KyuPugh: Miyama Pottery Village

Miyama Pottery Village is about a half an hour's drive outside of Kagoshima. I went there with two other foreign teachers and one of the Japanese teachers, plus her family a couple weeks ago. First we went to Oda sensei's house for lunch--salad, tempura, fried chicken, and maybe some other stuff I'm forgetting about. It was kind of a lot of food. Then we had like the best strawberries I've ever had after, with coffee slash tea. The thing about Japan and coffee, though, is people don't seem to realize that foreigners often take sugar with their coffee, although they do remember the cream. So a couple times I've not wanted to be rude and had to drink bitter yet creamy coffee.

After lunch we took two cars (in Japan they drive on the left, by the way) to Miyama, and our first stop was actually a glass-making gallery. This chick below is the glass blower, and she was doing a demonstration when we got there. She starts off with a ball of glass at the end of this metal rod, which she then heats for a moment in the kiln.

The she spins it around on this mechanism for a second to cool it off a little.

Then she uses this heavy-duty cloth to help her roll the glass out into a shape. In this case she's making a drinking glass. Then she repeats this process several times, making the glass more glass-shaped each time.

Tools.

Here you can see it becoming more like a cylinder. She's using a little blowtorch to help her.

At one point she flash cooled it? in water. I was glad I got the steam in the shot.

Nearer the end of the process, she trims the top edge.

Here she's using a cone-shaped implement to help herself along with the shape.

The end result is this, after they go into some other kiln--though I'm not sure if they get heated again, or if it's just a slow cooling process. All her explanations were in Japanese of course.

Here's another blowtorch shot. Those cabinets behind her is where she seemed to be putting the glasses after she finished with their shape.

On the left side is her gallery, which I actually didn't take a photo of, because I didn't want to be rude. This woman's husband is the salesman. On the right side is the work area.

I bought this ring because it was cool. It was a little pricey at 2900 yen (about $35), but whatever.

Our next stop was a traditional "black pottery" shop, where again I didn't take any photos inside. You can imagine the kind of stuff people made in high school pottery class, though, made with dark-colored clay. This place was of course expensive, too, but I don't know why. Just because it can be, I guess. Most of the stuff in there could easily be made by someone who knew a little bit about a throwing wheel or who could be patient enough to do a bunch of cookie-cutter designs and put them together to make something bigger. A lot of it, though, frankly, looked like trash. They were trying to charge like fifteen bucks for little things like chopsticks holders for the table, but they literally were just pieces of clay torn off from a flattened piece, the edges not even smoothed out, which were then pressed with a finger to make a little indentation and then pinched on one side to make a little handle or whatever. They looked like a three year old made them. And there were other things just as crappy, too.

Here's a cute little area map made out of wood, which we passed on the way to the next shop.

This place here is a "white pottery" place, where they make hand-painted ceramics. This kind of stuff I can understand charging a lot for, because you really can't do it yourself. This is all that intricately hand painted stuff you see, with all the fine lines and flowers and so forth. It's really pretty. In the ground floor windows there, there were some artists you could watch working. I didn't want to bother them with a photo. Sorry.

In front of the building.

There wasn't a shop there, so we crossed a little park, where we saw all this wood, plus a bunch of old school kilns outside.

The ground was full of broken pottery on the sides of the footpath. Cool.

Here's the shop. There were some kitty things in there that I considered getting for me and my mom, but it was totally too expensive, unfortunately.

In the windows were these giant urns.

And across from the shop was this building labeled the Consulate General of Korea. It's no longer in use (if ever), I assume, but apparently that's there because all this pottery came from Korea when Japan invaded Korea and brought back all these master potters. Then they passed down the specific skills and methods and such.