Hagi, Yamaguchi

A vessel whose face changes the more you use it. Hagi in Yamaguchi is the home of Hagi ware, long loved by tea masters, and during the Golden Week holidays the Hagi Pottery Festival is held. The town's kilns gather to display their work, at prices far more approachable than usual. Hagi ware is plain; there is no flashy painting, only the color of the clay and the cracks in the glaze. But it changes with use: tea and sake seep into the fine crackle called kannyu, and the hue deepens over time, an effect known as the "seven transformations of Hagi." The vessel grows along with its owner. The tradition dates to the late sixteenth century, when potters who came from Korea opened kilns here, four centuries ago. This is not a finished beauty but a beauty you raise. Pick a piece up, feel its weight, and choose. One of Yamaguchi's defining pottery markets.

The men who made the Meiji Restoration were disproportionately from Hagi. Yoshida Shoin, whose private academy produced a generation of revolutionary thinkers; Ito Hirobumi, Japan's first prime minister; Yamagata Aritomo, the architect of the modern military — all were from this castle town on the Yamaguchi coast. The transformation of Japan from a feudal society to a modern state was, in significant part, imagined and organized here.

Hagi preserves this history in unusually complete form. The castle district, the samurai residential quarters, the site of Shoin's academy — these remain as places rather than reconstructions, and the city has been careful about the kind of development that would compromise their character. Walking through Hagi on an ordinary afternoon, you move through architecture that the people who made modern Japan moved through as children.

The relocation experience programs available in Hagi offer the opportunity to stay in traditional townhouses, visit Hagi yaki pottery workshops, and understand the city as a place where people live rather than a museum of the Meiji period. The city's combination of historical weight, craft tradition, agricultural character — Hagi is a significant citrus-growing area — and coastal location makes it one of the more coherent environments for extended stays in western Japan.

One of the vessels most loved by tea masters. Hagi in Yamaguchi is the home of Hagi ware, long held in high regard in the world of the tea ceremony. "First Raku, second Hagi, third Karatsu," goes the ranking of tea bowls, placing Hagi second, so beloved has it been by tea masters. Hagi ware is made of soft clay and restrained glaze, plain in color and pattern. But that very plainness has been considered fitting for the tea room. And it changes the more you use it, the "seven transformations of Hagi," as tea and sake seep into the vessel and its hue slowly deepens. The vessel ages alongside its owner. It is fired in a climbing kiln, a great kiln built on a slope, the fire kept burning for days, flame turning clay into vessel. In the experience, you turn the wheel and make your own piece, which may one day become a vessel you raise with your own hands.