Mashiko

Lia collects cups. Not fine ones — she likes the ones with a wobble, a drip of glaze, some evidence that a person made them and wasn’t trying too hard to hide it. So Mashiko was always going to be dangerous for our luggage. We arrived on a grey afternoon with an empty tote bag and lofty intentions of restraint, and by evening the bag was heavy and the intentions were gone.

Mingei and the Beauty of the Ordinary

Mashiko is holy ground for the mingei movement — the folk-craft philosophy that ordinary, functional objects made by anonymous hands hold a beauty finer than anything self-consciously “artistic.” The town’s patron saint is Shoji Hamada, a potter who settled here in the 1920s, worked the local clay, and became a Living National Treasure without ever, as far as I can tell, losing his humility about it. His old house and climbing kiln are preserved at the Mashiko Sankokan museum, and standing before the great multi-chambered noborigama, built into the hillside like a dragon, I finally understood the appeal. This isn’t clay pretending to be porcelain. It’s honest earth, coarse and iron-flecked, glazed in persimmon and black and the milky white they call nuka. Made to be used, dropped, replaced.

Walking the Kiln Street

The main pottery street runs long and low, lined with shops and studios where you can watch wheels turning through open doorways. We spent hours drifting in and out, and the pleasure was in the range — one shop severe and expensive, the next a chaotic barn where seconds and student work sold for a few hundred yen. I liked the cheap barn best. Lia found her prize there: a mug, heavy, glazed a streaky ash-green, with a clear thumbprint pressed into the base where the potter had held it to dip it. We chose it precisely for that. It’s the one we still drink from most mornings in Mexico — the imperfect thing that outlasted all the careful ones. That, I think, is the whole lesson of Mashiko in a single cup.

The Great Pottery Fair

Twice a year, over Golden Week in spring and again in autumn, the town holds the Mashiko Toki-ichi, a pottery fair that swells the population many times over. Hundreds of tents line the streets, potters selling straight from folding tables, and the whole place becomes a slow-moving river of people cradling bubble-wrapped bowls. We caught the tail of the spring one by luck, and it was gloriously overwhelming — students, veterans, hobbyists, a man selling nothing but sake cups, a woman whose entire table was tiny bird figurines. We didn’t need any of it. We bought too much of it anyway. If you can time a visit to the fair, do; if you can’t, the town is quieter and, honestly, easier on the wallet.

Getting There

Mashiko takes a little effort, which keeps it from being overrun outside the fairs. From Tokyo, take the Tohoku Shinkansen to Utsunomiya, then either the bus toward Mashiko or the roundabout local trains via the Moka Railway, a lovely old line that sometimes runs a steam locomotive on weekends. Reckon on two to two-and-a-half hours all in. The town itself is walkable but spread out along the kiln street, so rent one of the cheap bicycles near the station if your legs are willing. Bring a sturdier bag than you think you need. You will not leave empty-handed.