About Blue Tokoname-Yaki, Mogake Japanese Kyusu Teapot - Fujita Tokuta- 210 ml

Tokoname sits on the coast of Ise Bay, and for centuries the sea has found its way into the pottery. The mogake technique began there as a practical matter: potters stacking pots in the kiln laid seaweed between them to keep the pieces from fusing together, and noticed that where the weed had touched the clay it left marks. What started as a kiln-shelf trick became one of the town's signatures. Today a maker drapes strands of seaweed over the raw pot before firing. In the heat the weed burns to nothing, but the salt and minerals it carried react with the iron in the clay and stay behind as lines and blooms on the surface. Nothing is painted, nothing is carved. The pattern is the ghost of a plant, fixed in stone.

On this kyusu Fujita Tokuta has fired the clay to a deep slate blue, the colour of wet river stone, and against that ground the mogake reads in pale gold and silver. Across the lid the marks gather into a fine net around the knob, then break into broader, brighter patches where the seaweed lay thickest, and a few long veins run down over the shoulder and body. In daylight the blue comes forward; under lamplight it retreats toward black and the gold lines are what you see. Because the seaweed lies differently every time and the kiln never repeats itself, no second pot will carry these marks.

The form is worth as much attention as the surface. The body is broad and low, with a gently domed lid, a sharp turn at the widest point, and walls that angle in to a narrow foot. It is a demanding shape to throw, because the wide shoulder has to stay light and true while the wall changes direction beneath it. Fujita has kept everything else quiet. The domed knob, the conical side handle and the short, straight-cut spout are all left plain in the same matte blue-black, so the eye settles on the lid.

In use, that low, wide interior is exactly what sencha and gyokuro want. The leaves have room to spread flat rather than pile up, the water settles to temperature quickly in the shallow body, and the side handle lets you pour with a single relaxed wrist, holding the lid with a fingertip. The unglazed clay is slightly porous and, brewed with the same tea over months, takes on its character and rounds the cup.

About the artist

Fujita Tokuta (藤田徳太) is one of the most decorated kyusu makers of his generation in Tokoname, and one of the few whose work moves between the tea table and the fine art exhibition hall. Born in 1975 in Kitakyushu, on the far side of Japan from any kyusu kiln, he entered the Tokoname Municipal Ceramics Research Institute in 1994, the town's training ground for potters, and stayed three years instead of the one he had planned. He then apprenticed under the institute's instructor Araki Toshio, years he describes as hard and formative, before setting up on his own.

His record since is unusual for a teapot maker. His work has been selected eight times for the Nitten, Japan's largest juried art exhibition, and eleven times for the Japan Contemporary Arts and Crafts Exhibition. He has taken the Grand Prize at the FUJI International Biennale, been selected for the Asahi Ceramics Exhibition, and been chosen three times for the Chōzan Prize Ceramics Exhibition, Tokoname's own award, with many further prizes at ceramic and art shows. Takashimaya carries his kyusu in its craft galleries, and one Tokoname dealer wrote of him that it was as if the god of Tokoname had chosen him to lead the next generation of kyusu throwers.

The skill behind that record is in the throwing. Every pot is made by hand on the wheel, with the wide, thin walls and built-in ceramic sasame filters that define a serious Tokoname kyusu, and he is known among the town's senior makers for forms that stay in balance from any angle. He works across the full Tokoname range, mogake seaweed firing, unglazed yakishime, ash glazes and kairagi textures, and he speaks about the craft in a plain, workmanlike way, still looking for the small adjustments that make a throw a few seconds faster and a wall a little truer. Asked why he has stayed with it, his answer is simple: "If I have kept at it this long, I suppose I must love it."