When Hideyoshi invaded Korea during the last decade of the sixteenth century, he and his generals were careful to kidnap as many Korean potters as possible, whom they settled over a large part of Japan. No longer restricted to a small area in the south, the Koreans injected a vigorous transfusion of peasant taste into all of Japanese ceramic art, extinguishing the last remnants of the refined Sung ideals. The Momoyama tea masters were given a new but still foreign standard of rustic chic perfectly in accord with wabi tea.
Not surprisingly, it was Sen no Rikyu who synthesized the new native freedom and the fresh influx of mainland technology to create the undisputed glory of Japanese ceramics—the famous raku. Unquestionably Japan's most original contribution to the history of ceramics, raku is produced in a manner entirely different from earlier techniques, and it is impossible to speak of raku without speaking of Zen. As might be expected, raku was invented in the Zen center of Kyoto, a city with no previous history of ceramic production, and it came into being when Rikyu happened to take a fancy to the roof tiles being produced by a Korean workman named Chojiro. Rikyu hit upon the notion that the texture and feel of these tiles would be perfect for wabi-style tea, and he encouraged Chojiro in the making of a few tea bowls with the materials and firing techniques used for tiles.
The bowls Chojiro made were neither thrown on a wheel nor built up from coils, but molded and carved like sculpture.
A mixture of clays was first blended to gain the desired consistency of lightness and plasticity, after which a spatula and knife were used to shape a rough-sided, textured bowl whose sense of process was flaunted rather than obscured—an overt tactile quality perhaps first seen in the West in the rough-hewn sculptures of Rodin. These bowls were fired in a most unconventional manner: rather than being placed cold in a wood-burning kiln and gradually heated, baked, and cooled over a period of days, they, like the tiles, were thrust directly into a torrid charcoal kiln for a blistering thermal shock, which gave them an instant look of the ravaged face of ancient sabi. Raku wares were first made in black with an iron-like glaze that is almost like frozen lava, but the later repertory included glazes that were partly or wholly red or off-white. Unlike the Shino and Oribe bowls, raku pieces were not decorated with designs or spots of color; they were wabi and sabi with unpretentious, weathered grace. The last term you think of when seeing raku is ornate.
Rikyu found raku bowls perfect for the tea ceremony; they were austere, powerful, seemingly wrenched from melted rock. In shape they were broad-based with gently rounded, one might almost say organically rounded, sides leading to an undulating lip, wrapping in slightly over the tea, thereby holding the heat and preventing drips. Not only were they light and porous, allowing for minimal heat conduction and comfortable handling, their center of gravity was so low they were almost impossible to tip over, permitting easy whisking of the powdered tea as they rested on the tatami-matted floor of the tea room. (It should be noted that special bowls for summer usage de-emphasized certain of these characteristics: they were thinner-walled and shallower, since the object in hot months was to dissipate heat rather than conserve it.) But the most appealing qualities of the raku were its sculptural sense of natural plastic form and its soft, bubbly, almost liquid glaze, which virtually invites one to hold it in his lips. Also, the colors of the glazes just happen to contrast beautifully with the pale sea-green of the powdered tea.
This was the end of the search for the perfect Zen tea bowl, and Hideyoshi was so pleased with Chojiro's handiwork that he gave the potter's family a seal bearing the word that would give the form its name: raku, meaning pleasure or comfort. Chojiro's descendants became the raku dynasty, as generation after generation they set the standards for others to follow.
Hideyoshi's act of official recognition meant that Japanese potters were no longer merely craftsmen, but fully accredited artists. In later years, Japanese ceramics became distinguished in many areas—from the traditional wares produced at a multiplicity of local kilns to a vast new nationwide porcelain industry producing decorative works for both export and home consumption. Tea-ceremony vessels were created in great profusion as well, but, unfortunately, genuine art cannot be mass-produced. By the eighteenth century, the great age of Zen ceramic art was over, never to be recovered. Today the early wares of the Zen Momoyama artists command their weight in gold, perhaps platinum. This is the great irony of the wabi tea vessels, if not of all Zen culture.
Tea bowls, the major expression of Zen art, seem at once both primitive and strikingly modern. To begin to understand this contradiction we must go back to our own nineteenth century in the West, when tastes ran to decoration for its own sake and the rule of perfect, symmetrical, polished form was the aesthetic ideal. Into this smug, serene sea of aesthetic sureties, which in some ways reached back to the ancient Greeks, the English critic John Ruskin threw a boulder when he wrote:
Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end. . . . [t]he demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art. . . . Imperfection is in some sort essential to all we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body. . . . To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed.1
Ruskin was rediscovering a large piece of Zen aesthetic theory while laying the groundwork for many of our modern ideals of beauty.