For over seventy years, KIHARA has been connecting the porcelain towns of Arita and Hasami to the present day. Founded in 1955 in Arita, Saga Prefecture, the company works differently from a single family kiln: KIHARA is a regional trading and design house that brings together specialist kilns and artisans across both towns, each contributing their own particular skill (mould-making, forming, painting, glazing) to a single piece. Its 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.

Arita's porcelain story is traditionally traced to 1616, when the Korean potter is credited with discovering porcelain stone at Izumiyama, leading to Japan's first sustained porcelain production in the region. Gosu 呉須, the cobalt-based blue pigment associated with Japanese underglaze porcelain, appears throughout much of KIHARA's work, applied either by hand or through a pad-printing method fine enough to hold an intricate pattern and print cleanly onto curved surfaces. Elsewhere in the range, pieces are finished by hand in sabi, an iron-oxide pigment that fires to a warm rust-brown. In some collections, a single motif is decorated twice: Gosu blue applied and fired beneath the glaze, then a red overglaze pigment added afterwards and fixed in a separate, lower-temperature firing, giving the pattern genuine visual depth. A smaller number of pieces carry overglaze gold and enamel work, also added after the main firing. Taken together, this reflects not one single skill but a wide regional network of kilns and specialist artisans that KIHARA coordinates, each contributing their own particular craft.

At iromizu, KIHARA's pieces span a wider range than any other maker we carry, across eight collections, each with its own character. Explore them below.