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Reviewed by:
  • Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons, and Tea Practitioners in Japan
  • Richard L. Wilson
Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons, and Tea Practitioners in Japan. By Morgan Pitelka. University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. 284 pages. Hardcover $55.00; softcover $29.00.

The cover of Morgan Pitelka's book, bearing the picture of a bowl by fifth-generation Raku master Sōnyū (1665-1716), chafes against received wisdom. Why start with a derivative? Wasn't it the Kyoto potter Chōjirō (active late 1500s), in collaboration with celebrated tea master Sen Rikyū (1522-1591) who invented the Raku style at the end of the sixteenth century? And wasn't it Chōjirō who bequeathed a tradition—a transmission of an exclusive, near-secret package of skills and style—to a succession of Raku masters?

Apparently not. For Pitelka, the Chōjirō narrative, and more fundamentally the notion of Raku writ large, is a later product, a collaborative effort of the Raku family, the tea ceremony establishment, and the information industry. Pitelka thus exposes the "handcrafted" nature of the Raku dynasty. He begins with Chōjirō and sifts through documents, archaeological evidence, and heirloom ceramics to demonstrate that the notion of a Raku founder is a posthumous invention. Only a tissue of evidence supports the Rikyū-Chōjirō collaboration. If Chōjirō did exist, he was only one of a number of Kyoto artisans making a variety of glazed earthenware products in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Kyoto. Urban archaeology of the 1990s has turned up dozens of these specimens (finally given due exposure in last year's "Kyoto Ware" exhibition in the city's National Musuem). [End Page 248]

How, then, did the workshop that now calls itself Raku distinguish itself? Pitelka turns to the records of the tea ceremony to demonstrate the making of strategic alliances between Raku potters and tea masters, beginning in the "salon" culture of the Kan'ei era (1624-1644). The salon was a space for stakeholders to normalize Tokugawa culture, and the common strategy was lineage making. Tea masters of the Sen family, beginning with Sōtan (1578-1658), organized a body of practice and objects around putative links to Rikyū. Once Raku ceramics were perceived as having been owned or otherwise admired by Rikyū, tea masters could begin to identify a canon and authorize new objects.

But the corporate identity of the Raku workshop was still far from established, and it was vulnerable to competition and inheritance disputes; indeed it seems to have been faltering from the mid-seventeenth century. The workshop entered a new phase, however, in the 1680s with the adoption of an heir from the wealthy and cultivated haberdasher Kariganeya (the same house that nurtured artists Ogata Kōrin and Kenzan). Raku would never be the same. The workshop moved to new and permanent quarters, created an authoritative family genealogy with documents that endowed it with the respectability of a "household," embodied past "dynasties" styles through reproductions, and adopted new naming practices that distinguished present and prior family heads. This required a sense of history and discursive skills. Surely the new master of the house, known by his retirement name of Sōnyū (we return to the book's cover), was less an artisan and more of a dilettante who could deal with tea masters and other patrons as peers. Pitelka convinces us that more than manual skill, compelling style, or workshop pedigree, Raku's enduring prominence, its sense of privilege and distinction in the Kyoto craft world, is rooted in this late seventeenth-century transfusion.

With Sōnyū, Raku's relation with tea became seamless. Raku masters began to practice tea and tea masters began to practice Raku. Pitelka carefully exposes how Raku practice benefited from the rationalization of tea under the iemoto system. Similarly, the publishing industry's exploitation of tea encouraged the circulation of Raku manuscripts, both hand-copied and printed. Thus commoditized, Raku-making could range from a hobby for cultured townspeople to a daimyo-sponsored "garden amusement." These twin pillars of Raku/tea discourse, amateurism and daimyo sponsorship, would be revisited in the late nineteenth century, when a new generation of entrepreneurs and industrialists...

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