep pink colour and long flowering period.
2. The Bowl That Smiled Back — Hohoemi — ほほえみ
Ceramic: Kofuku Chawan (small happiness tea bowl), Hagi ware. Personal name: Yawaragi.
The same workshop does this to me every time I visit. It creates the conditions for a particular kind of indecision — the generous, luminous kind that you don't want to resolve too quickly. I've come to think of it as a gift from the place itself.
For me, cherry blossoms are about presence: the beauty of the flower and the extravagance of full bloom. A bowl is something different — it enters daily life, becomes part of the rhythm of mornings and evenings, and even when it chips or cracks, I am the one who decides what happens next, who continues its story.
A Buddha figure sat in the tea room at the back of the workshop. While the workshop's owner spoke, I kept glancing at it. The figure had one of those faces that never quite look like they're watching you, but you feel certain they are — a familiar expression, composed and faintly amused.
In my left hand: a bowl with an unusual surface the colour and texture of weathered stone, almost like grey silk pressed against the clay, what potters call nezumi-hada — mouse-skin.
In my right: the Kofuku Chawan, the small happiness bowl, its glaze creamy and irregular.
The workshop owner recommended the grey one. It's particularly well made, he said, turning it in his hands. I'd choose this one.
I chose the bowl in my right hand.
3. What the Tide Carried Off — Yonami — よなみ
I still think about the grey bowl.
I've searched for it since — online, in other workshops, in the back rooms of shops I've made small detours to visit. Nothing. Not the texture, not the colour, not that particular quality of quiet it had. The kind of object that doesn't seem rare until it's gone.
I should have bought both.
There is something I've come to understand about how I encounter pottery, and it has to do with the way time actually moves.
My pulse does not repeat itself — no heartbeat is ever exactly like the one before, no moment reconstructs itself from the materials of an earlier one. I knew this in the abstract. The grey bowl made it specific.
Next time, I used to tell myself, when faced with the cost of something beautiful. There will be another one like it. I still sometimes say this.
But I say it now knowing it isn't quite true — knowing that the sensibility I carried into that workshop on that particular morning in early March, the exact register of attention I was tuned to, will not be precisely available again. Something will have shifted by the time I next stand in front of a grey bowl.
What that day gave me, then, was not just regret. It was a kind of instruction: trust what you feel right now, because right now is the only moment in which you feel it in exactly this way.
4. Wisteria Tide — Fujinami — ふじなみ
Hagi ware changes as you use it. This is one of its most quietly astonishing properties — that the object you own at the end of a year is not quite the same object you brought home at the beginning.
The yunomi on my shelf began its life as something close to the colour of rice-washing water: a soft, milky opacity, slightly warm, not quite white. That was its default state, the one it arrived in. I started using it after dinner, for the last cup of green tea of the day.
A year passed. When I placed it beside a photograph taken the day I bought it, I saw what I hadn't been able to see from inside the gradual process of change: roughly a third of the surface had turned.
Not dramatically — but decisively. A pale wisteria blue had moved in, quiet as a tide, occupying the lower third of the yunomi in a way that made the piece look as though it had always been planning this.
When light catches it at certain angles, part of the surface resolves into something that resembles a wisteria vine. I stand there for a moment longer than I need to.
The change had been too slow to notice, and then suddenly it had happened. I had been looking at it every day, which meant I had stopped seeing it. The familiarity of daily use had made me a poor witness to what was occurring.
I had also assumed — and this assumption turned out to be wrong — that the kind of transformation Hagi ware is known for would take decades. Generations, even. Not one year.
5. Coming Loose — Hodokeru — ほどける
I was worried enough that I brought the yunomi back to the workshop and asked the owner to look at it.
He held it for a long time. He turned it. He brought it close to the light. And then he smiled, the way someone smiles when they're about to tell you that the thing you thought was a problem is actually the opposite of a problem.
Yours has taken on more colour, he said, than the ones we use here in the shop.
He set it down, then reached for something from behind the counter — a new piece, one I hadn't seen before. This one, he said, will do interesting things if you use it. You should watch it.
I didn't hesitate. I didn't need to.
Where purchased: Kiln workshop, Hagi City, Yamaguchi Prefecture.
In the hand: The faint roughness of fine crazing lines against the palm is not abrasive — it is more like texture you discover slowly, the way you learn the particular geography of something you handle often. Where the glaze thins, the warmth of the clay comes through. I wash it carefully, apart from other things.
6. Mending — Tsukuroi — つくろい
When one of these bowls chips, I don't set it aside. I repair it with lacquer — urushi — and in doing so, I find that the repaired piece becomes something I look at differently than I did before. The chip, filled and sealed, becomes part of the bowl's face.
I've been thinking lately about what it means to accept a chip or a crack not as damage but as event — as something that happened to an object with a history, the way things happen to anything that is used and loved over time.
When I let myself hold that perspective, I find it does something to the way I see beyond pottery as well. It opens a small window I didn't know was there.
My own practice with kintsugi — the art of repairing ceramics with lacquer and, traditionally, gold dust — has its own pace. I don't rush to the gold.
Before I apply it, I live with the lacquer-repaired piece for a while. I use it. I watch how the mend sits in the whole.
Sometimes I decide gold isn't right for a particular piece, and I use tinted lacquer instead. Sometimes I'm not sure of anything, and I finish with black lacquer only, and keep using it while I think.
- Urushi: a natural lacquer derived from the sap of the urushi tree, used in Japan since antiquity. Also the primary material in kintsugi repair.
7. What the Lacquer Teaches — Urumu — うるむ
There is a reason for this caution, and it is not temperament — or not only temperament. It is accumulated experience.
Until recently, I had failed at the final stage of kintsugi more times than I could comfortably count. Too much lacquer, and the gold dust sinks into it before it can adhere to the surface.
Too little drying time, and the gold won't catch at all. I have refinished the same piece several times over because of mistakes made in the last step — the step that should, in principle, be the easiest.
Lacquer is not a cooperative material. It has its own schedule. It responds to humidity and temperature in ways that vary from day to day, and there are days when it simply refuses to behave the way it did the day before — not because anything has changed on my end, but because something has changed on its end.
Some days the lacquer flows easily under the brush, willing and even-tempered. The next day, the same lacquer from the same jar, applied with the same hand, refuses.
I've started to think of it as having a disposition. And I have started, somewhat against my will, to think of it as my teacher — patient in the way that only something with no investment in my progress can be patient, correcting me not through explanation but through consequence.
8. Summary
「あかわいろ にほひささめく かかりふじ」
[Akawairo, ni o i sassamékou, kakari foudji.]
Aquarelle, Nymphéa Sassafras, Calcaire Fusain.
Genou des Abysses, Cil d'Envol, Clarté de Seil.
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Available in: Japanese English Français 繁體中文
References
References consulted for this article: 器 01, 器 02, 工 01, 工 02.
Please use the link below to access references.
Audio [reading]: 2025_025_ja01 (in preparation)
Audio [reading]: 2025_025_ja02 (in preparation)
With thanks to: Microsoft Clipchamp: Brigitte, VOICEVOX: 四国めたん
End of Article
Through this article, I hope to bring a small discovery — and perhaps a touch of the familiar — to your everyday table.