Ichinokura, Onada, Takata – three small worlds in clay
If you want to understand how a landscape can think in clay, you could do far worse than begin in Ichinokura, wander on to Onada, and end the day in Takata. These three villages, stitched together by ridges, streams, and footpaths, have spent centuries firing their thoughts into cups, tiles, and bottles. They look modest enough on the map, but taken together they are a kind of pocket‑sized history of Japanese ceramics, from medieval wood‑smoke to twentieth‑century chimneys and back again.
Ichinokura – a village in a sake cup
My visit began with a pause in front of a single, almost shy little object: Kato Saihei’s gyokurowan, the “Sweet Potato Leaves” cup in the Sakazuki Museum. A sweet potato plant trembles in a painted breeze along its side, and for a moment you stand not in a museum but in a furrowed field somewhere on the edge of the village, watching its leaves flutter and gossip with the wind. It has precisely the scale of an intimate thought, small enough to hold in your palm yet big enough to hold an entire way of life.
“Sweet Potato Leaves” cup by Kato Saihei
The Japanese word sakazuki simply means "sake cup" — but this piece quietly insists on being called a wan, a bowl. The distinction is not pedantic. In older times, gyokuro tea belonged to the same rare, deliberate world as fine sake: something you approached slowly, in small quantities, with your full attention. In the same way that wedding sake or New Year’s o-toso – a spiced, medicinal sake traditionally drunk at New Year – is shared in minute sips, the value lies not in volume but in the way the liquid passes from hand to hand, lips to lips, and human to god.
The Sakazuki Museum in Ichinokura is essentially a love letter to this idea of smallness. Its shelves hold a silent crowd of thousands of cups – some sober, some flamboyant, some with designs that make you laugh out loud – some lit from below so their ultra thin porcelain glows like bone held up to the sun. Many are purely traditional, but others show how makers shamelessly innovated: war‑era designs with patriotic motifs, cups made to suit new fashions in drinking and display, little experiments that let a remote village keep up with the fickle tides of taste.
The Sakazuki Museum in Ichinokura is essentially a love letter to this idea of smallness. Its shelves hold a silent crowd of thousands of cups – some sober, some flamboyant, some with designs that make you laugh out loud – some lit from below so their ultra thin porcelain glows like bone held up to the sun. Many are purely traditional, but others show how makers shamelessly innovated: war‑era designs with patriotic motifs, cups made to suit new fashions in drinking and display, little experiments that let a remote village keep up with the fickle tides of taste.
That Ichinokura became a specialist in such things was not inevitable. During the Edo period, the region was criss-crossed with kilns, and the authorities tried to prevent chaos through the oya-nimotsu system – literally "parent cargo" – an arrangement that assigned each district its designated product, channelling output through licensed Nagoya merchants and protecting domain revenues as much as bringing order to the kilns. Records from the eighteenth century document these licensed kiln lineages, each under a shareholder who appears to have hired a mixture of full-time artisans and day labourers – a miniature industrial system, hidden quietly among terraced fields.
As porcelain technology spread and tastes shifted, the village made a strategic pivot. From the early 19th century, a “new‑made ware” kiln here pursued Arita‑style porcelain, and in a few decades, stoneware and porcelain had pushed older earthenware to the margins. Perched on a mountain slope with poor transport links and limited porcelain clay, Ichinokura learned to survive by going small and refined: sakazuki, sencha sets, chopstick rests, objects that were inexpensive in clay but rich in labour and imagination.
The fine painting technique that defines Ichinokura's most celebrated sakazuki was introduced in the early nineteenth century by master artisans from Kyoto and Seto. The specific technique they brought was sometsuke — the painting of cobalt blue ornamentation on a field of white porcelain — a style deeply rooted in the refined ceramic traditions of both Kyoto and the Seto area. These artisans transmitted techniques that had been developed over centuries in Kyoto's kyo-yaki and kiyomizu-yaki tradition, which itself evolved in the 17th century alongside the flourishing tea culture. The skill was extraordinarily precise — the brushes used had tips only a single hair in width. This level of refinement was central to what made Ichinokura's sakazuki so technically remarkable. The Kumano Shrine in Ichinokura has a celebrated painted ceiling (絵天井, e-tenjo) that was created approximately 150 years ago — in the late Edo to early Meiji period — by craftsmen who came to the village from the Kyoto region.
Dragonfly sakazuki cup by Kato Gosuke
By the mid‑Meiji period, about 120 kilns smoked and crackled around the village, and a coterie of a handful master craftsmen developed a house style – translucent, slightly milky bodies, walls under a millimetre thick, and extraordinarily delicate underglaze painting that set them apart from the better‑known Kiyomizu wares of Kyoto. Names like Kato Gosuke and Kato Saihei stand out, but they are really the bright peaks in a whole mountain range of anonymous skill. When you cradle one of these cups, you hold not only a drink but a strategy, a response to geography and economics distilled into a few grams of revolving clay.
The Sakazuki museum shelves are crowded with thousands of cups – and a few tea bowls in disguise. Many follow traditional patterns, yet over time you can watch designers gently stretch the rules to create novelty for new customers, even during the war years when decoration had to dance around scarcity and censorship.
Onada – from ash‑glazed bowls to Shiro tenmoku
Travel east and you find yourself in Onada, where the steep stairs to the sacred Hakusan Shrine pass across soil thick with the shards of old firing sites. There are remains of bowls, jars, and tiles from centuries past. It is a landscape where the past is not buried under glass in a display case but lies openly underfoot, ready to lodge in your shoe or your memory.
The Hakusan Shrine (白山神社) in Onada, Tajimi sits at the heart of one of Japan's most archaeologically significant pottery sites. Master potter Aoyama Soukei of Kusanokashiragama, who identified clay from near the Hakusan Shrine as one of only two sources of the original Onada clay suitable for reproducing shiro tenmoku (白天目), the rare white tenmoku ware now designated as a Japanese National Treasure.
Shiro tenmoku and tea utensils
Powerful warlords, and later merchants, meant that there was a market for sophisticated tea bowls and tea utensils, as the tea ceremony was at the core of elite culture. The earliest wares were tough stonewares, gradually giving way to lighter‑coloured pieces that joined a broader shift in tea culture toward paler, more luminous ceramics. In medieval Mino, the historical name of this province that is now part of Gifu Prefecture, Buddhist monks were crucial messengers, carrying tea practice and tea utensils through a Zen temple network anchored in Kyoto.
When the famous monk Musō Soseki was invited by local lord Toki Yorisada in 1313 to found the Eihoji Zen temple in Tajimi, he effectively wired the region into this web, ensuring a flow of clergy, tea habits, and imported Tenmoku bowls between Kyoto and these hills. Temples treasured these utensils, and travelling monks brought them into the countryside, offering local potters both models and aspirations.
When the famous monk Musō Soseki was invited by local lord Toki Yorisada in 1313 to found the Eihoji Zen temple in Tajimi, he effectively wired the region into this web, ensuring a flow of clergy, tea habits, and imported Tenmoku bowls between Kyoto and these hills. Temples treasured these utensils, and travelling monks brought them into the countryside, offering local potters both models and aspirations.
A retreat student at Kusanokashiragama in Onada inspects her first hikidashi-guro bowl — the matte, dark-fired ware prized in the tea ceremony.
As tea masters like Murata Juko and later Sen no Rikyu began to favour slightly rough, local wares over flawless imports, kilns in villages such as Onada were well placed. Within this setting, potter Sokei Aoyama has argued, based on clay analysis, kiln archaeology, and experimental firings, that the rare Shiro tenmoku bowls — white, luminous tea bowls long revered in the tea world — were probably made here using local white clay. Their production is dated to the late Muromachi period, around the 16th century, on the cusp of the Momoyama era.
Then came disruption from outside.
Then came disruption from outside.
There is a close connection between Buddhism and pottery, via the tea ceremony and Zen. Here pottery retreat students experience a kiln blessing in Onada.
During the Onin War (1467–1477) and the subsequent Sengoku (Warring States) period, repeated military devastation in Owari Province — where the great Seto kilns were located — drove potters north over the mountains into Mino. They brought their glazing and throwing techniques with them, and the region absorbed this knowledge hungrily. This migration is widely regarded as the direct cause of Mino's golden age, producing the iconic Momoyama styles — Shino, Ki-Seto, Seto-guro, and Oribe. Those styles have never quite left. Visitors come to Onada today to learn Shino and Oribe from village potters, reaching back through their hands toward the same techniques that arrived here, unannounced, in someone's pack five centuries ago.
360° image of the climbing kiln at Suigetsugama. Suigetsugama – including two kilns, studio, and annex buildings – was founded in 1946 by Toyozo Arakawa (1894–1985).
Strictly speaking, Suigetsu-gama sits not in Onada proper, but close enough to the boundary that it hardly matters — one of those places that belongs to both worlds and neither, which is perhaps fitting. The kiln was founded in 1946 by Toyozo Arakawa (1894–1985), one of the truly legendary figures in Japanese ceramics. Arakawa was designated a Living National Treasure — ningen kokuhō — for his mastery of Shino and Seto-guro, two of the great Momoyama glazing traditions.
What he gave the world was more than technical virtuosity. His discovery that Shino and Oribe wares of the Momoyama and early Edo periods were fired here in Mino — not in distant Chinese or Kyoto kilns as had long been assumed — was an act of recovery as much as scholarship: the quiet restoration of a nearly forgotten chapter in Japanese ceramic history. He did not merely revive a technique; he returned a people to themselves. Suigetsu-gama still stands today. The craft and spirit Arakawa left behind are carried forward in silence — as the best things always are.
Strictly speaking, Suigetsu-gama sits not in Onada proper, but close enough to the boundary that it hardly matters — one of those places that belongs to both worlds and neither, which is perhaps fitting. The kiln was founded in 1946 by Toyozo Arakawa (1894–1985), one of the truly legendary figures in Japanese ceramics. Arakawa was designated a Living National Treasure — ningen kokuhō — for his mastery of Shino and Seto-guro, two of the great Momoyama glazing traditions.
What he gave the world was more than technical virtuosity. His discovery that Shino and Oribe wares of the Momoyama and early Edo periods were fired here in Mino — not in distant Chinese or Kyoto kilns as had long been assumed — was an act of recovery as much as scholarship: the quiet restoration of a nearly forgotten chapter in Japanese ceramic history. He did not merely revive a technique; he returned a people to themselves. Suigetsu-gama still stands today. The craft and spirit Arakawa left behind are carried forward in silence — as the best things always are.
Takata – bottles, chimneys, and the rules of the game
Near the old cemetery at Takata stands a tosohi — a founding-potter monument, its name combining the characters for "ceramic ancestor" and "stone memorial" — erected to honour Kato Yozaemon Kagenao, who opened the first kiln here in 1616. It is a reminder that in this place, mastery of fire was seen as something close to a sacred calling.
The connection between Buddhism and pottery may seem strange to western readers. But the roots go deep in this area. Kato Yozaemon's grandfather was Kageharu, a descendant in the 10th generation from Seto's Pottery Ancestor Kato Shirozaemon Kagemasa. Kagemasa crossed to Song-dynasty China (modern China) together with the famous Dōgen, who transmitted Soto Zen Buddhism during the Kamakura period, and learned the art of pottery-making there. Some of the oldest kiln ruins in the Onada/Takata area stem back to the Kamakura era. As we have seen, Onada would produce equisite tea bowls for the tea ceremony popular among the elite.
The oldest kiln remains in the Onada and Takata area predate the founding potter Kato Yozaemon Kagenao — stretching back to the Kamakura period, and perhaps further still. As we have seen, even before Kagenao arrived, Onada was producing remarkable tea bowls for the tea ceremony — wares prized among the ruling classes, shaped in a tradition of refined quiet long before anyone thought to formalize it. History, as it often does, arrived as disruption. But Takata's earth and flame were not so easily redirected. Slowly, persistently, they passed into new hands and new purposes — and the same soil that once formed elegant tea bowls eventually gave its nature to the tokkuri, the sake bottle, and to the broader world of vessels made for drinking and sharing.
What Kagenao inherited when he arrived was already considerable. During the Ōnin War and the Sengoku period, potters driven north out of Owari had carried Seto's porcelain techniques with them into Mino — the same migration that gave Onada its Shino and Oribe. Takata absorbed a different gift from this influx: the methods for working white clay with precision. Combined with the district's own shirakotsuchi — an exceptionally dense local white clay, highly resistant to liquid permeation — this made Takata's kilns unusually well suited to a very specific product: the tokkuri, the narrow-necked sake bottle that would define the district for the next two centuries.
What Kagenao inherited when he arrived was already considerable. During the Ōnin War and the Sengoku period, potters driven north out of Owari had carried Seto's porcelain techniques with them into Mino — the same migration that gave Onada its Shino and Oribe. Takata absorbed a different gift from this influx: the methods for working white clay with precision. Combined with the district's own shirakotsuchi — an exceptionally dense local white clay, highly resistant to liquid permeation — this made Takata's kilns unusually well suited to a very specific product: the tokkuri, the narrow-necked sake bottle that would define the district for the next two centuries.
By the middle of the Edo period, production was in full swing. Japan's one-million-person city of Edo and the great merchant cities of Kyoto and Osaka created enormous demand for reliable sake containers, and Takata's clay provided exactly the right raw material — hard-firing, pale, and sealed. The kilns strung themselves along the hillside slopes for the same reason as in Ichinokura and Onada: heat climbs, and so did the flames. Takata sat inside one of Japan's most kiln-dense zones, with medieval and early-modern firing sites crammed into roughly a four-kilometre radius; to fire here was to be part of a very crowded conversation.
The domain understood the value of what this density produced. By around 1800, Takata appears in documents as part of a group of districts that agreed on "standard products" for sake bottles, known as oya-nimotsu — literally "parent cargo." Behind that dry term lies an arrangement that was less voluntary than it might appear: the Owari Domain controlled what Tajimi kilns could produce and sell, channelling output through licensed Nagoya merchants and assigning each district its designated product — a system designed as much to protect domain revenues as to bring order to the kilns. Ichinokura had its rust-glazed sakazuki; Takata had its tokkuri; and Takata, notoriously, sometimes strayed across the line.
Just up the slope from this ghost of modernity stands a Taisho-era climbing kiln, a reminder that the old ways and the new overlapped for a while. You can stand between chimney and noborigama and feel, almost physically, the tension between batch and flow, between nights spent nursing a wood fire and days spent tending an endless belt of moulded ware.
The chimney on this old factory once had dozens of companions that dominated the whole landscape.
The twentieth century brought a sharp change in scale. New coal-fired factories rose beside the older wood kilns, announcing a move from wheel-thrown to mould-made and jigger-and-jolley production. In one surviving plant, a tall chimney still scratches the sky, though inside, trees now push through concrete floors and rusting machinery — a slow green reclamation of what was once all soot and bustle. At its peak, such factories allowed semi-skilled workers to churn out great quantities of Takata-yaki: bottles, cups, and tableware shipped across Japan and even abroad as "Mino ware," the local name turned into an export label.
Down by the creek, a monument lined with typical Takata sake and shochu flasks acts as a kind of three-dimensional catalogue of this history, each bottle a standard form anchored in that old agreement, each one also a memory of hands, orders, and celebrations now long vanished.
Today Takata still has active kilns and pottery-related businesses, but it wears its past openly: in the chimney with a tree for a heart, in the old kiln where bats roost, and in the tosohi that still thanks Kato Yozaemon Kagenao for daring to put earth into the fire.
The script on this tokkuri reads something like: "To Kunihiro — the demon instructor who ran a firefighter's life without ever stopping."
We close with a tokkuri produced recently by one of Takata's workshops, and it is rather a fine thing to end on. The flask is a retirement gift — a tradition that sits close to the Japanese heart, particularly in those professions, firefighting and the military among them, where a career is lived at full sprint rather than a leisurely trot. The inscription tells you everything you need to know. 走り続けた — hashiri tsuzuketa, "kept on running" — is not mere decoration; it is a quietly moving tribute to a working life spent in perpetual motion, always answering the next call, never quite stopping to draw breath. And beside it, 鬼教官 — oni kyōkan, the "demon instructor" — which sounds alarming until you understand that in Japan, to be called a demon by the people you trained is roughly equivalent to being called a very good teacher by everyone else.
One trembling leaf
In the end, all three villages return you to that small painted plant on Kato Saihei’s gyokurowan. Sweet potato leaves shiver in a breeze that you cannot feel but somehow believe in completely, a little drama playing out on the inside of a porcelain wall less than a millimetre thick. Above ground they dance their brief, showy dance; below, the koimo tubers swell in the dark, modest and dependable, doing the quiet work of feeding people without fuss.
Zen has a way of insisting that this moment – this cup, this sip, this breeze – is both the first and the last, the only one you will ever truly have. The tea ceremony phrases it as ichigo ichie: one meeting, one time, never again exactly like this. It is not hard to imagine that this is what Sahei was thinking as he painted, aware of the kilns smoking above Ichinokura, of the tea bowls of Onada, of the chimneys of Takata, and of the hands that would one day cradle his work.
Held just right, the little bowl joins three villages, several centuries, and innumerable gatherings in one continuous gesture of offering and acceptance. It is a reminder that in these hills, clay is not merely a material but a language – and that a language, like a good sake, is meant to be shared.
Held just right, the little bowl joins three villages, several centuries, and innumerable gatherings in one continuous gesture of offering and acceptance. It is a reminder that in these hills, clay is not merely a material but a language – and that a language, like a good sake, is meant to be shared.
People and places of interest
Ichinokura
- Ichinokura Sakazuki Art Museum — 1,500 Edo and Meiji-era sake cups and sencha utensils. The essential first stop.
Kobegama — founded 1804; home of Living National Treasure Takuo Kato (1917–2005), who revived Persian lusterware. Eighth-generation Ryotaro Kato fires here today. More at discovertajimi.com
Kumano Shrine — hillside shrine with painted ceiling panels; spiritual counterpart to the village's ceramic history.
Onada
- Hakusan Shrine — stone steps crossing soil thick with kiln shards going back to the Kamakura period. More at discovertajimi.com
Suigetsugama — kiln of Living National Treasure Toyozo Arakawa, who proved Shino and Oribe were made in Mino. Still firing. More at discovertajimi.com
Kusanokashiragama — working pottery retreat using local Kibushi clay; welcomes visitors. More at kusanokashiragama.com
takata
- Tosohi — stone monument near the old cemetery honouring Kato Yozaemon Kagenao, who opened Takata's first kiln in 1616.
- Factory chimney & Taisho noborigama(Toujinsha-kiln) — industrial ruin and wood-fired kiln standing side by side; the full arc of Takata's ceramic history in two structures.
- Flask monument — creek-side display of standard Takata sake bottles, a record in clay of the old oya-nimotsu product system.
