Lost Innocence   1      2      3      -      PRINTER VERSION

(Book Review) Published in American Craft, Oct/Nov 1985.

Lost Innocence, Folk Craft Potters of Onta, Japan by Brian Moeran, published by University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1984.

Lost Innocence, thank heavens, is not another vacuous coffee table book reinforcing the romantic stereotypes held by Americans of folk craft in Japan. One might have guessed as much from the title, and certainly those who are not put off by the book's small format and lack of color photographs will soon realize that this is not the standard idealized approach to pottery making in Japan that has seemed to be the rule in craft publishing. It is instead a serious, thought-provoking, though somewhat academic, account of how Sarayama, an isolated pottery community in Kyushu, was affected by the folk craft boom in Japan and how the resulting economic improvements threatened its primitive methods of making and firing pottery. It was, paradoxically, these very aspects of Sarayama that had brought its potters and their pottery the praise of critics and scholars in the folk craft movement.

Brian Moeran warns us in his preface that Lost Innocence is "addressed to people of widely differing interests ­ to potters and to anthropologists ­ and consequently is in danger of failing to appeal to either professional group." Potters reading this book may at times despair at the anthropological style and the innumerable charts on social organization, but the author balances this with anecdotes and stories that are almost gossipy:

"...Mr. T. made use of his connections to start buying pots from all the potters in the community except Haruzo, whom he has always made it clear he dislikes. At the opening of every kiln, Mr. T. goes up to Sarayama by taxi, and with his back very straight from his early military training, he walks from one workshop to the next and selects the pots he likes. In each pottery he is served tea and cakes, but these he tends not to touch, for he is more interested in conversation. Sometimes he will talk about the war; at other times he will enter into a monologue concerning Japan's early industrialization and contact with the West; more often he will concentrate on what he refers to as "the great problem" besetting the folk craft movement. Potters will try to look attentive and adopt a fairly humble attitude in front of Mr. T., but as he has a habit of saying nasty things about people behind their backs, they tend to ignore most of what he tells them." (p. 40)

In this way Moeran succeeds in involving the reader in the community and making him more actively concerned about these people as he progressively outlines Sarayama's problems and dilemmas. It is an effective technique and for the most part it balances the tediousness of the anthropological data. Potters may also feel at times that Moeran is not addressing them. (Indeed, he does seem to consider his main audience to be anthropologists.) For example, after spending three interesting pages on how the ability to produce certain glazes well in certain parts of a kiln affects market demands, Moeran apologizes to the anthropologists: "All of this may sound too technical for a social anthropological study, but these details of the problems faced by potters in firing their kilns are pertinent because buyers consistently order all sorts of different color combinations." (p. 201) He offers no such apology to potters, how-
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