Japan’s history of ceramic artistry developed largely alongside the culture of drinking tea. The practice of preparing and serving tea, chanoyu (hot water for tea), gained popularity in the 16th century. Japanese tea practitioners initially used Chinese and Korean antique ceramics as tea bowls but began using newly made Japanese tea bowls, such as Raku ceramics in the 16th century.
Ceramics were part of the flourishing trade between Japan and Ming China (1368-1644) in the first half of the 15th century. Japanese merchants were also successfully trading with Joseon Korea (1392-1910). As the sea routes were ruled by the monsoon trade winds, fleets of ships would leave Japan for Korea annually with trade driven by the high demand for koraimono (Korean things), a taste that had come into fashion during the 16th-century. Knotted Clay: Raku Ceramics and Tea explores these hand-moulded ceramics and explores their close relationship to Japanese tea culture by using tea bowls, water containers, and other vessels from the museum’s permanent collection to demonstrate the glazes and forms unique to Raku ware.
First imported into Japan from China during the 9th century, the custom of serving tea did not become widespread until the 13th century. Later, the tea used was matcha, a finely ground powdered tea that is whipped in hot water and drunk immediately, not steeped as in other forms of tea. It is generally believed to have been introduced to Japan during the Song dynasty by the 12th-century monk Eisai, who documented it in the book Kissa Yojoki (Book of Drinking Tea for Curing), presented in 1214 to Minamoto no Sanetomo, the third shogun of the Kamakura Shogunate (1185-1333).
Although the ritual of the tea ceremony originally featured Chinese ceramics and utensils, the influential tea master, Murata Juko (d 1502), who transformed the tea ceremony in the late 15th century, initiated a taste for imperfection in Japanese utensils that evoked a simple, unpretentious beauty – wabi. Murata believed that upon entering his small and austerely appointed tearoom, the trappings of daily life, particularly one’s status, must be discarded, as each participant was considered equal. He also imbued his tea ritual with performative elements from Noh theatre and the philosophy of Zen Buddhism, which placed an emphasis on the communal nature of life. The most striking element of the ceremony was that participants were often required to use the same tea bowl – using authentic rustic wares from Japanese or Korean kilns rather than luxurious porcelains from China. As a result, tea bowls became the most prominent utensils of Murata’s wabi-cha.
By the late 15th and 16th centuries, tea culture had spread widely among the samurai class, where it was ceremonially prepared by a tea master and served to guests in a tranquil area specially created to enhance the ceremony and the art of the tea ritual. For the samurai, ‘the way of tea’ would become crucial to their lifestyle and essential for cultivating their own aesthetic sensibilities. Japan’s rich history of ceramic artistry developed, in large part, alongside the culture of drinking tea.
To meet this change in taste, Raku ware was developed as a new domestic earthenware, specifically produced for the tea ceremony during the late 1580s. Takeshi Watanabe, in his essay Breaking Down Boundaries: A History of Chanoyu (2009) writes: ‘It had been documented as being used by Sen no Rikyu at a tea gathering in 1580, hosted by a certain Soeki (another name for Sen no Rikyu). The next mention comes in 1586, when Matsuya Hisamasa noted at a party “a tea bowl in Soeki’s shape” (soeki-gata chawan or imayaki chawan – tea bowls in the new fashion), were used by tea practitioners in the late 16th century to refer to these bowls’.
Raku tea bowls are shaped by hand rather than being thrown on the potter’s wheel and are drawn from the kiln at the height of the firing so that they cool rapidly in the atmosphere outside. Typically either monochrome red or monochrome black, Raku tea bowls were considered radically avant-garde when they first appeared in the late 16th century. Raku ware shares its name with the family that has made these ceramics in Kyoto since the 16th century.
These tea bowls are synonymous with the ideals of the wabi style of tea ceremony pioneered by the tea master Sen no Rikyu (1522-1591). Sen no Rikyu was a former merchant from Sakai (now within Osaka’s conurbation), who became the head tea master to the samurai warlords Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) and Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598). Unlike most tea bowls, Raku ceramics are built by hand – a process described as ‘knotting clay’ – rather than using a wheel. The 16th-century potters are said to have collaborated closely with their tea-practitioner patrons to create distinctive vessels best suited for tea drinking.
Early Raku kilns were small and cylindrical and were usually made on-site with pieces often being fired one at a time. Unlike thrown ware, the hand-building and firing techniques did not require years of training, and this labour-intensive approach to pottery invested each piece with a sense of uniqueness, personality, and value. Raku tea bowls differed greatly from the refined Chinese bowls and Japanese Seto glazed bowls that had been in favour previously. The Raku bowls had more in common with the aesthetics of the Korean Ido rice bowls (Ido chawan) that some earlier tea masters had used. The beauty of an Ido bowl also contradicted earlier ideals of refined ceramics; whereas the Chinese bowls had a lustrous glaze, the Ido bowls looked unassuming with a matt, earthy finish, connecting them to the idea that these bowls were made by peasants in Korea as simple, domestic, everyday rice bowls.
Bonnie Kemske, author of The Teabowl (2017) explains that the early years of Raku were a productive time for chawan development with artists such as Honami Koetsu (1558-1637) helping to develop a new ceramic aesthetic. Raku bowls were usually cylindrical, whereas most earlier bowls and Ido deep-well bowls tended towards the conical. The bowls were low-fired rapidly, remaining only partially vitrified. This means that they retained the heat of the tea so they did not burn the hands. During the tea ceremony the bamboo tea scoop is gently tapped on the edge of the bowl to dislodge any remaining powdered tea. This is one of the few distinctive sounds intentionally created within the ceremony, and the low vitrification of Raku tea bowls gave a pleasing, solid, resonant sound, rather than the hard, high-pitched, ‘ping’ of high-fired stoneware or porcelain.
There are two main types of early Raku bowls – black and red – and with both, the forms are simple and unpretentious, fitting the aesthetics of Rikyu’s wabi-cha. Although there is a white Raku-type tea bowl in the exhibition dating to the late 19th century. The black bowls were covered in a lead glaze that contained iron and manganese oxides from ground rock from the Kama River in Kyoto. After firing, they were removed from the kilns while they were still molten and left to cool. In red Raku, a red clay body was used, sometimes with a thin ochre slip, which was then thickly covered with a lead glaze. The low-fired iridescent glaze is perhaps the most visually striking and recognisable aspect of Raku ceramics.
The Raku family first built their house and workshop during the Momoyama period (1568-1600) in Kyoto and have lived on the same plot of land since 1586. For the last 450 years, Raku’s successive generations have passed down the Raku technique and tradition within the family without any modifications with the method of making the bowls and firing remaining the same since the birth of Raku ware in the 16th century. Over the next four centuries, a network of Japanese potters incorporated Raku techniques into their practice; these techniques were later adopted in the 1950s by the American studio pottery movement. Jikinyu (b 1949) succeeded to the family headship as Raku Kichizaemon XV in 1981 and assumed the name Jikinyu when he retired in favour of his elder son, who became Raku Kichizaemon XVI in July 2019. He has devoted his career to exploring the possibilities of the traditional tea bowl format in a constant search for new modes of expression. Raku wares are now internationally recognised as a Japanese ceramic style and continue to inspire artistic creativity worldwide.
Through December 2026, Freer Gallery, National Museum of Asian Art, Washington DC, asia.si.edu. The exhibition is part of the Japan in Focus programme that runs until 2026
