Imbe is the actual name of the town that we went to.  It was quite nice to just wander around and look at this small ceramics town.  You can see fifty smoke stacks from all the kilns.  There are ruins of an old kiln as you can see in the third photo on the left as well as over fifty kilns scattered around the town.  There are lots and lots of ceramics shops that all have the classic natural red Bizen glaze that comes from ash falling on the work as it is fired.  I believe that they also add rice stalks into the firing at the end because I have seen them piled up around the kilns sometimes. I found myself thinking about my time learning ceramics and that it must be strange to be a ceramic artist and only work with this one color palette and be so restricted stylistically.  However, it is also really nice to be a part of something that is so old and that has been refined for thousands of years.

People here often ask me what type of "yaki" I make.  Yaki is dinnerware.  I tell them that I make "Julian yaki" and explain that in the US our traditions are very young so as a ceramic artist sometimes it is part of your job to decide what you make and the style you make it in.  For me this has been a frustrating and complicated journey but I am glad that I got to do it this way because it fits my personality.  I now have a great appreciation for the freedom that I have and feel like I can embrace the challenges that it throws at me.

For the whole time I have been in Japan when people have found out that I am a ceramic artist they always ask me if I have been to Bizen.  I really had no idea what Bizen would be like but I was expecting it to be impressive in some way.  I have discovered that people usually make a big deal out of things here.  Sometimes it is not so obvious why.  Now that I have gotten used to it, though, I find it kinda nice when it comes to things like this.  To the untrained eye this would seem like yet another Japanese shopping excursion.  It can be only that but we asked a few questions and got a little lucky and had a chance to look at the inner workings of a Bizen studio and a nabori gama kiln.

 

These nabori gama kilns are monsters.  They were invented after the anagama kilns and were designed to accommodate more work.  A studio with 5-10 professionals will fire twice a year.  This is where a few thousand years of knowledge and an amazing amount of trial and error comes in handy.  Imagine the sadness of destroying 6 months of work.