Hasami-yaki is the everyday porcelain of Hasami, Nagasaki, one valley over from Arita, and the source of roughly 16% of all the dishes used in Japan. The story of the cheap, thick kurawanka bowl that put porcelain on the common table, why Hasami spent centuries anonymous under Arita's name, and how it became the design world's favourite stacking tableware.
The beckoning cat by the register is calling luck in, not waving goodbye. A guide to what the left vs right paw means, what each color is for, the coin it holds, and the Aichi pottery towns that make it.
Arita is the town where Japan first made porcelain around 1616; Imari was only the port it shipped from — so 'Imari ware' is the same clay by another name. A guide to sometsuke blue-and-white, the Kakiemon and Nabeshima styles, and how a Chinese civil war put Japanese porcelain in European palaces.
