From the summer of 2018 to 2019, I spent a year in Karatsu living and working at Ryutagama under master potter Taki Nakazato. The Nakazato family are the preeminent pottery family in Karatsu, tracing an unbroken lineage of hereditary ceramic practice to early 17th century. Ryutagama is an offshoot of this main branch of the Nakazato family, started by Nakazato Takashi, Taki’s father, in 1974. Takashi sensei and Taki sensei developed a different philosophy at Ryutagama from Nakazato Tarouemon Tobo, centered on functional, modern pots influenced by Karatsu’s tradition but reinterpreted with a focus on food. Takashi sensei also pioneered a type of yakishime (unglazed ceramics wood-fired at high temperatures) called “karatsu-nanban,” building upon his experience at Tanegashima, a small island to the south of Kyushu, in the early 1970s investigating its indigenous Yokino ware. 

My time at Ryutagama was an extremely formative experience for me, which required me to rethink from scratch my approach to ceramics and my skills as an artist and craftsman. I lived on-site in the apprentice’s hut alongside Taki sensei’s apprentice Atsushi Shimomura. While I wasn’t an apprentice, I lived and worked like one and completed the first year of what is typically a three-year curriculum. 

My primary responsibility at Ryutagama was the day-to-day operations underlying the running and maintenance of the pottery. I cut hedges by hand, numerous lawns and slopes with a brush cutter, chopped wood for kilns and a wood stove, dug and processed clay, glazed the sensei’s work, loaded and fired kilns, polished finished work, and occasionally helped catalogue and pack pots. While my daily employment was not on the wheel, in the evenings and on my days off I practiced the wheel, working my way through a rigorous curriculum designed to teach me how to production throw off the hump and become proficient in a tool endemic to Kyushu, the gyubera. 

Taking part in the end-to-end work required to properly run a studio and produce a high standard of work taught me so much about best practices in ceramics. In particular, two lessons stand out: first, respect for the raw material we work with, including clay recycling and waste limitation, and second, function-oriented design for tableware. Part of my responsibility at Ryutagama was to assist the sensei in entertaining guests--serving drinks, assisting with simple cooking tasks, clearing dishes, cleaning up, etc. At these events, we would eat and drink family style, using Ryutagama’s tableware. This kind of exposure was one of the most valuable and cherished memories of my time at Ryutagama. The integration of cooking and pottery planted a deep-seated interest in functional tableware that forms the core of my practice today.