Chawan: form, use and changing taste

In Japanese, chawan can mean a tea bowl or an everyday rice bowl. A gohan-jawan holds rice; a matcha bowl is used to prepare and drink powdered tea. In chanoyu, that drinking vessel is also examined, named and collected. This article focuses on the tea bowl while keeping the everyday meaning distinct.

Profiles include rounded bowls, half cylinders, cylinders and shallow forms. Wide, shallow hira-jawan are often associated with summer; deeper tsutsu-jawan help retain warmth in winter. Form, material, glaze and decoration can all contribute to seasonal selection, alongside the arrangement of a particular gathering.

Chinese tea wares, including tenmoku and celadon bowls, became important in medieval Japan. Tea drinking spread beyond temples into other social settings. Fourteenth-century Seto kilns began making tea ceramics after imported models. Local makers were thus learning from and adapting these vessels, alongside the circulation of Chinese originals. Imitation involved material choices too. Kyoto National Museum notes that Seto clay contains less iron than Jian clay, leaving exposed areas near the foot paler. Some Seto bowls received an iron-rich coating there to darken them in firing. A similar appearance could therefore require a different treatment of the local material.

Changing sixteenth-century tea preferences increased the prominence of Korean bowls. Uraku Ido, made in sixteenth-century Korea, has an outward-opening body, a loquat-toned glaze and a visible foot. Kōrai bowls include many categories, such as Ido and Goki, as well as vessels later commissioned by Japanese tea practitioners.

In the Momoyama period, Chōjirō made red and black Raku bowls in response to Sen no Rikyū’s preferences. Hand forming followed by trimming is central to these vessels. The documented red bowl Tarōbō has a half-cylindrical body, a relatively thick base and a slightly inward rim, a different profile from an open celadon bowl. Firing helps explain Raku’s soft body. The maker Ogawa Chōraku describes small kilns with an inner chamber, from which bowls are withdrawn and rapidly cooled before the body becomes hard-fired. This modern workshop account explains the technical relationship; it is not a firing record for Tarōbō. That historic bowl’s catalogue specifies a reddish-brown soft body under a thin transparent glaze, rather than simply a red glaze painted onto the surface.

Momoyama Mino developed distinctive Shino and Oribe tea ceramics. The Shino bowl Furisode has a white-glazed surface through which grasses can be seen. Japanese tea bowls are therefore not synonymous with Raku: kiln traditions, forming methods, clays and glazes produce different profiles and surfaces.

The Momoyama black Oribe bowl Fuyugare in the Tokugawa Art Museum was thrown on a wheel, then gently distorted. Its undulating rim and trimmed lower body are combined with contrasting glazed areas. Black covers the interior and part of the exterior; a reserved area carries iron-painted decoration under white glaze, while other patterns are cut into black and filled with white. The cultural-property account explains the deep black iron glaze through rapid cooling after removal from the kiln. This bowl combines post-throwing alteration with divided decoration, unlike Chōjirō’s hand-formed Raku example.

A bowl’s mei is its individual name, separate from its maker or kiln category. A name may refer to an owner, appearance or associated story. For Chōjirō’s black Raku bowl Omokage, the Raku Museum records Yamada Sōhen’s naming and Ishikawa Jian’s explanation that it resembled Hachibiraki, owned by Hosokawa Sansai. Such accompanying inscriptions preserve later comparisons and interpretations. They provide a different kind of evidence from a maker’s mark impressed during production.

In 1930, Arakawa Toyozō’s discoveries helped establish Mino as the source of old Shino. The National Crafts Museum explains how he studied fragments, materials and firing, then developed his own work beyond replication. His Shino bowl Fudō, dating to about 1953, belongs to postwar production, even though its research began with Momoyama ceramics. The National Crafts Museum links this research to clay, feldspar glaze, hand-wheel forming, wooden trimming tools and wood firing. In Fudō, reddish colour emerges near thinner glaze and finger traces, alongside small pits. Its red body clay and some crawled-glaze effects are less typical of Momoyama Shino. Studying fragments led to a vocabulary for new work, rather than simply producing an old-looking replica.