Financial Times Weekend 22-23Feb2020

10 ★ FTWeekend 22 February/23 February 2020

House Home

I

foundmyfirstpiecewhileIwasona

bad date — a very bad date. I had

just moved to Tokyo for a year and,

keen to meet people, agreed to go

with him to a flea market on the

city’soutskirts.

I noticed an octagonal bowl with a

blue-and-white chrysanthemum pat-

tern,mass-producedbutstillpretty,

laidoutonablanketamongthe

potsandvasesonthefloor.The

elderly woman selling wanted

Y500 (£3.50) for it, and I was

about to buy it when my date

dragged me off to scour the

racks of Y100 vintage T-shirts.

Andscourwedid,spendingmore

than an hour looking at my 1990s

wardrobe.

The bowl was still there

when we got back to the stall,

but my date insisted on bar-

gaining the woman down by

Y100. That was the last time I

saw him. The bowl and I are

still together.

In fact, it is the bowls and

dishes and cups I have bought

and studied that have shaped

my understanding of Japan,

andmyplaceinit.

I threw a belated house-

warming party two months

after I arrived, crowding my

flat with colleagues, neighbours and

new friends. While neighbours brought

grapes — in Japan, these tend to be an

expensive delicacy — an Australian col-

league gave me a ribbed ceramic vase,

glazed deep green with an inch of plain

clayatthebottom.Itcamewithastory.

She had walked past a craft school

that was giving out items that the pot-

ters had not collected. This particular

vasewasinscribedonthebottom

with a date and two names

separated by a heart symbol,

suggesting a gift for a romance

that did not survive the firing

process. Dating Tokyo style:

Netflix and kiln.

Soon afterwards, I bought

two square vases less than

5cm high. These were deco-

rated withkarakusa, a scrolled

design featuring lines with

small leaves that curve

inwards on themselves. Their

colours were blue andaka,

the auspicious Japanese scar-

let-crimson.

I came across the vases in the

Tokyo Midtown shopping-

office-hotel-food court complex

inRoppongi,afancyareanear

my flat, which is also home to

the Suntory Museum of Art.

This is where I saw the full

measure of the country’s

appreciation of ceramics, and

started to understand what they could

teachmeaboutJapan.

The museum was exhibiting tea-

ware from Mino — an area 185 miles

west of Tokyo — produced during and

after the Momoyama period of the late

16th century. The star exhibit was an

early 17th-century dish, shaped like a

semi circle, pinched to form a dome,

with a handle.

Half the dish was painted with white

plum blossoms against the dark clay,

while the other half, jaggedly separate,

was an abstract lake of uneven green

glaze. That glaze drips off the underside

ofthehandlewithafreshgleam,despite

having been frozen against the handle

for centuries.

To me, this was as radical as if the

potter had pulled it out of a kiln yes-

terday, embodying incompleteness,

roughness, asymmetry, happenstance

— characteristics in art that were

understood and prized in the west

with the advent of modernism in the

early 20th century. But here was a

dish that proved that radical ideas

have run through Japanese culture for

hundreds of years.

In art, I have always enjoyed how

the abstract abuts the figurative; JMW

Turner’s genius was to paint a shifting

metaphysical form, add a ship and call

it the sea. This tendency always

seemed new and alive, and I loved the

surprise of seeing it in domestic

objects in Tokyo.

The pieces embodied a Japanese

stream of thought known aswabi sabi,

usually understood to mean something

like “beauty in imperfection”. But it also

means, as a friend put it, appreciating

“outcome without intention”. The way

the kiln happens to have made the glaze

Beauty in

imperfection

Expat lives| Japanese ceramics and streams of

thought helped FT journalistJosh Speroto start

understanding his adopted country

(Left) Shelves

in Spero’s Tokyo

flat feature the

blue-and-white

chrysanthemum

motif bowl he

bought at a

Tokyo flea

market

Cup by Kyoto-

based potter

Derek Larsen

Spero appreciates the concept of wabi sabi, ‘the way the kiln happens to make the glaze run, or the way life leaves its marks on you’— Yasuyuki Takagi for the FT

FEBRUARY 22 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 19/2/2020 - 18: 03 User: rosalind.sykes Page Name: RES10, Part,Page,Edition: RES, 10, 1