Things Japanese. Nicholas Bornoff

      Satsuma-yaki

       satsuma ware

      The Shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi's two attempts to invade Korea in 1592 and 1598 were dismal failures. But, taken with ceramics they discovered along the campaign trail, some of his generals came up with a brilliant idea for turning adversity into an asset. Rather than burden themselves with crates full of plundered pottery, they kidnapped the potters. Being regional governors, they saw ceramic production as a means of filling the provincial coffers. Although they were virtual prisoners, the Koreans nonetheless enjoyed a fairly exalted position in Kyushu. Small wonder. They were instrumental in inventing and propagating pottery techniques which made the ware from the Kyushu towns of Arita and Imari world famous in the next century.

      Shimazu Yoshihisa, another of Hideyoshi's generals and lord of the Kyushu province of Satsuma (now Kagoshima), brought Korean potters back to his fiefdom too. Displaying the delicacy of porcelain, their particular specialty was a cream-coloured glaze covered with minute crackling. Despite its early popularity, the ware fell out of fashion and the Satsuma potteries declined. By the mid 19th century 'Old Satsuma' ware had become very rare and was much sought by collectors. Today there are precious few pieces outside of museums.

      A different animal altogether, the newer form of Satsuma seen on these pages proved immensely popular in Europe. It was born of provincial governor Shimazu Shigehide's efforts to revive the flagging local pottery industry at the beginning of the 19th century, when he dispatched his potters around various centres in Japan in search of new techniques. They returned with the techniques of polychrome painting, learned in Kyoto's Kinkōzan pottery.

      In 1827 Shigehide sent another potter to Kyoto to learn kinran—a 17th century method for applying gold to enhance red and white patterns—imitating polychrome kinran textile designs of Chinese origin adopted in Japan for centuries. Adapting what he learned to what he already knew, he and the other Satsuma potters produced a lavishly ornate hybrid. Although called Satsuma ware, it was produced only in Kyoto for some time. The finest craftsmen of the genre was a Kyotoite, Nin'ami Dōhachi, who specialized in white Satsuma decorated in the nishiki style which, like kinran, was inspired from textiles. Nin'ami opened the first exclusive Satsuma pottery in his own city—far indeed from the real Satsuma.

      Hoping to take control of what they deemed should have been produced in their own kilns, the Satsuma governors sent another potter to Kyoto, who came back to launch the Naeshirogawa style which, comprising more colours, was (if such a thing were possible) even more ornate. Considered by many as the definitive Satsuma style, the ware not only faced competition from namesakes in Kyoto, but also spawned a rash of cheap imitators in pottery centres all over the country. Requiring minute precision, detailed designing and painterly skills, Satsuma ware is the product of extraordinary skill. Made almost exclusively for export, it appealed to the baroque and bombastic tastes of European courts. The work and paintings can be really exquisite, but in many cases the beauty of the objects is demeaned by sheer decorative over-kill. Praise was lavished on Satsuma ware at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867; it perfectly fitted the times. Good pieces fetch high prices today, though most look as though they were designed solely for the ponderous and ostentatious Victorian drawing-room.

      Imari-yaki

       伊万里焼

       imari ware

      Strangely, with all the influence that China had had upon Japan, the Japanese adopted porcelain over a millennium after the Chinese had invented it. Japanese ceramics had long consisted almost entirely of stoneware. In the late 15th century, Chinese porcelain was being increasingly imported, fuelling the growth of the aristocratic craze for the tea ceremony. Tea ceremony or not, the vogue for Chinese porcelain spread over the next century. It was the thing to have; high quality items were being imported more cheaply and frequently from Korea, though it soon became evident that it was high time to make it in Japan.

      The shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi made his second attempt to invade Korea in 1592. The campaign was disastrous, but to his general Nabeshima Naohige (among others) feudal lord of the old province of Hizen (now Saga Prefecture, Western Kyushu) Hideyoshi had given a 'license to trade', not in ceramics, but in the Korean potters themselves. "If there are persons skilled in ceramics found whilst encamped in Korea," went the shogun's instructions, "bring them back to Japan."

      The Nabeshimas kept their potters in captivity, though what had initially been coercion became more a matter of keeping professional secrets from rivals. Perhaps as a reaction to the ostentatious aficionados of porcelain, tea masters meanwhile came to prize the rough-hewn quality of stoneware all the more. Korean potters began by bringing subtle improvements to the same, notably in Karatsu; there was no clay suitable for porcelain in Japan anyway.

      In 1616, the great Korean potter Li Sanpei discovered kaolin, the exceptionally light clay needed to provide porcelain with its whiteness and hardness, near the town of Arita. Working thenceforth from their 'secret kilns', the reclusive and exclusive Nabeshima potteries dominated the ceramics industry until the end of the feudal era.

      In 1675 the potters moved from Arita to Okawachiyama, on the inland side of the port of Imari. This is how this kind of porcelain got its name—but not among the Japanese, who still prefer to call it Arita-yaki.

      Early Imari was mainly blue and white, but, during the Kan'ei era (1624-43), the great ceramicist Sakaida Kakiemon introduced over-glaze enamelling. The concept was Ming dynasty Chinese, but the polychrome designs were inspired from Japanese textiles, lacquer-ware and screen paintings. With the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644, China's exports of blue and white porcelain virtually ceased. Meeting the booming European demand for it provided the Japanese with a bonanza. Imari ware, both the polychrome enamel and the blue, were brought to Europe exclusively by the Dutch—the only foreigners apart from the Chinese allowed to trade on Japanese territory after 1639. Blue and white Imari proved highly influential in Holland, particularly in Delft, as well as in England and Germany. By the mid 17th century, Arita kilns were also producing European-style dinner services, often embellished with family crests. Porcelain was no longer a rarity in Japan and even the common people used it for soba noodle cups.