{"product_id":"muromachi-period-shigaraki-tsubo","title":"Muromachi period Shigaraki Tsubo","description":"\u003cp\u003eA powerful Muromachi period Shigaraki jar with a heavily textured surface animated by natural ash and areas of warm orange firing. The irregular mouth and strongly thrown body retain the direct character associated with Shigaraki's wood-fired tradition, while rivulets of vitrified ash descend across one side of the vessel in pale green and ochre tones. The contrast between the rough exposed clay and matt deposits gives the surface considerable depth. There is a kama-jirushi artisans mark in the shoulder which looks like the hiragana character “Ta”. It is 38 x 40 x 41.5 cm (15 x 16 x 16-1\/2 inches). The original has been broken and filed away, leaving a simple clean form, surprisingly contemporary and reminiscent of the modern works of the great Tsujimura Shiro.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eShigaraki is counted among Japan’s celebrated Six Ancient Kilns (Rokkoyō) and developed as an important center of high-fired stoneware during the medieval period. The continuous tradition recognized as Shigaraki ware appears to have become established during the Kamakura period, probably in the thirteenth century and under considerable technological influence from Tokoname. By the fourteenth century, however, Shigaraki had developed a character unmistakably its own, producing principally large jars, storage vessels, mortars and other robust utensils required by an increasingly prosperous agricultural society. These vessels were made from the distinctive local clay, relatively low in iron and rich in coarse particles of feldspar and quartz, and were fired without an applied glaze at high temperatures in wood-burning anagama kilns. The resulting surfaces became one of Shigaraki’s defining characteristics: warm tones ranging from buff and golden orange to reddish brown, scattered white feldspar stones that softened or burst through the surface during firing, areas blackened by intense flame, and accidental deposits of wood ash that melted into translucent green or olive natural glaze. The potter could control the fundamental form and the placement of vessels within the kiln, but fire, ash, atmosphere and the mineral composition of the clay completed the work, producing the highly individual surface “landscapes” for which old Shigaraki would later be admired. During the Muromachi period, Shigaraki production remained fundamentally utilitarian. Large jars were built gradually from heavy coils of clay, their generous shoulders and comparatively narrow mouths reflecting practical requirements rather than an intention to create works of art. Some were decorated with vigorously incised lines, including higaki or diagonal lattice patterns and rope-like designs, but much of their visual character resulted simply from clay and firing. It was precisely this lack of self-conscious artistic refinement that eventually transformed Shigaraki’s place within Japanese culture. The elite culture of the early Muromachi tea gathering had placed extraordinary value upon imported Chinese objects, the treasured karamono that proclaimed sophistication, wealth and international cultural knowledge. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, a very different aesthetic gradually emerged around wabicha, in which cultivated tea practitioners began to recognize beauty in humble, irregular and ostensibly ordinary Japanese objects. Shigaraki, together with Bizen, was among the earliest native stonewares to undergo this extraordinary change in status.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMurata Jukō (1423–1502), one of the formative figures in the development of wabicha, is associated with the introduction of Shigaraki and Bizen vessels into the tea environment, and references to “Shigaraki things” appear in material connected with his generation. Rather than requiring an object originally conceived as a tea utensil, early tea men practiced mitate—the imaginative reassignment of an existing object to a new purpose. A farmer’s seed jar could become a mizusashi for fresh water; a small storage jar might become a flower vessel; an agricultural container might enter the tearoom and, through the discernment of the tea master, acquire an entirely new cultural identity. Few objects demonstrate this transformation more vividly than the Shigaraki onioke (“demon bucket”), a rough cylindrical container believed to have been associated with the processing of hemp or ramie. Takeno Jōō (1502–1555), the great Sakai tea master and an essential predecessor of Sen no Rikyū, is traditionally credited with recognizing such vessels as suitable water jars. What had belonged to the world of agricultural labor could thus become an object of intense aesthetic contemplation. This was not merely an appreciation of rusticity for its own sake. Within wabicha, the irregular Shigaraki surface—with its scars, stones, accidental ash, fire marks, distortions and asymmetries—offered an alternative to the technical perfection and sophisticated decoration of imported ceramics. Its beauty seemed to arise naturally rather than from conspicuous artistic effort. The warm, relatively pale Shigaraki body was particularly distinctive among Japan’s medieval unglazed stonewares; its low iron content produced a gentler, brighter fired surface than the darker bodies characteristic of some other kiln centers, while its feldspar inclusions created a granular, almost geological vitality. By the middle decades of the sixteenth century, this relationship between Shigaraki and tea had entered a second and historically crucial stage. Tea masters were no longer merely discovering utilitarian vessels and adapting them through mitate; potters increasingly began to produce objects with the tea room itself in mind. Records of tea gatherings show Shigaraki water jars appearing with increasing frequency, including a recorded use of a Shigaraki mizusashi by Kitamuki Dōchin in 1542, while the works associated with Takeno Jōō came retrospectively to be known as Jōō Shigaraki (紹鴎信楽). This transition from the “found” object to the intentionally created tea utensil is one of the most consequential developments in Japanese ceramic history, because it required the potter to reproduce something that had previously been valued precisely because it appeared unintended. A vessel made specifically for tea still had to retain the directness, roughness and natural authority of the farmer’s jar. The finest late-Muromachi and early-Momoyama Shigaraki consequently inhabit a fascinating territory between accident and design. Their proportions may be subtly adjusted for the tea room, their mouths and shoulders made more suitable for handling, flowers or water, yet their surfaces retain the apparent spontaneity of medieval utilitarian pottery. The celebrated Shigaraki mizusashi known as Shiba no Iori (柴庵), traditionally associated with Sen no Rikyū and now designated an Important Cultural Property, beautifully embodies this transitional moment: its restrained vessel form, dramatic kiln crack, feldspar-rich body, areas of pale green natural ash glaze and dark firing marks combine the apparent happenstance of the medieval kiln with an emerging consciousness of the vessel as an object for tea. Official cultural-property commentary accordingly describes it as a work revealing the beginnings of the more deliberate aesthetic interventions characteristic of Momoyama tea ceramics. With the Momoyama period, the relationship between ceramic production and the increasingly sophisticated world of tea became still more intimate. The political and cultural upheavals of the late sixteenth century coincided with an extraordinary flowering of Japanese ceramics: Raku emerged in Kyoto, Shino, Setoguro, Kiseto and Oribe developed in Mino, while Bizen, Iga, Karatsu and Shigaraki were increasingly drawn into the orbit of tea. Shigaraki’s importance within this transformation lay not in elaborate glaze technology or pictorial decoration but in its ability to make the effects of earth and fire themselves the decoration. Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591), inheriting and radically refining the aesthetic developed by Jukō and Jōō, appreciated Shigaraki, and later tea tradition speaks of Rikyū Shigaraki (利休信楽) for works associated with his taste or designs. The Momoyama tea vessel therefore became more deliberately composed without necessarily appearing so: a swelling or compression of the body, an unexpectedly narrow mouth, a deliberate irregularity, a scar from firing, or the calculated exposure of one side to ash and flame could create a succession of visual events as the vessel was turned in the hand. The accidental keshiki (“scenery”) of medieval firing was increasingly understood and exploited as an aesthetic resource. Particularly prized were the orange-red flashing known as hi-iro, deposits of vitrified natural ash ranging toward green, glassy surfaces often described as biidoro, dark areas of koge where the vessel was intensely scorched, and the characteristic white eruptions of feldspar embedded in the clay. Yet the achievement of Momoyama Shigaraki is perhaps best understood not as technical innovation alone but as a profound reversal in the cultural meaning of pottery. A medieval Shigaraki jar had been made to store grain, seeds, water or other necessities; its irregularities were simply consequences of production. By the late Muromachi period the tea master had taught viewers to see those same irregularities as beauty, and by the Momoyama period the potter was creating vessels in full awareness that such “accidents” would be scrutinized and appreciated. The rough clay, melted stones, warped profiles, kiln cracks, ash runs and scorched surfaces became records of an encounter between human intention and forces that could never be completely controlled. This tension lies close to the heart of the wabi aesthetic. Shigaraki was not beautiful because it was crude, nor was wabicha simply an admiration for poverty or imperfection; rather, the ware offered an object in which artistic intention appeared restrained enough to allow material, process and time to speak for themselves. The transformation was so complete that medieval jars originally made without any connection to tea were preserved for generations as celebrated utensils, supplied with lacquer lids, boxes, poetic names and distinguished provenances, while later potters deliberately looked back toward medieval Shigaraki as an ideal. Indeed, evidence suggests that during the Momoyama and early Edo periods some jars were produced in conscious imitation of earlier medieval forms, testimony to how thoroughly the once-utilitarian appearance of old Shigaraki had itself become an admired aesthetic category. The small, squat vessel later called the uzukumaru (蹲)—literally suggesting a person crouching or squatting—similarly illustrates the extraordinary capacity of tea culture to discover profound expressive character in simple forms, such jars eventually being admired and employed as flower vessels. By the close of the Momoyama period, Shigaraki had therefore travelled an extraordinary cultural distance. It had begun as one of medieval Japan’s regional centers for practical, high-fired storage pottery and had become one of the ceramic languages through which the tea masters articulated a distinctly Japanese alternative to the perfection and prestige of Chinese karamono. Its importance lies precisely in the fact that it never entirely abandoned the memory of the utilitarian vessel. Even when made specifically for tea, the finest Shigaraki retained the weight, directness and elemental presence of objects intended for ordinary life. In that sense, the history of Shigaraki during the Muromachi and Momoyama periods is inseparable from the history of wabicha itself: the discovery that an unpretentious native jar, marked unpredictably by stones, ash and flame, could possess an aesthetic and spiritual presence equal to—or, in the intimate environment of the tearoom, even more compelling than—the most precious imported ceramic. Shigaraki’s great contribution was therefore not simply a particular clay body or firing technique, but a new way of seeing ceramics, in which the traces of making, firing, use and chance became inseparable from beauty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Kura Monzen Gallery","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51139591831799,"sku":"K1624","price":423600.0,"currency_code":"JPY","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0658\/7472\/3063\/files\/2026-08-3114.25.49.jpg?v=1792471899","url":"https:\/\/kuramonzen.com\/products\/muromachi-period-shigaraki-tsubo","provider":"Kura Monzen Gallery","version":"1.0","type":"link"}