Vessels*

6 April 2010
Today was to have been the day we visited galleries and museums, primarily to view ceramics but also some of the great Japanese art treasures housed in Kyoto. With the whole of the National Museum closed for refurbishment, not just part of it we had to opt for second and third best. Our first stop was the Museum of Contemporary Art which houses a collection of ceramics – but not this month. The whole gallery has been taken over by an exhibition called “My Favourite Things” and as far as we could gather from reading the blurb the only ceramic piece in the exhibition was Marcel Duchamp’s urinal! The second place we tried was the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art – the only pottery they could direct us to was in the museum’s coffee shop. Undeterred we continued to the Kyoto Museum of Traditional Crafts; the museum provides an excellent introduction to the whole range of Kyoto crafts, from roof tiles and metal work, through bamboo work, fans and ceramics (hooray) to textiles, kimonos, confectionary and ornamental hairpins. All very interesting in an anoraky sort of way but not what we wanted, especially as the ceramics were of the highly decorated variety and not really to our taste but we could appreciate the fine craftsman ship. This was shaping up to be a bit of a disappointing day and of course it was now much earlier in the day than we had planned. Our next stop was the Kyoto Pottery Hall which, allegedly, had an exhibition of the works of local potters and a shop selling their work. However as this was some distance further on and there were a couple of gardens in between we thought we would meander on in. The first was Shoren-in or Awata Palace as it is sometimes called; outside its main gate are two absolutely huge camphor trees. The house started life in ninth century as lodgings for Tendai-sect priests and later served as residence for members of the imperial family (this is, of course a euphemism for Royal-Hangers-On, we have a lot of them in England and they live in minor palaces like Kensington, Clarence House etc.)

The house is quite spartan with rooms containing little more than tatami mats and exquisitely painted screens from the 16th and 17th centuries. Inevitably there is a shrine attached which has so much ‘stuff’ in it, it resembles a junk shop. Outside there is a beautiful stroll garden designed to include the hillside with the usual, rocks, moss, water, stone lanterns etc. There were also the usual waterfalls but this garden had one right outside the tea house which sounded like a horse having a pee – enough to put you off your cuppa.
We then made our way on to Chion-in, a big busy complex where everything is built on a monumental scale – it houses the biggest bell in Japan, a monster weighing 67-tonnes which, at New Year, takes seventeen priests (of the jodo Pure Land sect of Buddhism) to ring. As we arrived so did about fourteen coach loads of school youths (all of them about 17 or 18, all smartly dressed, all amazingly well behaved) who made their way up the hundreds of steps to the large main hall, which we, of course avoided and visited the gardens. These are on two levels – the lower gardens being mainly ponds with bridges and islands with the upper gardens being on a series of levels and containing, once again, the usual ingredients but this time with sub-shrines and tea houses, one of which contains a screen with ‘the cat that looks in every direction’ – quit uncanny in that wherever one stands the eyes seem to be looking at you. We were reminded of that review of the Rolf Harris painting of the Queen – “wherever you go in the room her teeth are following you.” The cat was supposed to be some sort of sermon; the moral of which is while cats may look in any direction, humans must keep their eyes fixed upon eternity, please pass the bucket.

The upper garden just kept going up and up until we had a view over the whole of Kyoto, then we passed through a gate and found ourselves in the cemetery – or perhaps more correctly the cinerary – the dead get all the beat views in this town. Several photographs later we made our way back down on, through the park full of picnickers and cherry blossom (does no one work in this town?) and on to the Pottery Hall which (and we’re sure you knew this was coming) was closed. Ah well the whole area is where all the kilns of Kyoto have traditionally been based so we thought we would just wander around the numerous ceramics shops there. This we did and saw mostly highly decorated vessels of the sort we rather uncharitably say have been made by “hobby potters”. In fairness we did see a few very fine pieces but these were well outside our price range being a few hundred thousand yen. This was turning into quite a disappointing day – there was only one place left to visit and that was Kawai Kanjiro’s House.

Kawai Kanjiro was an innovative potter who lived from 1890 to 1966 and helped revive the mingei (folk crafts) tradition in the 1930s which so influenced Bernard Leach. This made our day – the house was as he left it (but unlike National Trust properties you could sit on the furniture and touch the wooden sculptures but understandably not the pottery). The house contains ceramics and sculptures from his long career and out in the garden the kilns where many of his pieces were made.


A technical note follows: one kiln is a small wood-fired biscuit kiln but the monster he used for his main firings is a fascinating wood-fired nobori-gamma – a seven chambered stepped kiln. To see all of this entailed taking off our shoes and putting on slippers to walk around the house (G found a pair that almost fitted), taking off the slippers to walk on the tatami mats, changing the slippers to outside slippers to go and see the stepped kiln and changing them again to toilet slippers to go for a pee (toilet slippers were pink for ladies and blue for gents). Never mind all that, just seeing all these beautiful things made what might have been a disappointing day into one that, like so many we have experienced, was special and unforgettable.
Just down the road was a shop selling ceramics new and old – much of it sublime, most of it, again outside of our price bracket and/or so heavy (many of the pieces being in sets of five) that we would exceed our luggage allowance. However we did discover in the ‘antique’ section two Japanese tea cups that we loved and we could afford (they no longer had their original wooden boxes) and (you know what’s coming) we purchased. These like the teapots we bought in Hong Kong are carefully wrapped for travelling but when we return home will be unwrapped and photographed. These pictures will then appear on the blog just in case anyone is interested.

We walked back through the Gion District which was the largest pleasure district in ancient times. Now, despite the looming modern buildings and congested traffic it still has an historic beauty as well as some modern ones in the form of Geisha who, given a couple of roof tiles, would have been walking museums of traditional craft – they pass wearing kimono, obo, flower hairpins, wooden shoes and traditional make up.
For dinner we made some rules – no noodles, no tofu, no wasabi, no Japanese pickled vegetables, no taking off shoes to enter, no kneeling on the floor to eat and no we didn’t end up at McDonalds we went to the Kerala Indian Restaurant and very good it was too; although we did find it strange to see Japanese people eating their curries with chopsticks and that the Kingfisher beer was made under license in the UK by Shepherd Neame. We began to appreciate why all those Japanese were queuing up outside Crispy Creme Doughnuts the other day!