Kasama

Lia found Kasama the way she finds most of our better detours — by falling down a rabbit hole of ceramics photos online and refusing to leave it. She’s collected small pottery pieces from almost every region we’ve visited, and when she learned there was a whole town built around both a major shrine and a centuries-old kiln tradition, ninety minutes from Tokyo, there wasn’t much discussion about whether we were going.

Kasama Inari Shrine

Kasama Inari Shrine dates back to the 7th century and is counted among Japan’s three great Inari shrines, alongside the far more famous Fushimi Inari in Kyoto, though it draws its own millions of visitors a year without ever feeling as overwhelmed as its southern counterpart. We arrived on an ordinary weekday and had long stretches of the grounds nearly to ourselves, walking past rows of fox statues — Inari’s traditional messengers — toward the main hall. The shrine’s real showpiece, though, is its wisteria trellis, centuries old and enormous, supported on a wooden frame that must stretch fifty meters across; we’d timed it slightly early for full bloom, but even the first cascading purple clusters were enough to make Lia stop and just look up for a long minute.

The Clay That Built a Craft

Kasama’s other identity comes from the ground itself: iron-rich clay in the surrounding hills that’s supported a pottery tradition, Kasama-yaki, since the 1770s, originally producing simple, sturdy vessels sold to the very pilgrims visiting the Inari shrine. We spent an afternoon in the Kasama Pottery District, a scattered collection of studios and galleries where the historical style — thick-walled, earthy, unglazed in places — sits alongside strikingly modern work from a new generation of ceramicists who’ve moved here specifically for the clay and the community. Lia talked a young potter’s ear off about glaze techniques while I quietly bought a set of cups I had no real plan for packing home.

An Afternoon at the Wheel

On a recommendation from one of the studios we’d visited, we booked a short hands-on pottery session at a workshop just outside the main district, the kind of place clearly built for visitors but run by people who took the craft seriously regardless. My bowl came out lopsided in a way the instructor was too polite to comment on; Lia’s came out genuinely good, centered and thin-walled, which she has not let me forget since. We left our pieces to be fired and shipped weeks later, and unwrapping them back home, misshapen and all, brought back the whole afternoon more vividly than most souvenirs manage.

Getting There

Kasama Station sits on the JR Mito Line, reachable from Tokyo in about ninety minutes with a transfer, most commonly via Tomobe or Mito depending on your route. The shrine sits an easy walk from the station, while the pottery district is spread out a bit further, so renting a bicycle or taking one of the local loop buses makes exploring the studios far less tiring than walking between them all. It works comfortably as a day trip from Tokyo, though a slower overnight stay leaves more room for an actual pottery session rather than just browsing the shops.