Shigaraki ware was as authentic as the porcelain of Satsuma or Arita – a complex art form refined over millennia – but it was folk art: the rustic pottery of a humble people. Deliberately ...

In the final stages of the war, due to a shortage of metals, ceramics from various regions in Japan, such as Shigaraki and Mino ware, were used as substitutes for metal and were employed in the ...

This time, he visited Koka, a city famed for ceramics, where he met Takahashi Rakusai the Fifth – a master of the centuries-old Shigaraki-yaki style. Takahashi Rakusai the Fifth remembers ...

We visit Japan's largest and oldest lake, Lake Biwa. A cat leads us to an overlook with a great view of the lake. We meet another cat hiding among the multitude of wares at a Shigaraki ceramics shop.

On May 14 exactly 30 years ago, a Shigaraki Kogen Railway Co. (SKR) train and a West Japan Railway Co. (JR West) train collided head-on, killing 42 people. I recently visited the accident site in ...

The official description reads: “Summer of 1940 in Shigaraki, Shiga Prefecture. Yoko Matsubara is a young girl with a talent for pottery. She dreams of becoming a ceramic artist, unaware of the ...