A Journey East
My fascination with Japan didn’t come from anime, in fact I don’t exactly remember where it stemmed from. I remember speaking to my aunt-in-law as a young teen and learning that she’d taught English there. Not long after I learned about the 2000s Harajuku vibes and remember writing on my Myspace page that I wanted to visit Tokyo and stay in a pod hotel. Fast forward a few years, when I was living in London, working minimum wage and struggling with my mental health, I ended up in a corner of YouTube filled with J-vloggers. Their videos gave me a sense of pace, the quiet moments, the way people moved through their day, it soothed me. At the time those videos were a small escape from the noise in my head, I didn’t realise it yet, but those videos planted a seed.
A few years later I’d moved to Switzerland, learned German, started a new career, got through the pandemic and found pottery, and the pull towards Japan was still there, so I saved up and booked nine weeks in Japan.
I landed in Tokyo jetlagged and nervous, and spent the first part of the trip travelling around, from the big cities to much quieter towns in the countryside. The main reason I’d gone, though, was to spend a month on a ceramics course in Tajimi, a small pottery town near Nagoya.
I spent the whole train ride wondering what the studio would be like and who I’d be sharing it with, and when our teaching assistant met us at the station I remember feeling calmer straight away. The people on my course turned out to be some of the best I could have shared it with. After the first throwing exercises, I spent most of my time learning to make kyusu teapots, along with other teaware, and for the first time my whole day was about clay, from heading to the studio in the morning to trying things, getting them wrong and starting again.
Some of my favourite moments happened outside the studio. One day I was walking down the alley by my guesthouse and stumbled across a production pottery, with a gas kiln far bigger than anything I’d seen before. The potter who ran it was so kind and showed me around, even though we didn’t have much language in common, and between a lot of pointing and smiling I got to see how a working pottery there actually runs day to day.
We fell into a little routine together, with shared dinners and stories in the evenings, and for that month my whole world shrank down to a small bubble of the studio and the village around it. I didn’t think about anything except pottery, and what I remember most is how still it all felt, with just the sounds of the village in the background while we worked. It was pure bliss, and it’s the feeling I’ve been trying to create in my own studio ever since.
