JAPANESE CULTURE, EXPLAINED
楽焼
Raku is a ceramic tradition closely associated with Kyoto’s Raku family and tea practice. Chōjirō is central to its early history. Forming, trimming, glazing and firing explain more than colour alone.
The Raku Museum places Chōjirō at the centre of the tradition’s late-sixteenth-century beginnings and relates his bowls to Sen no Rikyū’s tea. The museum proposes around 1579 for the start of these bowls, retaining uncertainty about the early chronology. The museum traces the glazing background to Ming three-colour ware. Chōjirō’s red and black bowls transformed that technical inheritance through forms associated with Rikyū’s wabi tea.
The Raku Museum describes an earlier name, ima-yaki, followed by Juraku-yaki and then Raku. It connects the name with the Jurakudai area and Rikyū, while presenting Hideyoshi’s gift of a seal as a transmitted account. The naming process, workshop succession and seal story should not be treated as one securely dated event.
Hand-form the clay, then carve it when partly dry. Trimming shapes the walls, rim and base rather than merely decorating a finished bowl.
Kanai Shisei describes his red bowls as iron-coloured clay under transparent glaze, and black glaze made from ground Kamogawa stone and glass. His firing temperatures are 850–900°C and 1250°C respectively; tongs remove the bowls once the glaze melts. These are his processes, not universal recipes.
Black Omokage is by Chōjirō; red Shūkaidō is by the tenth-generation Tannyū. They are not a matched pair. In Shūkaidō, look beyond the colour name: vertical and horizontal carving shapes the body, while firing produces bright red and dark-green areas. “Red raku” need not mean a uniformly red surface.
The Raku Museum describes ninth-generation Ryōnyū emphasizing vertical, horizontal and diagonal carving as both form and decoration; Tannyū developed it further. Earlier, Jōkei had also used white glaze alongside red and black. Change within the family concerns both glaze and the tool’s role in shaping a bowl.
The Ōhi Museum records Sensō Sōshitsu taking the first Ōhi Chōzaemon to Kanazawa in 1666. There, raku techniques supported a local tradition noted for amber-brown glaze. Movement through tea networks produced a distinct workshop history; Ōhi ware is not simply another name for a Kyoto Raku generation.
Kakunyū, the fourteenth generation, opened the Raku Museum in 1978. Its inherited bowls, tea objects and documents preserve examples from which later makers learn while developing their own forms. Continuing production and preserving earlier work are related parts of transmission, distinct from the post-firing processes associated with Western raku.
V&A distinguishes Japanese traditional practice from a common Western approach that places the hot vessel in combustible material after firing, producing surface reduction effects. The English word can therefore refer to different processes; smoking is not a compulsory step in all Japanese raku.
The walls and profile still need shaping; tool marks can also become surface expression.
Firing produces different tones within one work; the category does not require uniform colour.
No. It is common in Western raku and must be distinguished from a particular Japanese maker’s process.