Weybridge Pottery

Hamada Shoji (1894 - 1998)

"Making pottery should not be like climbing a mountain, it should be more like walking down a hill in a pleasant breeze."

Hamada Shoji - his life

Hamada Shoji

(1894 - 1998) was born in Kawasaki and studied pottery at the Tokyo institute of technology. At the age of 22 he was developing 1000's of glazes at the Kyoto Ceramic Reseach institute, and learning all the technical side of making, glazing and firing pots.

Then in 1918 he was much impressed by a Leach exhibition in Ryuitsuso, Tokyo. He wrote to Leach who was working in Japan with Yanagi, and became friends with Leach. When Leach returned to the UK in 1920, he also came to the UK and worked with Leach in St Ives for 3 years. It seems that Leach brought Hamada to the UK to help him with the technical side of building a pottery.

Hamada returned to Japan after the great Kanto earthquake in 1924, and travelled to Okinawa to make pots. In 1930 he built his house in Mashiko, and set up a pottery there.

A small vase by Hamada

... The "bamboo" design became his signature go to decoration on a pot. He could do 1000's of these in a day. 5 quick brush strokes

There are now about 380 potteries with over 600 potters in Mashiko. Mashiko is now one of the biggest pottery towns in Japan.

Although you can buy from the individual studios attached to each pottery, you can also buy from the pottery supermarket in the centre of town. The Japanese arrive by the coach load, and buy large quantities of pottery in this fashion, loading up baskets with bowls and cups.
The prices for new work range from £1 for a "seconds" rice bowl, to £15 for an Hamada style plate, for instance, for an almost exact copy of the original Hamada on the left.
(This "Hamada" plate was £3,000).

The Japanese have (a very sensible) small business/shop tax break. This is one reason why Tokyo is full of small shops. This benefits the potteries of Mashiko as well.

In true Mingei tradition, the pots are not signed... because, as Hamada said, it does not contribute to a pot's beauty to know who made it. It obviously helps to establish a value though. A very average Hamada pot now sells for well over £4000 in the West, though how anyone really knows it was made by Hamada is a moot point, and one which I believe Hamada would enjoy enormously.

Hamada - his philosophy

Tealight Hamada believed there were only three important measures of a pot:

Function

- a pot is not a sculpture, whose purpose is to be looked at, but it should serve a purpose, such as holding water, or supporting chop sticks.

Beauty

- it should be beautiful to look at and to touch

Repeatable

- it should be possible and practical to make it again and again.

"To return to Mingei, the problem is how does the individual artist today approach folk craft. Of course the answer is that he should look after his character first. The problem of his own character must come foremost. With one's intellect, with one's mind, one can understand what tradition means. The folk art formula may be fed though the mind and through the intellect. But in work, what comes out must come out through one's own fingertips, one's own hands, otherwise it is no work at all.... Because Yanagi was a critic and dealt in words, he used the term "beauty" a great deal to express what he was trying to say. In my case, being a workman, I do not feel any lack by not using that word.... Beauty is not in the head or in the heart, but in the abdomen." - Shoji Hamada

"Take, for instance, eating and apple. The primitives took it right off the tree and ate it, skin, seeds, and all. But today we seem to think that peeling it looks better, and then we cut it up and stew it and make a jam of it and prepare it in all kinds of ways. In preparing the apple, quite often we commit many errors on the way. But in just taking it off the tree and eating the whole thing, there are no mistakes to be made." ~Shoji Hamada

Asked by Leach how he could manage to glaze several hundred pots in a day, without seeming to need any notes or planning ahead, he said, "I simply look at the pot and ask what it wants."

"The good pots are the ones I like... for me." Hamada

According to Yanagi Soetsu

Mingei work had to be:
Made by anonymous crafts people
Produced by hand in quantity
Inexpensive
Used by the masses
Functional in daily life
Representative of the region in which it was produced.

"On reflection," Yanagi writes in The Unknown Craftsman, "one must conclude that in bringing cheap and useful goods to the average household, industrialism has been a service to mankind -- but at the cost of the heart, of warmth, friendliness and beauty. By contrast, articles well made by hand, though expensive, can be used in homes for generations, and thus considered, they are not expensive after all."

"The potter is no longer a peasant or journeyman as in the past, nor can he be any longer described as an industrial worker: he is by force of circumstances an artist-craftsman" Bernard Leach in "A Potter's Book"

Hamada Shoji - how to pot the Hamada way

Hamada Hamada threw his pots sitting cross legged at ground level on a heavy wheel that he got revolving with a stick, and then worked on the clay. Stopping only to get the spinning going again. The house he built in Mashiko was simple and had no electricity. (and when he set up the pottery in St Ives with Leach they had no electricity in the beginning, and only kick wheels)
Hamada The house was a traditional Japanese house with sliding panels for doors. The house was relocated to the Hamada Museum at Mashiko at the top of the hill This is me sitting in the Hamada house in 2000
Hamada Hamada worked in high fired stoneware (a necessity because he only wanted to make functional wares) . The work was wood fired in an enormous rising kiln (also now relocated to the museum).

The kiln is still functional. You can see from this video why this type of kiln is known as a "dragon" kiln

Firing the beast

Hamada Shoji - Some of his pots

Hamada Bowl with a stem
Hamada Hamada was not averse to the Japanese tradional of fixing broken pots with laquer and painting the crack with gold

Kintsugi (金継ぎ, "golden joinery")
Hamada This set of 6 small dishes came with their own box. The tradition in Japan is to have the pots unmarked... but the box has all the marketing info
Hamada The underneath of the hexagonal dish

Note no makers mark on the underneath (the "Oxford Ceramics Gallery" sticker was just the gallery that was selling this pot)

Establishing whether a pot was made by Hamada, or by his associates, or even when he was alive, is a challenge for galleries and collectors alike. Basically it is done on provenance, a paper trail of owners, and guess work. I am sure Hamada would love the idea that copies of his pots are circulating, some ascribed to his name. And there were many associates in his Mashiko pottery He did not believe that the potters name contributed to the beauty of a pot.
Hamada Tall bottle