Bizen Ware (備前焼) reach back over a thousand years, to the first kilns that worked the hills near Imbe, Okayama. The reddish brown, unglazed style familiar today took shape by the thirteenth century, and has continued largely unchanged since. In the Bizen region, it has long been believed that tea and water taste smoother from unglazed clay, that flowers stay fresher in a Bizen vase, and that the surface grows more refined with years of use. The last one we can confirm ourselves; the rest remain traditional beliefs passed down by Bizen's own potters.
One of Six Ancient Kilns
Bizen ware traces its roots to the Heian period, over a thousand years ago, in what is now Imbe, a small town in Okayama Prefecture. It is one of Japan's Rokkoyo, the Six Ancient Kilns, and the only one that has never adopted glaze. Where most ceramic traditions layered color and pattern onto their work, Bizen artisans left the clay bare, trusting the fire to do what pigment could not. Bizen ware is shaped from Hiyose clay, a fine-grained, iron-rich clay unique to the region. There is no glaze and no decoration. Every color, texture, and marking on a finished piece comes entirely from the kiln: where the piece sat, how the ash settled, and how the flames moved around it. The classic route is the anagama, a single-chamber wood kiln fired for one to two weeks at a stretch. Hidasuki, the style Haremono works in, reaches the same bare surface by a different path.
