The tobikanna bowl

An everyday rice bowl. The foot ring (4) lifts it clear of the table and gives the fingers somewhere to rest while the rice is still hot. It holds one serving, and is filled again as often as the meal asks (fig. 3).

Every day, for rice. And for anything else that will fit: leftover rice with broth poured over it, a little simmered food, yogurt in the morning. Nothing about this bowl asks to be kept back for guests (fig. 4).

Wash it by hand. Detergent is fine. The foot ring (4) is bare clay with no glaze on it, so turn the bowl over, foot upward, and let it dry all the way through before it goes back on the shelf (fig. 5). The clay deepens in color little by little, beginning where the bowl is used most. That change is ordinary, and it belongs to whoever has used the bowl.

The half-dry bowl is coated with white slip and set back on the wheel. A thin, springy steel blade (fig. 6) is held against the turning surface. The blade bites in, leaps, and comes down again. Carried once around without the hand stopping, it leaves a single band of cuts (3).

No two bands are alike. The cuts come out of the speed of the wheel, the temper of the steel, and the pressure of a hand on one particular afternoon.

Onta ware is made at Sarayama, in the mountains of Hita, in Ōita Prefecture. The kiln is said to have been opened in the second year of Hōei (1705), and a potter from Koishiwara, in Chikuzen, is said to have brought the craft there (fig. 7).

The clay is raw earth dug from around Sarayama. It is pounded in mortars turned by water from the Ōura River, then strained and dried in the sun; the pots are glazed without a preliminary bisque firing and fired in a climbing kiln. There are nine kiln houses (as of 2025).

In 1995 Onta ware became a national Important Intangible Cultural Property. The holder is a group, 小鹿田焼技術保存会, the society that preserves the techniques of Onta ware, and the designation is for all the kilns of the village together rather than for any one person. In 2008 the whole of Sarayama was selected as an Important Cultural Landscape.

Yanagi Muneyoshi (Sōetsu) visited Sarayama in 1931 and wrote about it in “Hita no Sarayama”.