A Raku tea bowl is light for its size. The walls are thick but the clay is open and porous, fired soft and fast, so the bowl holds warmth without passing heat to the hands. The surface is rarely even. Glaze pools at the foot, thins at the rim, and carries the marks of the tongs that drew it from the fire. Nothing about it is symmetrical, and nothing about it is accidental.
Raku (楽) is one of the most closely held traditions in Japanese ceramics. It began with a single tea master and a single maker in Kyoto in the sixteenth century, and it is still carried by the family that bears its name.
Born in the tea room
In the 1570s and 1580s, the tea master Sen no Rikyū was shaping what is now called wabi tea: a quieter, more austere way of serving tea in small rooms, built around plain and imperfect objects rather than imported Chinese treasures. He needed bowls that suited it.
He found them through Chōjirō, a Kyoto maker of roof tiles. Chōjirō's bowls were shaped entirely by hand, black or red and unadorned, with walls that sit close in both palms. At first they were simply called ima-yaki, "contemporary ware." Their link with Jurakudai, the palace of the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, gave them the name Juraku-yaki, later shortened to Raku-yaki.
Hideyoshi is said to have presented the workshop with a seal bearing the character 楽, raku, meaning enjoyment or ease. The character became the family's name.
Made by hand, fired fast
Raku is not thrown on a wheel. Each bowl is built from a disc of clay, raised by pinching and pressing the walls upward, then pared down with a spatula once the clay has stiffened. The carving sets the final form: the slight inward lean of the rim, the line of the waist, the low foot.
The firing is short. Bowls are placed into a small kiln, often one at a time, and when the glaze has melted they are lifted out with long iron tongs while still glowing and left to cool in the open air. This sudden change in temperature gives Raku its soft, porous body and its living surface. Most ceramics cool slowly inside the kiln over a day or more. A Raku bowl leaves the fire glowing.
Black Raku and red Raku
There are two classic kinds. Black Raku, kuro-raku, is coated in a dark glaze made from Kamogawa river stone and fired hot, at around 1,200°C, with bellows driving the heat. It is drawn from the kiln at full heat, a method called hikidashi, and the sudden exposure to air turns the glaze a deep, matte black that can shift toward brown or show faint pitting.
Red Raku, aka-raku, is fired at a lower temperature. A wash of iron-bearing clay is brushed onto the body under a clear glaze, and in the kiln it turns a warm, mottled red. Where the glaze runs thick it deepens toward crimson; where it is thin, the clay shows through as a pale orange.
Both are meant for the tea room, and both are made for matcha. The wide, deep well leaves room for the whisk, and the thick walls keep the tea warm through the few slow sips it takes to finish.
Sixteen generations
Since Jōkei, the second generation, each head of the Raku family has taken the name Kichizaemon, and the line has sometimes continued through adoption. Each generation learns the forms of the founders and is expected to find its own voice within them. Raku Kichizaemon XV, born in 1949, became known for bold, sculptural bowls and for yakinuki, a black Raku fired to the limit of its heat. His eldest son succeeded him in 2019 as Raku Kichizaemon XVI, the sixteenth generation.
Their bowls are held in museums and tea collections around the world, and they are among the most valued objects in Japanese ceramics.
Raku beyond the family
Over the centuries, other Kyoto workshops took up the Raku method and made tea bowls of their own, working by hand and firing in the same low, fast manner. Today, Raku-yaki describes both the main family line and these independent kilns, many of them several generations deep.
One of them is the Rakunyū kiln in southern Kyoto. The family there made fired whetstones and crucibles in the Meiji era, turned to Raku as a sideline, and moved fully into tea bowls after the Second World War. The current master, the third Rakunyū, studied tea as well as ceramics and was certified as a Traditional Craftsperson in 2001. His kiln works in both black and red Raku, following the classic half-cylinder form.
Raku in the West
The word "raku" now has a second meaning. The English potter Bernard Leach watched a Raku firing at a party in Japan in 1911 and carried the idea home. From 1960, the American potter Paul Soldner began placing red-hot pots into leaves and other combustibles to smoke them, and plunging them into water. This became American raku: crackled white glazes, smoky black lines, metallic lustres.
It is a separate tradition with its own makers and its own beauty, but it differs from Kyoto Raku at nearly every step. Traditional Japanese Raku is not smoked in combustibles or plunged into water. The bowl cools in open air, and the surface is shaped by the glaze and the fire alone. In Japan, Raku remains a tea ware first.
Caring for a Raku bowl
Because the clay is porous, a Raku bowl absorbs a little water each time it is used. Before its first use, soak it in warm water for about half an hour, then let it dry. Before each use after that, rinse it in warm water for a few minutes, so it takes up water rather than tea. After use, rinse it again without soap, then let it dry fully, upside down and then upright, for a day or two before putting it away. A bowl stored damp can mark or develop odours.
Over years of use, the surface darkens slightly and the glaze softens to the touch. In the tea world this is welcomed. A Raku bowl is considered finished not when it leaves the kiln, but after it has been used.
To see a Raku bowl in use, read How to Make Matcha.
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