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

Epilogue: Authenticity and Connoisseurship

Epilogue Authenticity and Connoisseurship On March 8 of 1944, Seiny, the thirteenth-generation head of the Raku workshop and the most prolific author of Raku-related texts in the history of the tradition, died of a sudden illness.1 His eldest son, a graduate of the sculpture department of the Tokyo Academy of Art (now known as Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music), was fighting abroad in the Japanese Imperial Army and would not return home until after the end of the war in the winter of 1945.2 For a year and a half, the Raku house was without a head. Upon his return, however, Seiny’s son quickly succeeded to the name of Kichizaemon. Until 1980, when he passed away at the age of sixty-two and posthumously received the name of Raku Kakuny, Kichizaemon XIV gradually and quietly reestablished his family business as one of the most influential tea-ceramic It might be that the continuity of tradition is mere semblance. But then precisely the persistence of this semblance of persistence provides it with continuity. —Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project Pitelka07.epi 161 7/22/05 9:42:36 AM 162 | Epilogue kilns in the country. In 1978 the Raku Museum was established as an incorporated foundation (zaidan hjin), located on Aburanokji Street next door to the family residence in Kyoto. The museum’s holdings consisted of approximately nine hundred objects, all of which were donated by Kichizaemon XIV to the tax-exempt foundation. This event put to rest any question of where the center of Raku production was located and who its authentic practitioners were, at least in Japan. “Outside” potters continue to produce the ware for tea consumers, but nothing like the diversity and vibrancy of the late Tokugawa scene is apparent today. Concomitant to these developments, the Raku technique was spreading beyond the boundaries of Japan. The technique became widely popular in North America,Europe,andAustraliaafterWorldWarII.Itwasprizedforitssimplicity and was often used in high school and university ceramics programs.3 Also popular was the aesthetic language of tea that accompanied its introduction into the West.4 In the 1960s many American ceramists—led by the influential California potter Paul Soldner among others—appropriated the term “raku” for an approach to making ceramics that was concerned less with technique and more with a vaguely defined state of awareness. Soldner described raku as “pottery made within a mental framework of expectation, the discovery of things not sought.”5 Raku ceramics became associated with immediacy and with forsaking a certain degree of control, characteristics that appealed to potters struggling to define themselves in relation or opposition to Abstract Expressionism, Dada, and Pop Art. However, the experimental forms of American and European raku potters bore little resemblance to the tea ceramics of potters working in the Raku tradition in Japan.6 This represents a wholly new phase in the growth and spread of the tradition, as the transnational movement of the technique has resulted in a complete loss of proprietary control for the Raku house. This recent reinvention of Raku is another example of the numerous and substantial transformations in the tradition over the course of the past four centuries. Such shifts lead to the thorny question of what, exactly, is “traditional ” about a practice as protean as Raku (or, for that matter, tea). The continuity of Raku might be the mere “semblance of persistence,” as suggested by Benjamin’s comment on tradition (the “false consciousness” view) in the epigraph of this chapter.7 However, something more substantial than a persistent facade is apparent in the cultural production of Raku potters and tea practitioners. It is precisely the productive tension between various and at times Pitelka07.epi 162 7/22/05 9:42:37 AM Epilogue | 163 opposed elements in Raku that has enlivened and sustained practice. We can broadly group these elements into the three categories mentioned in my introduction : discursive components, technical/material components, and symbolic ones. In truth, though, the shifting ties between the heirloom ceramics, new pots, technical knowledge, private writings, public texts, and Raku reputation defy simple categorization. Producers and consumers created, possessed, embellished, transmitted, lost, denied, and masked these components in an intricate navigation of each historical moment. These shifting links and identities constitute the tradition. One prominent example of tension in the contemporary tradition is seen in the connoisseurship of Raku...