Four Hundred Years of Arita, Still on the Table
In 1616, on a hillside above a small town in Kyushu, a potter found a seam of white stone and changed what Japan ate from. Within a few decades, that same discovery would be sitting in the cabinets of European royal courts, and quietly shaping what an entire continent decided fine porcelain should look like.
The potter is traditionally credited as Yi Sam-pyeong, brought to Japan among the Korean craftsmen who arrived during Toyotomi Hideyoshi's invasions of Korea at the end of the sixteenth century. He is said to have searched the hills around Arita for years before finding what he needed at Izumiyama: a deposit of porcelain stone pure enough to fire into true, translucent porcelain, the first ever produced in Japan. Before this, Japanese ceramics meant earthenware and stoneware, warm-bodied and opaque. Arita changed the material available to Japanese potters entirely, and the town has been making porcelain, without interruption, ever since.
How a Small Kyushu Town Ended Up in European Palaces
What followed is the part of the story that reaches furthest from Japan. Arita's porcelain was painted mostly in gosu, a cobalt-based pigment that fires to a deep, slightly uneven indigo blue beneath the glaze, in a style called sometsuke. By the mid-seventeenth century, that blue-and-white porcelain was being shipped out of the nearby port of Imari, first to Edo as tribute for the shogunate, then further afield: China's own porcelain trade had been disrupted by civil war, and Dutch East India Company ships began carrying Arita ware to Europe in its place. It ended up in the collections of European royal courts, admired and eventually copied by early European porcelain factories that had never seen a Japanese kiln. A tea bowl made in a small Kyushu town helped shape what "fine porcelain" meant on the other side of the world, and it travelled under a name that was not quite its own: Europe called it Imari ware, after the port it left from, rather than Arita, the town where it was actually made. The name stuck, and you will still see it used today.
Two Questions People Actually Ask About Arita Porcelain
Why does it feel so thin, yet so strong?
Arita porcelain is fired at genuinely high temperatures, typically in the range of 1250 to 1300 degrees Celsius, in what is called a reduction firing. At that heat, the porcelain stone the clay is made from fully vitrifies: it essentially turns to glass at a microscopic level, closing up the tiny pores that make earthenware and stoneware absorbent. The result is a body with almost no water absorption at all, which is why it can be thrown thin without becoming fragile. Thinness and fragility are not the same thing in porcelain. Vitrification is what decouples them.
Why is some Arita porcelain dishwasher safe, and some isn't?
It comes down to when the decoration is applied. Most Arita porcelain is painted in gosu underglaze, meaning the pigment goes on before the final glaze firing and is sealed permanently beneath a layer of glass. That combination, vitrified body plus sealed-in decoration, is what makes a piece dishwasher and microwave safe. Pieces finished in overglaze decoration, gold leaf, or delicate enamel painting, are handled differently: that decoration is added after the main firing and fixed in a second, lower-temperature firing, sitting on top of the glaze rather than beneath it. It is more exposed, so it is usually the exception that needs a hand wash instead.
There is a step in between worth knowing about too. Before any painting happens, the shaped clay goes through a bisque firing at a much lower temperature, around 900 degrees Celsius, which is deliberately not enough to vitrify it. At this stage the body is actually more porous than it will ever be again, and that is the point: it needs to be absorbent enough to take the glaze and pigment evenly. The near-indestructible, non-porous porcelain you eat from is really the last stage of a piece that spent most of its life being made more absorbent, not less.
One Piece, Many Hands
None of this happens in one workshop. Arita's porcelain production runs on a division of labour rather than a single craftsman's hand: separate specialists for shaping the clay, firing it, painting it, and glazing it, with many artisans further specialising within each of those stages alone. This is how the industry works today, and it explains something people often assume incorrectly, that a hand-painted piece must have come from a small, single-owner studio. In Arita, it is entirely normal for the shaping, the firing, and the painting of one plate to have passed through several different specialists, each expert in only their part, before it reaches a table.
KIHARA: Bringing the Region's Skill Together
Four hundred years is a long time for a craft to stay both alive and unchanged, and Arita's has not done the second. What has changed is what the porcelain is for, and who gets to decide, and this year that question has a new answer at iromizu: KIHARA, joining us as our first direct maker relationship.
Founded in 1955, KIHARA's own stated purpose is to keep the region's traditional skills in everyday use by shaping them into tableware that suits modern life, rather than treating them as something to be preserved unchanged. It is, in its own words, not so different from what we try to do at iromizu: bring quality, craftsmanship, and design together in a way that adds something to ordinary, everyday life, rather than sitting behind glass.
What makes KIHARA distinctive is less a single technique than a role. Where the division of labour described above is spread across many small, specialist workshops throughout Arita and the neighbouring town of Hasami, KIHARA works as a coordinator across that whole landscape, known in Japan as a sanchi shosha. It does not run one kiln. It works with many, bringing specialist kilns and artisans together around a single design idea, then deciding, collection by collection, which of the region's traditional techniques best serves that idea, and where a more contemporary approach should take over instead.
Not everything KIHARA makes is, strictly, Arita-yaki. Three of its eight collections, including KOMON, its best-known range, are actually made in Hasami, six miles down the road, using the same coordinated network of specialist kilns rather than Arita's own. It is a useful reminder that Arita has never really worked in isolation from its neighbour, and it is exactly why KIHARA describes its own purpose as "connecting the traditional industries of Arita and Hasami to the future," not Arita's alone.
Across the full eight, KIHARA offers eight different answers to the same question the whole region has been asking for four hundred years: what should this material be made to do next. ARITA ICON takes the town's own founding date and turns it into the design itself, sixteen landmarks and sixteen porcelain-making tools on a single plate, a nod to 1616 and the number that has carried special meaning for Arita-yaki ever since. KOSOMETSUKE is painted onto a body developed to recreate the look of early Imari, Arita's first export ware, and KIHARA itself notes the glaze varies slightly from piece to piece, a quality of the firing rather than a flaw. KOUSYUHAI is shaped specifically around how a cup concentrates aroma, a very modern design brief solved with a very old material. That is three of the eight Arita-yaki collections; the other five collections make their own case just as deliberately, and are worth working through on your own.
Three More Ways the Region Keeps This Alive
KIHARA is not the only answer to that question already sitting in our range. Taseigama works in a decorative, giftable register: hand-painted plates in the "Musubi" knot pattern, an auspicious motif rendered in gold or in paired red and blue, made for the kind of occasion where the object itself is part of the gesture.
Ozaki Touki, a porcelain house running since 1877 and now in its fifth generation, takes a more everyday approach: donburi bowls and stretch plates with looser, painterly brushwork, built for a table rather than a display shelf.
39Arita goes further still into the present day, using Arita's dense, high-fired porcelain body not for painted decoration at all but for something closer to engineering: ceramic pour-over coffee filters, fired until the body itself is fine enough to filter coffee without paper.
Three makers, three genuinely different relationships to the same four-hundred-year-old material, and now a fourth alongside them.
At iromizu
We carry Taseigama, Ozaki Touki, and 39Arita's Arita porcelain already, and KIHARA's eight collections are joining them this year, our first ever direct relationship with an Arita maker. If you would like to see how one town's four-hundred-year-old discovery has ended up on a British table in this many different forms, our Arita-tradition range and the KIHARA maker page are the place to start.
Moments matter. Even the ones sitting on a shelf since 1616.