Hamada Shōji
The potter of the mingei movement.
Hamada Shōji worked with Bernard Leach in England and founded the mingei movement for folk crafts. He was designated a Living National Treasure.
Hamada Shōji was born in Tokyo in 1894. He studied ceramics at the Tokyo Higher Technical School and then worked at a ceramics research institute in Kyoto, where he learned a great deal about glazes. There he became friends with the potter Kawai Kanjirō. Around 1918–19 he met the British potter Bernard Leach, who was then living in Japan.
In 1920 Hamada travelled with Leach to St Ives in Cornwall, where together they built a wood-fired climbing kiln of Japanese type and founded the Leach Pottery. The workshop became one of the most important places for modern studio pottery in the West. Hamada also held an exhibition in London that attracted attention. After a few years he returned to Japan and in 1924 settled in Mashiko, a small pottery village north of Tokyo, where he stayed for the rest of his life.
In Mashiko he worked with local clay and simple, traditional methods alongside the village craftsmen. His pots are robust and unaffected, often with glazes in brown, black and grey. He is known for pouring or flinging the glaze over the pot in a single movement, and for simple brushed decoration such as a stylised sugar-cane leaf. He wanted his objects to look as if they had come into being almost by themselves.
In the 1920s, together with the philosopher Yanagi Sōetsu and Kawai Kanjirō, he founded the mingei movement, which held up anonymous everyday folk objects as models of beauty. After Yanagi's death Hamada became director of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo. In 1955 he was among the first to be designated a Living National Treasure.
Hamada died in 1978. His home and workshop in Mashiko are now a museum, and the village has become one of Japan's best-known ceramic centres. Through his collaboration with Leach he had great influence on studio pottery in Britain, the United States and Scandinavia, and his idea of the simple and everyday as the height of beauty lives on among potters all over the world.