About Tokoname-Yaki Flat Kyusu - Jinshū (Ito Seiji) - 100ml

About Tokoname-Yaki Yōhen Flat Kyusu, Jinshū

This is a kyusu pared down to its essentials. The body is a low, straight-sided disc, the lid sits flush in its gallery so that the top reads as one unbroken curve, and the only ornament is what the kiln did to it. Fired unglazed, the clay came out a soft stone grey, and across the lid and down one side of the body runs a single pale band, shading from smoke to bone to a faint blush of rust at its edge. This is yōhen, "kiln change": the mark left where the flame and atmosphere inside the kiln touched the pot differently from the rest. It cannot be painted or planned, only invited by the way the pot is placed, and it is different on every piece. Here it crosses the lid on the diagonal, past the knob and the single steam hole, and slips over the rim to the wall below, as if a cloth had been drawn across the pot while it was still hot.

The form is a hira, or flat, kyusu, the shape Tokoname makers keep for the finest sencha and gyokuro. A shallow body spreads the leaf in a thin layer so every needle meets the water, and the wide, low interior lets the water settle to brewing temperature quickly. It is one of the hardest shapes in Tokoname to throw well, because a lid this large has to seat true on a wall this low, and the pour depends on getting both right. Jinshū has taken the difficulty further by making the sides vertical, so the pot reads almost as a cylinder, a decision that leaves no room to hide a wobble. The short conical side handle and the straight-cut spout are left in the same bare clay, so nothing distracts from the line.

In use the pot rewards attention. It is meant to be held low, the lid steadied with a fingertip, and tilted slowly; the wide body drains fast, so the last of the infusion comes out clean rather than stewing. The unglazed clay is slightly porous and, brewed with one tea over months, takes on its character and rounds the cup.

About the Artisan

Ito Seiji (伊藤成二), who signs his work Jinshū (甚秋), was born in Tokoname in 1949, the son of a wheel master who turned vases and hibachi in the days when the town's pottery still ran on the apprenticeship system. He did not go straight to the wheel. He trained as an automobile mechanic and spent two years in a repair shop before joining his father's pottery at twenty, where for the next two decades he threw yunomi and vases in volume, all the while, by his own account, thinking of the cup as the supporting player and the teapot as the star.

In the mid-1990s, as the easy years of Japan's growth faded, he chose the harder road and turned to kyusu, going from workshop to workshop among Tokoname's established teapot makers to learn how the many parts of a pot must balance. Thirty years on he is one of the town's senior masters. His shudei red-clay kyusu are his best-known work, and he took the silver award at the first World Ceramic Teapot Competition in Yixing, China, the birthplace of the side-handle teapot. In 2020 HULS Gallery in Tokyo gave him a solo exhibition, "Tokoname Ware of Earth and Sea," and he leads the Ban Project, a group of Tokoname makers rethinking the town's traditional forms. He is a regular at tea gatherings in Taiwan, where his pots have a following.

His aim, he says, is a kyusu that feels natural in the hand and disappears into daily life, and that people drinking tea together from it have a good time. He intends to stay at the wheel for life.

Details

Origin: Tokoname, Aichi, Japan
Artist: Jinshū, Ito Seiji (伊藤成二 / 甚秋), Jinshū Tōen kiln
Capacity: 100ml
Style: Hira (flat) kyusu, straight-sided
Material: Tokoname clay, unglazed
Form: Flat disc body, flush lid, side handle
Use: Gyokuro, sencha and other fine Japanese green teas