Ikuhiko Shibata - not your ordinary potter

Ikuhiko Shibata
not your ordinary POTTER

Ikuhiko Shibata is a Tajimi-based potter with one foot in classic Mino ware tradition, and one in tableware and products for modern everyday life. While not shy of adventure, he keeps one keen eye on the ancient sensibilities of Mino pottery. Shibata enjoys crossing borders in many ways. He regularly visits the US to help Americans take their first steps into the world of Japanese pottery.

Ikuhiko Shibata - a potter in Tajimi, Gifu Prefecture, Japan

Ikuhiko Shibata in his studio, November 2019

Recent works

FRom the Japanese tea room to the western dinner table

As soon as we arrived at Mr Shibata's studio, I knew this was going to be something altogether different from our previous interviews. His studio (or was it his house?) had a distinct personality. It looked cosy, welcoming. Many Tajimi potters work in warehouse-like workshops with walls of grey, corrugated steel. This house looked more inviting, like a lovely little countryside cafe. I immediately found the potter's appearance charming when he greeted us in the entrance to his small hut. His round face greeted us with a broad, friendly smile as he peeped at us through the opening in the Japanese style sliding door entrance.

"If you think this place looks like a cafe it is no coincidence", he said, as we stepped in and looked around at the pottery surrounding us everywhere on shelves, tables, and even on the floor. "I wasn't sure I was going to succeed when I built this kiln, so I wanted to have a plan B in place in case I would go bust. That plan was a cafe." That could have been an exciting experience too judging from the coffee pot he brought to fill our cups. It was a large, very rustic style pot with a terracotta look to it. The pipe was tiny compared to the body of the thing, and it had no handle. It looked more styled like a katakuchi pitcher for sake. "Indeed, you'd normally use this for sake, but I like to serve coffee with it," Shibata said, smiling. His coffee proved to be a potent drink too.

Japanese sake pitcher made by Ikuhiko Shibata

Shibata likes to use his sake pitcher to serve coffee.

"I like to make traditional Japanese matcha chawan (Japanese tea bowls), but I also enjoy doing tableware these days," he said. He brought several plates, some square and some rectangular. They had a modern look yet that Japanese traditional, organic feeling to them. "These may be used at a Spanish restaurant, for example," the potter said as he laid down the plates on the table. Shibata is increasingly interested in crossing the border between the world of the classic Japanese chawan (tea bowl) and that of Western tableware. "For example," he says, "you could make a chawan with a highly simplified method to make it reasonably priced and otherwise more accessible to modern users. People could then use it as a dinner or teatime tableware. I think that would work well for drinking green tea and enjoying traditional Japanese sweets in a Western setting."

plates

"Are you selling in the US as well?" I ask. I had heard the potter is visiting the country every year for several months. "No, I think it takes a lot of thinking to find the right customers," he replies. He talks about his "spare time project" when he makes plates and other things for everyday use. It's a very different product category from the traditional tea bowls, but he hopes it can open a route to a different kind of buyers. As an example, he brings some long plates. "I made them for a customer to serve mackerel on - as you can see, they have the right dimensions. But they could just as well be used for sushi and other things."

plates for mackerel pike

The potter certainly seems to love to play with ideas without restricting himself to convention. "It's tough to try to succeed only by making traditional tea bowls," he says on a more serious note. "There is so much hard work going into each of them. There's so much mental struggle in the creative process. If that's all you do, you could go crazy!" he laughs. Shibata's laugh is the kind that triggers more laughter. You immediately feel that he is having fun. "All that work and struggle makes chawan bowls expensive," he continues. "So I am now spending much of my free time making tableware like this."

Matcha chawan
(Japanese tea bowls)

Destruction for survival

While Shibata loves to try new things, there is also a side of him that leans towards the traditional. I tell him about a European potter I once met who lived in a famous pottery town in Japan. He found it disheartening that even in the golden days of the Japanese economy in the 80s people would only buy his classic Japanese pottery. He was disappointed that they wouldn't consider anything new he tried.

"Well, to be honest, I think that man didn't truly understand the tradition of his town," Shibata replied. "There is a tremendous depth of classic Japanese design, even in a simple donburi (rice bowl). In the eyes of a layman, they all look the same. Even tea bowls look boring to such a person. The reason is that he or she doesn't get it. The problem for the traditional Japanese potters, on the other hand, is a lack of imagination and creativity. It's very obvious here in Tajimi."

Shibata is not talking about the creative process here. "Take Toso, for instance," he says, referring to the "father of pottery" in the region. "Look at how other cities have been able to make good use of the image of an ancient figure to build their brand. People here totally lack that kind of imagination. They are lousy salesmen. Because of people's poor imagination, great traditions vanish, and our industry shrinks. 'Oh, potters don't make good money, so it's no use trying,' they say. But a son in a potter's house has a brand he can use. If he wants to join Rotary or some business organisation, what would he be without that brand? It's not a matter of pottery being a bad business, but an ability to take that business and brand and think creatively to make money."

Shibata is a firm believer in the importance of mastering your art. It is, he says, too easy to fall into the trap of pure business-like thinking. "You can buy your kiln from some manufacturer, buy your clay from another, your machines from a third, have some designer provide designs, and in the end, you are a factory owner, not a craftsman. It's the easy way, perhaps, and people told me I was stupid not to choose that path. But now they are gone, and I am still around. It's a result of economy-of-scale capitalism. Others will adopt the same business model. The larger volumes you must manufacture to make a profit, the more other large producers will start to produce similar goods at even larger volumes and compete for that pie. It's a vicious cycle of larger and larger volumes at lower and lower product prices. The large manufacturers produced for the gift market, for example, until one day the same kind of gifts were in every household. They weren't desirable anymore, and that's where the story ended for them. I am on the other end of that spectrum. I smash up most of the wares I make, and only sell a small fraction to keep the value up."

Shibata is appealing to a new audience with these kinds of designs. The protruding parts are covered in gold leaf.

Recent work

Shibata popped in to our office in May 2020 and asked us to add some images of works from his latest collection. They are all utensils for the tea ceremony, but will fit in nicely in Western living spaces.

the Japanese matcha chawan is a landscape

"It's quite interesting how Westerners think about ceramics," he says. To the Westerner, in general, a Japanese matcha chawan tea bowl is simply a bowl. To the Japanese, it is a part of an extraordinary kind of hospitality - we call it omotenashi." Omotenashi is beginning to become a concept in the Western hospitality industry. In one sense, it is about the host trying to imagine herself in her guest's shoes, to understand what her guest desires most in a given moment. In the world of the tea ceremony, this can involve touch. What does a guest want to feel in his or her hands? "I have found that Americans and other foreigners have no concept of serving tea in a cup or bowl that feels good in your hands as a token of hospitality," says Shibata. "A bowl is a container, it's as simple as that. When I ask my American students what elements comprise the concept of a matcha chawan, nobody is ever able to answer. So I have come up with an answer: think of the front, back, the place where you put your mouth and put your hands as parts of a landscape." These parts, to Shibata's mind, form the haptic landscape of a matcha chawan.

"If you try to imagine the time when this culture started to appear in medieval Japan," Shibata continues, "it was dominated by samurai. The small, intimate tea ceremony room was ideal for negotiations. You might also imagine that an irregular, organic shape like one of a matcha chawan must have been a good conversation starter. After all, you can't just dive into a sensitive negotiation straight away!" he says, laughing. "You might also imagine that the most influential of all tea masters in our history, Sen no Rikyu, developed the tea ceremony in the context of those dangerous times. Assassination was a real threat. They must have taken precautions in the negotiation room. This could be one reason why we still turn the matcha chawan a couple of times before we put it to our mouth.

kougou
(INCENSE container for the tea ceremony)

the tea ceremony and the fear of poison

"Everything about the tea ceremony is related to cleanliness," Shibata explains. "For example, the tea master snaps his fukusa-sabaki cloth tight with both hands to shake the dust off. Maybe this was originally part of the procedures for protection against poisoning. Or when the master poor the hot water into the guest's tea bowl, he doesn't empty the ladle. He pours half of the water back into the pot. This could have served as insurance for the guest that he was safe. I believe Sen no Rikyu designed the tea ceremony to be an elaborate display of all these safety measures. He turned them into art. The more you ponder it, the more likely it seems, don't you think?" he laughs. "The truth could be very different, of course, who knows? Anyway, I go to enjoy the tea ceremony with some old ladies once a month, and when I tell them about my ideas, they are very entertained! That foreign potter in Japan who was bored by making traditional matcha chawan, but with deeper insight into the culture of tea bowls or the tea ceremony they don't seem so boring anymore."

Shibata travel to the US every year to teach pottery enthusiasts, to help them apply a deeper perspective to their work. "I try hard to teach all these things to my American workshop students, but it's not easy. They tell me that 'I understand well what you are saying, but my hands can't follow.' Why I am not quite sure, but there are a couple of things I think hinder them: they try too hard to make something skillfully, and they think too much in design terms. To put it in simple terms, foreigners tend to take a shallow approach to creation. They are satisfied as long as the shape of their work is visually pleasing."

Matcha chawan from three angles
"a japanese tea bowl is a landscape"

"we make things look hard to use on purpose"

It is easy to be affected by Shibata's enthusiasm. He fires off one thought after another in great excitement. "We Japanese love to challenge things. 'I have made this strange-looking tea bowl,' we say. 'Would you like to try to drink from it?' We make these asymmetric, 'hard-to-use' bowls on purpose so that people can enjoy trying them in the tea ceremony. I feel this is alien to foreigners. A utensil in their mind should be smart-looking and ergonomically well designed. It should be practical. We Japanese try to make things that look odd and hard to use but are pleasant to use when you try. We owe Furuta Oribe a lot for that tradition (Furuta was a samurai lord and tea master). Any potter wants to make something perfectly round and pretty, but many times they failed and the bowl ended up being crooked and strange. Then Furuta Oribe came around and found the crookedness exciting and even attractive. And that was the beginning of our Oribe tradition."

Ikuhiko Shibata in his tea ceremony corner, holding the tea bowl in the above slide show.
Click/tap & drag to look around. Click/tap icon in top right for full screen.

Ikuhiko Shibata is both passionate about the Mino ware tradition and eager to break free from it. It is the mother of some of Japan's most famous forms of pottery, such as Shino, Kizeto, Setoguro and Oribe. The valley of Mino is their birthplace. But while Japan is often seen as an insular nation, Shibata strives to share all this with the world and break new ground in the process. Perhaps it is this quality of his that sets him apart and inspire others, even in lands far from this island that we live on.