Mashiko, Tochigi

Twice a year, a small pottery town in the Kanto hills receives more visitors than it can comfortably hold — and the visitors keep coming anyway.
Six hundred stalls and tents line the sloping streets around Jonaizaka, the main ceramic district. Established kilns sell their standard lines at reduced prices. Young ceramicists show work they haven't exhibited anywhere else. Makers from across Japan set up beside local potters who have been working the same clay for generations. A day is not enough to see everything.
Mashiko's pottery tradition dates to 1853, when a craftsman trained in nearby Kasama opened the first kiln here. For decades it was a working production town, making the utilitarian vessels — crocks, jars, water pots — that rural households needed. Then in 1930, the mingei movement ceramicist Hamada Shoji moved to Mashiko, and the town's relationship with its craft changed entirely. Yo no bi — the beauty of the everyday object — became the animating idea, and it has shaped what Mashiko makes ever since.
The fair has been held since 1966. Spring and autumn combined, around 600,000 people visit each year.

Beauty in the vessels of everyday use. Mashiko in Tochigi is a leading pottery town of the Kanto region, with many studios in town offering pottery experiences. Mashiko ware is plain; the character of the clay comes through directly, thick and round and warm. It is not a luxury item, but everyday ware for the daily table. The man who made this town famous was the potter Shoji Hamada, who, moved by Soetsu Yanagi's mingei movement, believed that true beauty lay in the daily goods made by anonymous craftsmen. Nameless vessels made by nameless people, and the beauty that dwells in them, that is mingei. In the experience, you turn the wheel; the clay takes shape in your hands. It does not go as you intend, and yet it is fascinating. To eat every day from a vessel you made yourself, that is a modest but certain richness.