Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons, and Tea Practitioners in Japan

Introduction

Introduction In 1997 the fifteenth-generation head of the Raku house organized a traveling international exhibition devoted to the history of his family’s ceramics, titled “Raku: A Dynasty of Japanese Ceramists.” The displayed pots, mostly consisting of the roughly shaped, simply glazed tea bowls that characterize the tradition , were dramatically lit to highlight contrasts in texture and slight variations in form. Each generation of the Raku house was represented, with particular focus on works attributed to the founder, Chjir (active late 1500s), and pieces by the organizer, Raku Kichizaemon XV (1949–). A video was playing at the entrance, showing Kichizaemon, dressed (uncharacteristically) in traditional Japanese artisan’s garb, removing pots from a small, bellows-driven kiln. Face lit by the glimmer of the flames, he gingerly held the long metal tongs in his hands as he transferred each fragile pot, still glowing red from the heat of the Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood With solemn reverence: throw away respect, Tradition, form and ceremonious duty, For you have but mistook me all this while: I live with bread like you, feel want, Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, How can you say to me, I am a king? —William Shakespeare, King Richard II Pitelka00.intro 1 7/22/05 9:38:30 AM 2 | handmade culture kiln. This image served as a striking metaphor for the approach to mounting the exhibition itself, an exercise in carefully relocating a tradition viewed as unique, delicate, and precious. The exhibition was a momentous event in the history of Raku and in the broader story of the globalization of Japanese culture. Although the Raku technique spread from Japan to Europe and North America in the period after World War II and later became one of the most prevalent methods of ceramic production in the world (through the popularizing efforts of 1960s potters like Hal Riegger and Paul Soldner), the four-century history of the Raku family was largely unknown outside of a small community of specialist art historians and tea practitioners. The word “raku” had entered into the global lingua franca along with “sushi,” “tofu,” “kimono,” and a handful of other Japanese terms, but the original cultural context of its use—Japanese tea culture (chanoyu) and its associated arts—had been mostly lost along the way. Kichizaemon, a welltraveled and highly educated artist and intellectual, was surprised by the wide variety of ceramics he saw labeled “raku” outside of Japan and understandably felt that the legacy of his ancestors had been ignored to the extent that some sort of correction was required. The catalog that accompanied the show, printed in a separate edition for each of the three European exhibition sites, is representative of the state of late twentieth-century Japanese scholarship on the history of Raku. It includes a discussion of the fertile age that gave birth to Raku ceramics, the late sixteenthcentury Momoyama period; a brief biography of each potter in the Raku lineage ; a discussion of the aesthetic principal of “rusticity” (wabi) in tea culture; and a technical explanation of Raku ceramic production. The impression created by the catalog is of a narrowly focused, continuous tradition dominated completely by a single lineage of individualistic potters. Patrons, consumers, competitors, usurpers, and imitators are conspicuously absent from this narrative of uncontested development. In this sense the catalog can be situated in a larger modern literature on Japanese culture that emphasizes homogeneity and continuity as hallmarks of Japanese civilization. Yet signs of complexity thrust through the smooth veneer of this “dynasty” of potters. In Kichizaemon’s heartfelt and confessional essay on aesthetic principles , he poses two difficult questions: “[W]hat does traditional inheritance meantoculturalcreation?Whatistherealsignificanceofinheritingtradition?” Being trained in Raku ceramics by his father on the one hand and in modern Pitelka00.intro 2 7/22/05 9:38:31 AM Introduction | 3 sculpture at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and the Accademia di Belle Arti of Rome on the other, Kichizaemon presents an answer by juxtaposing a sophisticated discussion of traditional Japanese poetic principles with comments on the work of the influential conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp (1887– 1968). Kichizaemon explores his own attempts to straddle the bifurcations of craft and art, tradition and modernity, familial past and egocentric present, all issues that inform his work as a contemporary artist. These musings also, however, point towards a gaping flaw in the catalog, symbolic of...