APPRECIATING JAPANESE CRAFT IN KYOTO’S KAWAI KANJIRŌ HOUSE MUSEUM
Dr Kathleen Olive
24 October 2022
I’ve always loved house museums, for the way that they can strongly convey the biography, character and values of their past residents. One of my favourite house museums anywhere is the potter Kawai Kanjirō’s house and studio in Kyoto. It is blissfully quiet, showcases an extraordinary traditional aesthetic, and opens a window onto a revered figure in a twentieth-century Japanese art movement. Oh, and did I mention that there’s usually a resident cat lounging around in the internal courtyard?
Kawai Kanjirō was born in 1890, about one generation after the so-called Meiji Restoration. At this time, the hereditary rule of the Tokugawa shogunate came to an end as Commodore Matthew Perry (and his armed steamships) “invited” Japan to open once more to free trade with the rest of the world. Western ways of governing, educating, manufacturing and making art flooded the country. A young Kawai-san thus had a Western-style polytechnical education in Tokyo but, after seeing a local farmer make his own pottery, knew that his interest lay in ceramics. By his twenties he had already built a traditional kiln and commenced making works using ancient Chinese and Korean techniques.
Kawai-san’s kiln represents a wider response to increased interaction with the West after the Meiji Restoration, reflecting a concern that ancient customs were being lost in favour of foreign styles. There are two kilns in the grounds of his Kyoto house museum. The largest is in a so-called noborigama style, and is a climbing kiln of a type introduced perhaps 1,500 years ago from Korea. Its sloping floor built to increasingly higher chambers and, over approximately ten days, allowed for up to thirty kilograms of wood to be fired as gravity drew the flue gas up the kiln. This kept the extreme temperatures constant, which in turn ensured the release of ash and volatile salts and gave unpredictable and highly variable finishes to the colours and textures of the glazes used.
The noborigama at the Kawai Kanjirō house museum, complete with a Shinto straw-rope amulet at its base (photo: Sodai Gomi, Flickr)
The final effect of the hand-thrown pieces fired inside Kawai-san’s kiln is the essence of wabi-sabi: rough, never too polished, and raw in their beauty. The works are clearly handmade by an individual, rather than mass-manufactured on an assembly line, and the kilns themselves are still decorated with amulets calling on the Shinto gods to protect the potter’s creative powers.
At the house museum in Kyoto, you can see the small kiln for firing earthenware in the garden and then, alongside it, Kawai-san’s studio. Separate to the house, it faces into the internal courtyard garden and still contains two foot-powered wheels for turning pots. The tools, brushes and personal stamps of Kawai Kanjirō are still laid out in neat rows on the workbenches, and there are larger pieces made by the master dotted around the garden.
Inside Kawai-san’s very neat pottery studio! (photo: Rory Hyde, Flickr)
Inside is a collection of the kinds of ceramics that brought Kawai-san to national attention in the 1920s. His interest in ancient techniques – Korean celadonware, for example, or traditional peasants’ handicrafts – brought him into contact with other Japanese artists and intellectuals who were seeking to return to the old ways of doing things. Together with another potter, Shōji Hamada, and an art critic and connoisseur, Yanagi Sōetsu, Kawai Kanjirō established the mingei movement.
A sake bottle by Kawai Kanjirō, typical of the mingei style and now in the Honolulu Museum of Art
(photo: Hiart, Wikimedia Commons)
The aesthetic of mingei is all through Kawai Kanjirō’s house in Kyoto. There is a proliferation of natural materials, from the painted crossbeams to the rustic wooden floors that have been worn to a high sheen. Tones of gold and brown predominate, from low, rough chairs carved out of logs and furnished with reed cushions, to tatami mats, woven sculptures in rice straw, bamboo furniture and the golden light that filters through paper lamps and latticed shoji frames.
A peaceful corner of the Kawai Kanjirō house museum (photo: NP & DJ Jewell, Flickr)
There is an open hearth, as well as myriad nooks for flower arrangements and low desks at which to sit and read. In the Japanese style, rooms across two floors are open and adaptable to multiple purposes, with windows that open onto the internal courtyard garden. The overwhelming effect is of a warm, inviting space – one in which it feels like every object has a long and loved tradition. As the mingei movement argued in general, it is the imprint of the individual that is more important than the Western-style ego of “the Artist”.
The mingei movement, along with the work of Kawai-san, Sōetsu and Hamada, had an important impact on twentieth-century Japanese arts and crafts. It led to the revival of ancient pottery villages, such as Mashiko in central Japan, where Hamada set up a network of kilns and producers, and Onta in the southern island of Kyushu, where less than a hundred potters continue to create ceramics using eighteenth-century water mills. And you can still buy mingei objects, which, thanks to their often-humble origins, are affordable and distinctive gifts – for example, at the Yamato Mingei-ten shop in central Kyoto (founded 1946).
Critic Yanagi Sōetsu (left) and potter Bernard Leach (right) watch Shōji Hamada at work (photo: Phil Rogers Pottery)
Kawai Kanjiro’s House and Studio is located in the Higashiyama or Eastern Mountain district of the city, a neighbourhood still closely associated with artisanal ceramics. It is quiet, and Kawai-san’s house sits comfortably in small streets of similar townhouses. Nearby is an excellent small coffee roaster and café, located in a machiya or traditional Kyoto townhouse – and perhaps we can also connect the twenty-first century interest in renovating Kyoto’s many neglected machiya with the ways in which Kawai Kanjirō and the mingei movement championed Japan’s traditions.
I highly recommend a visit to the Kawai Kanjirō House and Studio: although you can reach it by public transport, taxi is an inexpensive and efficient way to get there. And, of course, this beautiful house museum is also included on our upcoming Kyoto & Tokyo tour in November 2023.
Tranquil streets in the Higashiyama district of Kyoto, not far from the Kawai Kanjirō house museum
Kyoto & Tokyo
Dates: 06 - 20 Nov 2023
Tour Leader: Dr Kathleen Olive
Unpack your bags for long stays in two of Japan’s most emblematic cities, the capital of traditional culture in Kyoto and the fast-paced contemporary metropolis of Tokyo.