With its pink-white palette of skin, snow and spring blossoms, Shino glaze has long captured the public imagination in Japan – never more so than in its 20th century revival at the hands of two distinctly different potters…
Ken Matsuzaki, Rectangular Vase, Yohen Shino and natural ash glaze, 2025
Thousand Cranes
Kikuji Mitani, the protagonist of Yasunari Kawabata’s famous short story Thousand Cranes, is in something of a bind.
With the death of his father, he finds himself entangled with the women who once formed the older man’s complicated romantic orbit. He has been invited to a tea ceremony hosted by Chikako Kurimoto, his father’s former mistress and now a spinster tea instructor. Though their affair was fleeting, the meddlesome Chikako has insinuated herself into the Mitani family home, and Kikuji has been lured here on false pretences: Chikako is eager to arrange a marriage with a young woman named Yukiko Inamura, adorned, when Kikuji first meets her, with a kerchief patterned with a thousand cranes: a motif of purity, cleanliness and hope.
Yukiko’s quiet beauty stirs him, but the ceremony dredges up memories of his father’s past affairs. At the same occasion, Kikuji encounters Mrs. Ota, another of his father’s lovers, whose dignified sorrow contrasts sharply with Chikako’s gleeful venom. Soon they are drawn into a passionate, tormented affair, mirroring the very relationship she shared with his father.
Wracked with remorse, Mrs. Ota’s anguish eventually becomes overwhelming. Her suicide marks a sudden turning point in Kawabata’s delicate narrative and leaves Kikuji grappling with a complex mixture of grief, responsibility, and unresolved desires. This emotional turmoil deepens when Kikuji encounters Fumiko, Mrs. Ota’s daughter. Acutely aware of her mother’s suffering, she tries to distance herself from Kikuji, yet a bond forms between them, undercut by a shared sense of loss and unbelonging. Their meeting places, shaped by the ritualistic atmosphere of informal tea rooms, serve as intimate but fraught settings where every moment passes in an eternity.
As Kikuji’s sordid situation unravels with the interventions of the manipulative Chikako, we are introduced, periodically, to Kawabata’s second cast of characters: the ceremonial tea wares, many of them once belonging to Kikuji’s father, that pass as gifts from mother to daughter, mistress to son, becoming conduits for the memories that intensify the psychological entanglement between our key players. Chief among these are a water jar and a tea bowl, each in a luscious, thick white glaze called Shino that seems, whenever Kikuji looks upon it, to blush like the skin of a woman. In the water jar presented to him by Fumiko, holding her mother’s funerary flowers, he is reminded of his lover’s once soft, warm body, just as he sees Mrs Ota’s form vicariously in the gentle curves of her daughter. Even the rim of her Shino teabowl he finds kissed with the stain of Mrs Ota’s lipstick – a stain, Fumiko remarks, that won’t come out, no matter how hard she tries.
As the story draws toward its haunting conclusion, these pink-white vessels seem almost to soak up Kikuji’s emotional desolation. These pots, he wonders, made some three or four-hundred years ago – how many lives have they watched around them come and go? How many strange careers pass by?
As the story draws toward its haunting conclusion, these pink-white vessels seem almost to soak up Kikuji’s emotional desolation. These pots, he wonders, made some three or four-hundred years ago – how many lives have they watched around them come and go? How many strange careers pass by?
Shino Teabowl known as Bridge of the Gods (Shinkyo), late 16th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art NY
Mono No Aware
There is a very strong feeling in much Japanese art of the part as an evocation of the whole. We talk about the keshiki, or ‘landscape’, of a pot’s surface, where the contour of a rim – or indeed a flash of colour, like the red that Yasunari Kawabata describes ‘floating’ up from deep within white Shino – seems to conjure a grander poetic theme. Images like these abound in Thousand Cranes: of green tea in the well of a white or black bowl, ‘like traces of early spring’, for example. When Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968 – the first Japanese writer to do so – he described in his lecture how such evocations can be found at the roots of Japanese aesthetic culture. ‘When we see the beauty of the snow,’ he writes, ‘when we see the beauty of the full moon, when we see the beauty of the cherries in bloom, when in short we brush against and are awakened by the beauty of the four seasons, it is then that we think most of those close to us, and want them to share the pleasure.’ This same feeling found expression in the exchange of love poems at the 11th century Japanese imperial court, whose early chronicles saw the birth of Japan’s literary tradition, and it lies, Kawabata tells us, at the heart of the 16th century tea ceremony too. It is an aesthetic influenced by Zen Buddhist thought, looking beyond the tableau of the changing seasons to a deeper, stiller movement permeating all things. ‘The snow, the moon, the blossoms, words expressive of the seasons as they move one into another, include in the Japanese tradition the beauty of mountains and rivers and grasses and trees, of all the myriad manifestations of nature, of human feelings as well.’ It’s not surprising that Kawabata chooses Shino – the colour of snow, the moon, of cherry and plum blossoms – to capture the transitory sadness and beauty of Kikuji’s story – a feeling, in Japanese literature, referred to as mono no aware.
Like many philosophical concepts in Japanese, mono no aware is difficult to explain. A literal translation might read ‘the sorrow of things’, like our own ‘nostalgia’ or ‘melancholy’, but the 18th century critic Motoori Norinaga who popularised the term stressed that it covered every kind of strongly felt emotion. To know mono no aware, he writes, is simply to be deeply moved by something – so deeply moved, in fact, that one can hardly express it except through images drawn from the natural world (as when Kikuji, reflecting on his troubles, looks across to the alcove in his home and sees hanging ‘in a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.’) ‘Aware’ in traditional Japanese poetry is an act of sighing – ‘Ah!’ – a sigh of pain and of love in equal measure. It is, in other words, a spontaneous response: when mono no aware becomes unendurable, it must be expressed, and it can find that expression in the simplest of images.
blossoms outside Ken Matsuzaki’s wood stack, Mashiko
Figured Shino
Today, Shino is somewhat ubiquitous – an export that has travelled to Europe and the United States especially, where the starkly different character of American clays, kilns and potters has given this glaze a new tradition all its own. But at the time of Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes, published in 1949, Shino wares still retained an air of mystique even in their native Japan. Even the name ‘Shino’ is of unknown origin, emerging some hundred years after such works were first made.
This white glaze, the first of its kind in Japanese pottery, emerged at the height of the Momoyama period (1573-1615), and in its earliest forms was remarkably simple, made with nothing but a little local clay and feldspar, a silicate mineral found abundantly in rocks that could be dug straight from the earth (‘feldspar’, from the German, translates literally as ‘field flake’). But it is a glaze capable of great variety, despite its apparent simplicity, subject to wild changes in character depending on when and how it is applied, dried, layered and fired. One Shino laid over another may melt at different temperatures, creating a thick, cascading effect reminiscent of snow drifts. Of particular interest to the potters who originated it was the pitting effect in Shino’s surface that seemed to resemble the skins of citrus fruit, and its capacity for ‘crawling’ when the clay content is high and it is thickly applied. As the viscous glaze shrinks more aggressively than the clay beneath it during the firing, it retracts over the surface of the pot, revealing a pattern of spidery cracks across its face.
Shino was one of several loosely grouped styles of tea ware that flourished under the patronage of the warrior aesthete Furuta Oribe. At a time when aristocrats and tea connoisseurs kept detailed chakaiki tea diaries – not unlike the descriptions of the ceremonies given in Kawabata’s story – Oribe’s reputation for eccentricity grew through reports of his less conventional tastes. In particular, Shino and its cousin styles presented ample opportunity for patterning and motifs – something otherwise missing from the traditional Chinese bowls, caddies and kettles that had, until then, been the prevailing vogue in tea culture. With iron pigment, designs could be brushed on beneath the surface of the Shino glaze, or the whole pot could be submerged in a slip made from iron-rich clay and water, with motifs scraped back before the Shino was applied to effect a design in negative.
With darker patterns dancing over and under the milkish white surface, these pots were said to approximate the elegant decorations of Chinese white and blue porcelain, but Shino has a distinct quality all its own: a rosy warmth owing to the iron it takes on from the clay and pigment beneath it, that in the right hands can even transform Shino’s white surface to crimson – like the red that floats from deep within the Shino of Thousand Cranes, like a blush.
Shino potters Toyozo Arakawa (left) with Tokuro Kato (right), c.1984
Toyozo and Tokuro
Within a few hundred years of its invention Shino would virtually disappear, to such an extent that by the early 20th century knowledge of how to formulate and fire the glaze had been completely lost. Two potters, more than any other, would be responsible for its revival – and in temperament they could not have differed more.
Toyozo Arakawa was born and raised in Tajimi, not far from Toki, in the heart of the old province of Mino. Here, in a shallow valley cut through by the Toki river, good clay was abundant and pottery was a longstanding industry, going back many generations. A modest mountain range separates both towns from Seto, a few miles south as the crow flies, location of one of Japan’s six ancient kiln sites and long believed to have been the centre of Shino and Oribe ware production during the Momoyama period. But in the spring of 1930, a chance encounter led Arakawa to a major discovery.
In an exhibition in nearby Nagoya he had spotted on a Shino teabowl, decorated with a bamboo shoot motif, a red fire-coloured mark that seemed out of place for Seto clay and recalled instead a shard he had found among the ruins of an old kiln in Mino. Returning the very next day to this spot, an archaeological site called Mutabora, he began digging and immediately put his hands upon a Shino shard with the very same bamboo decoration. ‘As though in a dream, I worked until dusk,’ he later wrote, ‘completely engrossed in the excavation and collection of other reference material. From that day until now, no other teabowl shard with a bamboo-shoot design has come to light.’
This unearthing rewrote the story of Shino’s origins, and it gave meaning to Arakawa’s own journey in pottery too. The realisation that Momoyama tea wares had been fired in his birthplace, and that he had been responsible for this discovery, filled him with immense purpose: ‘It was as though I had been struck by a thunderbolt.’ He immediately resolved to build a kiln like that which had once stood at Mutabora and to revive the old ways of the past – work for which, in 1955, he was recognised as a Living National Treasure.
Beside the restrained and composed Arakawa, Tokuro Kato was a potter of very different sensibilities: a prankster and self-professed ‘country bumpkin’, brilliant but flawed, who liked nothing better than to poke fun at the pomposity of academic critics. Born in Seto, like Arakawa he was drawn to the ambitious tea wares of Oribe’s time, but when he published his own historical revision, proving that a form of traditional Seto wares had also originated in Mino, he was ousted from his hometown by disgruntled locals who took great pride in their ancient potting lineage, living the rest of his life in nearby exile. With this first rejection, he resolved to outdo his forebears, producing tea bowls and water jars of extraordinary vigour and individualism. Eventually his detractors conceded his brilliance, awarding his Oribe wares the title of ‘Intangible Cultural Property’ – only to rescind the award several years later, when it was discovered (in what ranks among the most devastating scandals in Japanese ceramic history) that Kato, with his son, had forged an ancient Seto vase so convincing that expert curators had requested it too be awarded the very same title and preserved for posterity.
That Kato was punished for demonstrating the very same excellence that had seen him begrudgingly rewarded in the first place did not go unnoticed. For years until their deaths in 1985, Arakawa and Kato – unamicable rivals, by all accounts – stood to represent the very best in what contemporary Oribe wares, Shino in particular, could look like.
Ken Matsuzaki, Yohen Shino vase with natural ash glaze, 2025
Matsuzaki and Murasaki
Arakawa’s and Kato’s radical revival of the Shino tradition prompted waves of young potters to return to the forms and glazes of the Momoyama heyday. For the young Ken Matsuzaki, eager to escape the shadow of his mentor, Tatsuzo Shimaoka, and Shimaoka’s own teacher, the great Shoji Hamada, Shino and Oribe offered rich avenues for exploration. Like Kawabata, he found their distinct colours and forms almost seductive: ‘Shino pottery, in its authentic style, has a scarlet colour phenomenon on its surface, somewhat like rouge brushed over white skin’ he wrote in an exhibition catalogue some 20 years ago. His own unique contribution to this revived tradition came in exposing Shino-glazed works to the chaotic fire and ash of his wood kiln. Oribe wares, after all, had been born in an era of civil war across Japan, as warlords fought for supremacy in their bid to unify the country. Such pots represented not just an emerging Japanese aesthetic identity, distinct from the Chinese and Korean traditions that inspired them, but a search for fragile beauty in an age of violence. The image of white Shino discoloured and veiled with Yohen (literally ‘kiln change’) could not have been more poetic.
Prolonged reduction in this multi- chambered kiln, over the course of eight days – requiring 4,000 bundles of chestnut and pine wood, and upwards of 50 bags of charcoal – extracts an extraordinary richness of colour from Matsuzaki’s clays, deposits molten ash in snow-falls and rivulets round the shoulders of vases, and, in the case of the usually pillow-white Shino, blackens with soot, traps bubbles of silvery carbon, and occasionally, in very heavy reduction, effects a metallic sheen across their surface.
This ‘gold’ Shino, which Matsuzaki pioneered two decades ago, was in fact an accident – the result of introducing charcoal in great quantities to the kiln, spiking its temperature upwards. What he had sought instead was to lower it steadily, while keeping a reducing atmosphere, in pursuit of a Shino colour he has been chasing for many years: a deep purple (‘murasaki’) Shino achieved, with great notoriety, in the late 1970s by the legendary Tokuro Kato.
The word Murasaki derives from the plant from which purple dye was once obtained in Japan, but it is most prominently associated with Lady Murasaki, the pen name of the lady-in-waiting author of the Tale of Genji. This early novel is among the foundational texts of all Japanese culture. Concerned with the tribulations of courtly life and written at the turn of the 10th and 11th centuries, before the rise of the military samurai class – a time, Kawabata writes, ‘when ripeness was moving into decay. One feels in it the sadness at the end of glory, the high tide of Japanese court culture’ – the Tale of Genji is suffused with images of mono no aware, and so too does this murasaki colour evoke feelings of rich maturity. The process of obtaining it in Shino is not dissimilar to the murasaki dyeing process, in which silks were repeatedly bathed in water coloured by the crushed root of the plant, soaking up more dye with each submersion. In the case of the Shino, a long, reducing firing draws out the iron within the clay body into the glaze, darkening its usually white colour. With the right clay blend – trialled over multiple years – the shade can be as deep and dark as a ripe plum, the paler highlights, where the Shino is at its thickest, reminiscent of a waxy bloom covering its skin, like hot breath on a winter’s evening.
Ken Matsuzaki, Murasaki Shino teabowls, 2025
The Scent of Purple
When Tokuro Kato first exhibited his infamous Murasakinioi tea bowls (‘the scent of purple’), they caused something of a sensation. Critics were divided; one friend of the artist thought them ‘vile things…a bad joke…dirty and without an inkling of charm’. Kato, who embraced wholeheartedly his coarse reputation, described himself as a kind of ‘worm’,
‘Surviving by consuming the soil... Wandering around mountains and fields in search of good clay, I am a clay pilgrim. Earth is my lover.’
What the critics could agree, however, was that these purple pots reflected Kato’s essence as a potter: mischievous, experimental, talented yet conceited, unafraid of pushing the acceptable bounds of Seto wares. His natural flair made for a poignant point of comparison to the more reserved and introspective Toyozo Arakawa; neither potter were on good terms during their lives, though each could be said to have contributed (and represented) the duality of Oribe’s Shino wares: at times austere, at others soft and inviting; exuberant or restrained; soothing and wounding, just like Kawabata’s Shino vessels.
For his own part, Matsuzaki has kept elements of both masters alive in his work. Leaning into Kato’s infamous ‘unrefinement’, he describes his own Murasaki with a second, unpronounced kanji ‘埜’, an ancient word for ‘field’ suggestive of something rustic and wild. He shares something of the long romanticism of Lady Murasaki’s courtly era, but also that gentle austerity of the Zen priests who, together, brought knowledge of mono no aware to the heart of Japanese art. And in his own pots, he comes close to the kind of evocations Kawabata gave at the root of Japanese ideals of beauty: the snow, the moon, the cherry blossoms – images of change, like a white Shino glaze, rouged with human colour.
