TSUBO - THE NOBLE JAPANESE JAR - THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD - by Leighton R. Longhi The HIGH-WATER mark in the production of Japan’s great stoneware jars known as tsnbo occurred during the medieval period (1185-1573), encompassing the Kamakura, Nambokucho and Muromachi periods. Though the technol­ ogy for producing high-fired stoneware came to Japan from Korea during the fifth century, it wasn’t until the medieval period that large tsubo were produced. Fine arts and crafts are sharply divided and precisely defined in Western culture. However, no such distinctions exist in traditional Japanese connoisseurship. In fact, the term for fine art in Japanese is bijitsu, which encompasses all creative work in the diverse media of painting, calligraphy, sculpture, crafts and architec­ ture. What is it that has inspired Zen practitioners and followers of the tea ceremony in Japan, as well as Westerners of diverse artistic backgrounds, to appreciate the beauty of Japanese jars? Some Western philosophers have reasoned that one defines beauty by example, not definition. So, beyond these words, perhaps a sense of the jar through illustration will ring a greater truth, since there are no traditional terms of beauty that would properly explain the tsubo. Certainly not their perfect shape, because they are beautifully uneven. Not because of their painted decorations, since there are none. There are random deposits of natural ash glaze in most cases, and sometimes incising, but their drippings and surface textures would come closer to the painting of Morris Louis or Jackson Pollock. To the contrary, the beauty of tsubo lies within their unevenness and imperfection. Picasso said that art is “what nature is not’’.1 Man-made, tsubo are formed Figure l, Suzu Stoneware Jar (Kamc). 13th century. from the earths’ materials in a way that recreates a sense of Height: 23% in. (59.5 cm.) Private Collection, U.S.A. whence they were derived. A powerful ovoid form with rugged texture, furnished by man from earth and water, fired and blown with ash, is brought together in the kiln as nature It must also be kept in mind that within each area of cannot. production there were numerous kilns, anywhere from 400 Japanese have traditionally grouped medieval production to 600. This was partially due to the amount of wood into six kiln areas: Bizen (Okayama Prefecture), Tamba needed to fuel a kiln. As wood was used up around one kiln, (Hyogo Prefecture), Shigaraki (Shiga Prefecture), Echizen production was moved to another hillside. At a later period (Fukui Prefecture), Tokoname and Seto (Aichi Prefecture). production might resume again at the old site when trees in However, since the 1960's, as a result of numerous excava­ the area had matured. A representative piece from one of the tions, a number of previously unknown medieval sites have newly excavated kilns would be a Suzu jar (fig. 1), a rarity come to light, some 26 on the Island of Honshu with a few here in the West. (Another smaller example resides in the scattered kilns on the other islands. These include lizaka Asian Art Museum of San Francisco ). Suzu jars were created (Fukushima Prefecture), Suzu and Kaga (Ishikawa Prefec­ for simple everyday use and usually built by coil technique in ture), Atsumi (Aichi Prefecture), Kancgama, Nakatsugawa five sections. As a result of reduction firing their surfaces and Mino Sue (Gifu Prefecture), Kamei (Saitama Prefecture), range in color from gray to black. This jar has combed Tokita, Takoda, and Shinanoura (Miyagi Prefecture), Sasaga- patterns that suggest windswept rain or water, giving further mi (Niigata Prefecture), Kosai (Shizuoka Prefecture), Kauai character to a body which manifests an almost planet-like (Gumma Prefecture), Kameyama (Okayama Prefecture) and appearance. As with most medieval jars of kame (wide­ Sue (Kagawa Prefecture). mouthed) shape, it is large and unglazed. It was intended for 13 water or liquids whereas tsubo, a narrow-mouthed jar, was used for seeds and other agricultural products. (Tanctsubo were larger jars used to store seeds and chatsubo were smaller jars for the storage of tea leaves.) Expansion and improvements in farming on medieval manors gave rise to an enormous demand for large storage and handling vessels. Beginning in the Kamakura period (1185-1336), areas with access to the sea such as Tokonamc, Bizen and Suzu, were able to ship large jars to most of the outlying areas of Japan. Of the three, tokoname ware was transitional in the change from reduction firing typical of earlier wares to the more economical oxidation firing. Of the many kilns that were active during the medieval period, it was only the major kilns of Seto, Tokoname, Bizen, Shigaraki, Tamba and Echizen, with the addition of Iga, Mino and Kaga, that survived into the Edo period (1615-1868) and are still in production today. It is amongst these primary six kilns that tsubo production occurred during the medieval period. In addition to tsubo, they also made kaine and suribachi (grating bowls) — all utilitarian objects of daily usage unintended for any artistic involvement. It was not until later in the sixteenth century that these peasant potters were commissioned by the practitioners of the tea ceremony to make chawan (tea bowls), chairc (tea caddies), mizusashi (water jars) and hanaike (flower vases). Changing tastes as well as social and political upheavals during the later Muromachi period brought to ascendance tea masters such as Murata Juko (1423-1502) and Sen no Rikyu (1522-1591 ) who dictated taste to the ruling class in everything from tea ceremony to architecture and garden design. Juko was tea master to the shogun Yoshimasa and a Figure 2, Echizcn Stoneware Jar (Tsubo), c. 1500. student of the great Zen priest-painter and calligrapher Ikkyu Height: 22'A in. (57.5 cm.) Leighton R. Longhi, New York, N.Y. (1394-1481). He tried to give tea a religious aspect using common everyday objects and it was the wabi taste of such Figure J opposite, Shigaraki Stoneware Jar (Tsubo). 15th century. tea masters that created a renewed interest in native Japanese Height: 21 'A in. (54.5 cm.) Yale University Art Gallery. (Purchased with a ceramics. gift from Walter Barciss. B.S. 1940’s, and Molly Bareiss, and with the Wabi is a Japanese conceptualism of beauty and is normally Leonard C. Hanna. Jr. B.A. 1913, Fund, and the Henry Sage Goodwin, B.A. 1927, Fund). found together with the term sabi. It originally meant ‘insuf­ ficient’ or ‘not thorough’. Wabi, as it came to be appreciated by tea followers in the Momoyama era (1573-1615) repre­ glazed wares; the earlier tea ceremony utilizing more elegant sents simplicity, austerity, naturalness, asymmetry, calmness; a Chinese ceramics (ch’icn ware, celadon, etc.). Native subtle profoundness and wizened nature. Sabi is the Japanese ceramics such as Scto ware had also been used, but restrained refinement and luster of things and can represent these were glazed wares imitating Chinese prototypes. Zen, anything from the patina on an old piece of wood to the combined with the native Japanese religion, Shinto, helped wetness on an aged and encrusted rock in the garden. The to end this and seek the adoption of simple objects for the wabi sabi concepts arc said to have originated with Matsuo tea ceremony. It would be fair to say that the taste in native Basho, Japan’s famous 17th century haiku poet, but the taste Japanese ceramics was formed through religious conviction and feelings existed long before Basho’s time. and has lasted to the present day. This taste extended to Largely due to the precepts of Zen Buddhism and it’s painting and calligraphy and resurrected the Zen style of adoption by the warrior class then in power, later tea masters painting. Even aristocrats such as Konoc Nobutada (1565- exerted enormous influence over the military rulers they 1614 ), a member of the Imperial Court, fashioned his served, such as Oda Nobunaga (1534 -1582), Toyotomi calligraphy in the rugged Zen manner and even went so far Hideyoshi (1536-1598) and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616). in many of his works as to utilize rough fibrous paper to Zen was, in a word, simplistic, believing in the immediate enhance the naturalness of his calligraphy and painting. and intuitive nature of the mind and it’s oneness with the A general overview of the main producers of medieval universe. Because of its anti-doctrinaire nature, it was tsubo would mainly encompass the kilns of Echizen, Shigara­ immensely appealing to the warrior class that was emerging ki and Tamba; the other three kilns primarily made other as a power in Japan as early as the 13th century. Zen was forms of jars and vessels. The ancient Sueki kilns were the thoroughly opposed to anything contrived, mannered or basis for the medieval ceramic tradition, which was already ostentatious. Previous taste in ceramics reflected more aristo­ occurring in Echizen Province (present-day Eukui Prefec­ cratic standards, partially due to the expensive nature of ture) during the late Heian/early Kamakura period 14 IS fk ■tilm % 12tli/13th century). However, in the case of Echizen, its potters arc deeply indebted to the Tokonamc tradition. Their kilns, the greatest in the area of the Sea of Japan, produced jars of various sizes, as well as grating mortars, tiles : ifHF& and other objects for everyday use. During the later Kamakura period it became popular to apply various incised I abstract and floral designs to Echizen wares, some perhaps for i identification, and others, as some scholars have theorized, for religious reasons. Echizen jars are marked by a reddish stoneware body, a result of high iron content and an ip oxygen-rich atmosphere in the kiln, with an abundance of m kiln fallout, as opposed to the gray/black stoneware of Sucki, which was fired by the reduction process.