Hasami is a town of about 14,000 people in the hills of Nagasaki, and it has been making porcelain for everyone else for four hundred years. We spent a morning there in early September.
The first thing you notice is the chimneys. Dozens of them, brick and square, rising out of the valley between the rice fields and the low wooden houses. Most are no longer used; the climbing kilns they belonged to were replaced by gas and electric kilns in the 1960s. But they are still there, and the town still arranges itself around them.
Hasami’s story is unusual. Unlike its famous neighbour Arita, which made porcelain for feudal lords and European courts, Hasami made it for ordinary households: the plain rice bowls and sake cups called kurawanka that were sold cheaply across Japan from the seventeenth century on. The town was, in effect, the country’s first mass producer of everyday ceramics, and its instinct for the useful object has never gone away.
Division of labour
What surprised us most is how the work is divided. In Hasami, one workshop makes the plaster moulds, another casts the pieces, a third glazes and fires them, and a fourth handles finishing and shipping. A single mug may pass through four family businesses before it is boxed. It is a system built for consistency, and it explains why Hasami porcelain is so reliably thin, even and well-finished.
At the kiln we visited, the owner’s mother was trimming the unglazed rims of a batch of mugs with a small knife, one every eight seconds or so, while explaining that the rim is left bare because glaze would round it off and lose the clean line. “You should feel the clay somewhere,” she said.
Why it matters to us
The mug we sell is the one she was trimming. It is not rare or precious. It is simply very well made, in a place that has thought about nothing but well-made tableware for longer than most countries have existed. That is the kind of object Komorebi is for.