Mashiko - Monday

On Monday morning, left Tokyo station by Shinkantsen (Bullet Train) to go to the Northern city of Utsunamiya; it took about an hour at 300/km per hour to get here. This is YUBA country, in other words, rolled tofu.

The reasons for my stopover are two: the first is Mashiko, the small pottery town made famous by Shoji Hamada and Bernard Leach in the first half of the 20th century. My first ceramics prof, Susan Peterson, wrote a book about Hamada. I got to see some of Hamada's works, some of the climbing kilns in Hamada's complex (the whole town smells of kilns burning) and went through several galleries of new and old styled pieces.

Taking the bus to Mashiko means learning a few Japanese idiograms as the bus does NOT have any Roman characters on it nor the bus driver understand any English. As a matter of fact, very few people in Utsunamiya speak English, not even the clerk at the internet cafe :-)

Many of my pictures of Mashiko are ceramic wares. My first purchase in Japan is my small bottle from this town. It's a high fire reduction piece fired in a wood kiln. It has a small thumb mark.

After a long journey up and down the galleries in Mashiko, I took the bus back to Utsunamiya watching the sun set.

Dinner was near the hotel, in a small restaurant row, where I had oden and spoke with the owner; somehow we managed to communicate. She was kind enough to offer me some sake.