Raku tea bowl
Although Japan had been a nation of potters almost from prehistoric times, it was only after the rise of Zen influence and a popular interest in the tea ceremony that ceramics was raised from craft to high art. The great age of Japanese ceramics occurred several hundred years after the heroic periods of Chinese ceramic art in the T'ang and Sung dynasties, but, as in other cases, the Japanese eventually equaled and in some ways surpassed their mainland teachers.
The Stone Age Jomon tribes in Japan created some of the richest figurine art of any of the world's prehistoric peoples. These Jomon figurines, fired at low temperatures and rarely over six or eight inches in height, are a classic puzzle to anthropologists and art historians, for they sometimes seem Polynesian, sometimes pre-Columbian, and sometimes pure abstraction in the modern sense of the term. Indeed, certain Jomon figurines could pass as works of Picasso or Miro. At times the features of the body were rendered recognizably, but usually they were totally stylized and integrated into the figure as part of some larger interest in material and pure form. It was a noble beginning for what would be a permanent Japanese interest in the look and feel of natural clay.
When the Jomon were displaced around the third century b.c. by the Yayoi, their beautiful figurine art disappeared, and for several centuries Japan produced mainly pedestrian crocks and drinking vessels. The few figurines created retained little of the sophisticated Jomon abstraction. Around the turn of the fourth century a.d., however, Yayoi potters found their metier, and began the famous haniwa figurines, hollow-eyed statuettes in soft brown clay which were used to decorate aristocratic tombs, and simple but elegant vases and water pots in low-fired brown clay, which often were dyed with cinnabar and which give evidence of being thrown on some form of primitive wheel.
This domestic ware was in such demand that a class of professional potters came into being—inevitably leading to a gradual falling off of the individualistic character of the pots, as craftsmen began to mass-produce what had previously been a personal art form. The Korean Buddhist culture which reached Japan in the fifth and sixth centuries brought the Japanese new techniques for high-firing their stoneware pots, introducing a process whereby ashes from the kiln were allowed to adhere to the surface of a piece to produce a natural glaze. These new high-temperature pots had a hard surface texture and an ashen- gray color, while the existing native wares of low-fired porous clays retained their natural brown hues.
Typically the average Japanese preferred the natural-colored, soft clay vessels, and so the two types of pottery continued to be produced side by side for several hundred years, with the aristocracy choosing the hard-surfaced mainland-style gray works
and the common people continuing to use the simpler, underrated brown vessels, which were often fashioned by hand. The importance of this instinctive Japanese reaction for the later acceptance of Zen-inspired ceramic art cannot be over-stressed. Not only did the Japanese love of natural clay make them reject glazes for centuries after they had learned the necessary techniques, they also seem to have had little spontaneous interest in decorating their pots or using high-firing or mechanized techniques for their production, perhaps because the technology came between man and object, distancing the potter too far from his handiwork. Japanese potters cherished their regional individuality, and they continued to express their personal sensibilities in their work, so there were a multiplicity of rural kilns and a wide variety of styles.
The passion for Chinese culture during the Nara period of the eighth century led to a brief fling with Tang Chinese-style three-color glazed wares among the imitative Japanese aristocracy; but these seem to have been too much at odds with native instincts, for they were soon forgotten. After the government moved to Kyoto and launched the Heian era, both the indigenous pottery techniques—the low-fired, brown, porous pots for the common people and the high-fired, gray, polished bowls for the aristocracy—continued to thrive side by side. However, technical advances in the high-firing kilns brought about subtle changes in the mock-glazes of the aristocratic wares. It was discovered that if they were fired in an atmosphere where there was abundant oxygen, the fused particles of fueled ash on the surface would turn amber, whereas if oxygen was excluded from the kiln, the surface ash would fuse to a pastel green. Thus by varying the baking process, Heian potters could produce a variety of light colors, creating a pottery considerably more delicate than had been possible before. Aside from this refined technique for firing, however, the Japanese steadfastly refused to change their traditional methods of making pots.