I'm now on my way to visit Takashi Nakazato, an internationally renowned artist considered Karatsu’s most famous potter, a member of the 13th generation of the most pre-eminent pottery family in town. I’m winding along a country road that cuts through the farmland outside Karatsu. Besides rice, farmers here grow acclaimed Toyonoka strawberries, Mikan mandarins, and Kyoho table grapes, and run cattle whose beef is as prized as Kobe’s. The potters here are tucked away deep in the landscape.
The brick smokestack of a wood-burning kiln announces the Nakazato compound. Five-foot-four, full of energy, with long, unruly hair and a bushy salt-and-pepper beard, Nakazato is wearing only long surfer Jams and Birkenstocks when he greets me in English. He breaks into a wide grin as I introduce myself and ask about his pottery. “In Japan, we hold our plates and bowls. We put the bowl to our lips.” So a vessel has to fit in the hand, feel good to the touch, he explains. It must be balanced and durable, but not too heavy.
We watch his 40-year-old son, Taki, fashion a pot by turning his wooden potter’s wheel with quick taps of his bare foot while sitting on a straw mat. His fingers and palms are coated in a film of blond clay as he stretches and forms the material with the aid of a tool that resembles an oversize shoehorn. Soon, he has created a perfectly symmetrical bowl, its walls thin and smooth. Bach plays low on the stereo; the only other sounds to be heard are crickets chirping in the rice fields and water gently rippling through a stone channel next to the studio.
“When I’m making a pot,” Nakazato says, “I think, ‘This is for sashimi. The next bowl is for broiled fish.’ ” Plates, bowls, and cups are dipped in oak- and rice straw-ash glazes to produce buff, biscuit, oatmeal, and coffee tones. Some, in Nakazato’s unique style, are completely earthen, with no glaze. Sometimes, too, his pots are adorned with simple freehand sketches of Japanese pampas grass, leaves, or flowers. His work isn’t cheap. A small cup can cost $80; a tea-ceremony bowl as much as $5,000.
It is thanks to the tea ceremony that pottery like Nakazato’s is held in such high esteem. According to the classic Book of Tea, the ceremony venerates “the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence.” Derived from the discipline and frugality of Zen Buddhism, it celebrates natural materials, the humble, the art of understatement. It brings art and functionality together by using tea bowls inspired by the rustic wares of farmers.
The tea ceremony inspires that connection in all forms of Japanese dining. I experience something very similar at downtown Karatsu’s Kawashima Tofu, a tiny restaurant of just ten seats set along a gleaming blond ginkgo-wood bar. The business began in the 1790s, delivering tofu to the local castle. Eight generations of Kawashimas later, tofu is still the star, famous nationwide and prepared fresh each morning from organic soybeans. But even this venerated creation has to share the spotlight: Every piece of pottery in the restaurant is the work of Takashi Nakazato.
The tofu, blossoming like a perfectly turned-out soufflé, sits in an ash-gray clay bowl the size of a large flowerpot. This particular dish is called zaru dofu (basket tofu), as it’s formed in a wicker cradle almost a foot across, and never soaked. “Usually tofu is cut square and placed in water,” explains the current owner, Yoshimasa Kawashima, “but it’s more delicious if the flavor is not diluted.” He spoons a ball of the glistening white tofu into a shallow, glossy black bowl. The contrast is dramatic. The tofu has a nutty aroma and tastes barely sweet, like fresh ricotta. I eat it with a few drips of soy sauce. Next come dumplings made of soy lees (a byproduct of the tofu-making process, in which cooked soy splits into milk, which hardens into tofu, and lees), hand formed and coarsely cylindrical. Juliennes of shiitake, carrot, and negi (Japanese leeks) poke out the sides. It’s served on one of Nakazato’s nubby, unglazed rust- and gray-tinted serving bowls, the lip peeled back like a rose petal to accentuate the texture of the dumplings.
My next stop is to see Yukiko Tsuchiya, another potter who loves Baroque music, a taste she perhaps acquired from Takashi Nakazato, with whom she apprenticed for three years. Tsuchiya fought hard to become a potter. She says Nakazato was reluctant to take a woman on as an apprentice, a physically arduous job. So she hit the gym, and pumped iron and swam for two years to toughen up for the task. She flexes a rock-hard bicep as proof.
Today, 34-year-old Tsuchiya is one of only a few women out of around 50 Karatsu potters to run her own kiln. She recently married a chef from Tokyo whom she met while she was an apprentice with Nakazato. Tsuchiya’s secluded workshop, five minutes from her home, is a simple prefab warehouse paneled in pine and surrounded by Mikan groves, a vegetable garden, and forest. She welcomes me as her first American journalist.
She likes to fashion diverse shapes such as steeply conical bowls and pinched cups, an artistic freedom she and her fellow potters owe to the unassuming chopstick. Because they’re such precise instruments, chopsticks can pluck food from crevices that would foil a fork. This adds a dash of playfulness to her pottery, as it gives those using her pieces another freedom, to try new ways of serving food. “I always think how my pottery is going to be used,” Tsuchiya says, displaying an uneven, hand-thrown plate—dramatically glazed in silver, copper, and matte-black streaks—that would be “great for swordfish teriyaki.” She points to small cracks in the glaze called kannyu, fissures that give her work character. “I believe my pottery breathes,” she says. “It’s alive.” She explains that as heat and cold expand and contract her vessels, and as liquids—soy sauce, oil, water—seep in and stain them, they mature. She holds up two of her plates, produced two years apart. The older one has a completely transformed character. The streaks are gone; the colors have melded together.
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