The Influences and Use of Japanese Tradition   1      2      3      4      -      PRINTER VERSION

Published in American Craft, Aug/Sept 1988, 18 & 66.

In the early 1950s potters in the United States, lacking what they felt was a vital indigenous ceramic tradition, turned almost en masse to the ceramic art of Japan for inspiration and aesthetic sustenance. The Englishman Bernard Leach, in his seminal work, A Potter's Book (1940), was the first to introduce the intricacies of Japanese ceramic art to Americans. This book and Leach's subsequent tours of the United States—one in 1952 with Shoji Hamada (who was to become the most recognized Japanese potter in the West) and Soetsu Yanagi (founder of the Japanese folkcraft movement)—marked the genesis of American potters' love affair with Japan.

Americans seemed particularly susceptible to two aspects of the philosophy that Leach, Hamada and Yanagi shared and espoused: Tariki-do and Chokkan. The first is a Buddhist concept. As applied by Yanagi to craft, it means that beauty is the result of the surrender of self to a higher order like one's craft rather than the self-conscious effort of an individual craftsman. This was conveniently interpreted by some to support a kind of dropout life-style with subsistence craft making the focus. Chokkan, Yanagi's theory of direct perception, states that an individual's intuitive, non-intellectual confrontation with an object is the basis for determining beauty. It became a justification for abstract expressionist ceramic art.

As a consequence of these cursory adaptations of Yanagi's philosophy—only one of the many schools of aesthetic thought in Japan—Japanese ceramic art has been romanticized, popularized and commercialized to the point that it has been stripped of any real meaning it once held. Copies of Japanese shapes with kaki, shino and celadon glazes over imitative brushwork can be found at every craft fair across the United States. This kind of Japanese-inspired ceramics has become so trivialized, in fact, that now any visual or verbal reference to it at all is enough to make collectors, critics and dealers roll their eyes and walk away This trivialization, however, is not so much a comment on the significance of Japanese ceramic art as it is a reflection of the superficial and cavalier manner in which American ceramists have approached the history of their medium and exploited its forms.

While large numbers of potters have been content merely to borrow from books and publications the shapes, glazes and decorative techniques that they find pleasing, a smaller number have traveled to the Far East in an effort to understand what exactly it is that makes them respond so strongly to work from an alien culture. Apprenticeship in Japan has become for hundreds of Americans a preferable alternative to the laissez-faire approach to pottery education found in academic institutions in the United States. Unfortunately, there is a tendency among most of these potters to use their narrow, romantic view of Japanese ceramics to determine the worth of all ceramic art. Their propensity to judge ceramic art entirely by the standards acquired from various teachers in Japan has resulted in a genre that, on the surface at least, appears to stress overt references to traditional forms and techniques as a goal in itself. This limited focus has not only kept these potters from making intellectual inquiries into the nature of the beauty they originally found so compelling in Japanese ceramic art, but also kept them from questioning the relevance of such work in Western culture.
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