The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Craftsman

An overgrown corner of Tokoname; photo by Alex Qi

I knew the chimney had been sleeping for at least some time. Its sun-touched brick face was oddly pristine but for some dusky imprints left behind by coal-fired smoke that once billowed out its throat. Below, nothing designated this place as home to a livelihood but a tourist plaque. Built in 1958, Year 33 of the Showa Era; it sells noodles and sake. I glanced back up. Nature too tried to reclaim the chimney - except she had given up. Her drapery of vine parched brown all the way down. This would not be the only dead kiln on my path.

We had come in search of several families’ wares. I made my way past an overgrown mural, lots littered with broken ceramic, and an empty warehouse (wrong address, said my girlfriend, who is somewhat fluent in Japanese) before arriving at the local ceramics center. Armed with a long catalogue of kiln signatures, twenty minutes of checking pot stamps blurred past before I gave up confidence and turned to the woman at the register. Did they carry Gyouzan? 

She shook her head: not any more. Yukizou, he isn’t here. 

I found, long before I walked over the bridge to this quiet town an hour’s journey by train and by car south of industrial Nagoya, that Nakano Yukizou—founder of the Gyouzan Kiln and potter, whose tatarazukuri techniques had inspired attempts to build ceramics of my own—had shuttered his kiln. I found, in his work, the fate of the industrial craftsman.

Bonsai does not strike the ear with an industrial note. The mind conjures an old man hunched over a small plant, a tidy allusion to inner peace. But supply enough demand for an art, and its artists will need more tools to create more art; supply enough demand for any tool, and its craftsmen will have on their hands an industry. So it was with taming and dwarfing nature vis à vis clay. Bonsai pots, alongside shears, wires, and formulated soil, allow the artist to control the space and nutrients that keep an otherwise large tree small. Their business was a commercial enterprise not unlike those in pigment, canvas, or paint tubes. As a French painter put it, “without colors in tubes, there would be no Cézanne, no Monet, no Pissarro, and no Impressionism.” If volume could subsidize commission, then industrial craft would grow art’s fruit.

To understand the rise of the bonsai pot industry, it is necessary to understand the rise of the nation whose fortunes it was linked with. Japan’s wallet had fattened in the years after it signed its instrument of surrender. American defense dollars and a deft industrial policy had raised from the depths and devastation of war a new middle class and a new nouveau-rich elite, flush with cash flowing through Toyota, Sony, and Panasonic. Their money went in search of discretion beyond necessity. One was found and brought home: nature, in miniature, en masse. Demand for bonsai gave rise to the professional bonsai garden, the professional bonsai artist, and the professional bonsai exhibition. In a rush of speculation, scouts climbed mountains to find and dug out wild trees—yamadori—with attributes no human could replicate. Some lost their lives doing so.

A Gyouzan pot paired with an American yamadori. Credit to Bonsai Mirai.

Specialized ceramics were needed to outfit not only the exhibition yamadori that earned state recognition, but also the bonsai that adorned middle-class backyards across Japan. Tokoname, oldest and largest of the nation’s Six Ancient Kilns, had for a millennium served as a ceramics town. The emergence of new molding technologies, improvements in kiln design, and engineering advances in clay formulas—alongside revivals of ceramic tradition from before the war—revolutionized its output. Now Tokoname made everything from toilet seats to wind chimes to bonsai pots. One kiln could go from producing a few dozen pieces to thousands per year. 

It was in this bustling new world that Nakano Yukizou opened his shop in 1972. His Gyouzan kiln would join dozens of other bonsai pot kilns that dealt in the business of joining form and function at scale. Yukizou focused his time on unglazed ceramics. He had a fondness for designs in rectangular forms that could anchor the imposing junipers and pines standing over Japan’s natural landscape. A quietness guided his hand, though for fun, he would experiment with muted glazes too. A few roads away, Sadamitsu Kataoka of the Yamaaki kiln, whose gas kiln could fire up to 200 pots at a time, sometimes deviated from his usual style to carve clay, mimicking the damage left behind by boreworms in wood. Crass, a bonsai apprentice told me; only foreigners like this style now. Nearby Hirata Atsumi of the Bigei kiln, which opened in 1975, worked vermillion-red clay into pots for shohin, or small bonsai, whose minute, twisting deadwood he admired and would draw attention to with his fine carvings and crisp line work. A little while away labored Aiba Kouichirou of the Kouyou kiln, which opened the same year as Gyouzan and became renowned in time for its mastery of oribe, a grey-speckled glaze of crackled emerald and flashes of blue—and whose son and continuer of the craft, Aiba Kuniaki, was kind enough to drive us from their storefront to the local co-op. 

Like his peers, Yukizou divided the kiln business into tiers of craftsmanship, appealing to both the large middle and the small top. Its lower tier consisted of affordable wares that yet retained quality. These were thoughtful in design and often hand-trimmed, whose production was still overseen by masters: reliable work shoes for the middle class family’s bonsai. Custom pots for masterpieces comprised the kiln’s higher tier. These would become slippers to the trees at Kokufu, Japan’s most prestigious bonsai exhibition. Gyouzan’s production-grade pots can be had today for less than two hundred dollars; the master’s fully hand-crafted works, upward of five thousand. Thus fired at full throttle, productivity dusted all Tokoname’s kilns in the trappings of a golden age.

But no golden age lasts forever.

China, too, harbored a long tradition of bonsai, far longer than Japan’s. It was in the imperial courts of the Tang Dynasty thirteen centuries ago that bonsai—from penzai, the Chinese root word—first came into existence as art. Penzai was a unique form of art, like the Tang’s written script and legal code, that Japanese diplomats carried back home to repurpose as their own. Maintained well into the 1800s, Chinese ceramic culture reached its zenith in meccas like Yixing during the Qing Dynasty. Of such acclaim were Qing pots that the Japanese artisan would oft journey across the sea to watch how Yixing’s weathered hands would wrangle clay, mined from the nearby Yellow and Green Dragon Mountains, into a menagerie of shape and color. What skill they had, though, would be forgotten over a century of war.

In the ensuing wreckage, a scant six years after Nakano Yukizou opened his Tokoname shop, China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, announced in Beijing the reform of the country’s centrally planned economy.

Japan’s high had once demarcated China’s low. Now, the latter would overtake the former. As China began industrializing in earnest, its ceramics industry staged a comeback—not through honed craft, but through the ruthless scale of production. Bonsai pots can be quite simple creations. Industry men saw in them a lucrative opportunity, an increasingly global market whose domination needed none of the old dynasty’s artisanal memory. Their domestic manufacture thus was uniquely susceptible to mass production at extraordinary scale. Whereas Gyouzan and other kilns mixed high-quality stoneware clay and pressed them into plaster molds, ensuring the uniformity of production-grade pieces, Chinese factories turned to watered-down clay mixed with deflocculants, or anti-clumping chemicals. One untrained laborer pouring this muddy liquid into plaster molds could now do the work of ten trained potters in a tenth the time. The resulting product was worse in every way—lighter, brittle, prone to breakage, and nonporous, altogether a bad combination for bonsai health and weather’s daily wear-and-tear. But it was much cheaper.

Tokoname, a town which at one point owned as much as half of the bonsai pot market, could thus do nothing to stop the avalanche that bore down upon them from the east. Slowly, then quickly, Chinese bonsai pot production grew from the hundreds to the millions. In less a price war than a price conquest, imports buried Tokoname wares—bonsai pots and teapots and pipes and toilet seats and wind chimes—on store shelves just as the broader Japanese economy tottered into the Lost Decade.

To walk through Tokoname today looking for active potters is to walk through a charming, growing graveyard of industrial craft. There is an earnestness to the town, whose pottery-littered paths are interspersed with the occasional cafe, the occasional independent shop, the occasional ceramics museum—yet. Tokoname has lost over three-quarters of its original 40 bonsai pottery kilns. The largest among them, the Yamaaki kiln, which had focused on production and the global market, shut down in 2011. A few fourth and fifth-generation craftsmen continue to work, with catalogues like those of old still being mailed out in Japan, with some foreign visitors—from America, from Europe—still journeying to see them. Kakuyuki Watanabe of the Kakuzan kiln, who visited America’s National Bonsai Exhibition in New York last year, still labors with pride in his cluttered second-story workshop decorated with pots dressed in stunning yellow glaze and pots caressed with dragon motifs, while his son works downstairs. But successors are in short supply, and the potters of Tokoname grow ever fewer in number. I tried in vain to reach the man who had unknowingly set me on this journey. 

Nakano Yukizou died earlier this year. 

His life’s work is harder to find now. Leaving its home, I looked elsewhere. After some frustration, having misread the local bus schedule, we made our way—via a taxi called by a local police officer sympathetic to our plight—to a garden in Saitama Prefecture famed for hosting the largest collection of quality bonsai pots in Japan. But global demand for these ceramics has grown, as bonsai spread outside of East Asia (though almost all of it is serviced by either mass production or local artisans without industrial operations). Some Germans had beaten me to the chase. The store specialized in Qing Dynasty antiques, otherwise, which are less known and pricier than Tokoname-ware to the international buyer. And so it was not until a few days later that, wandering the streets of Tokyo, I discovered a production-grade Gyouzan hidden under a bench of a local bonsai shop wedged between empty lots.

The journey has made one thing clear to me. It is that while the craftsman and the industrialist are each well alive, their child, the industrial craftsman, is fading from memory. There is now little left of the personal touch in scale. Prosperity left as quickly as it came—nothing unique to the bonsai potter. Scrimmaging through shop shelves, I found that the fate of Tokoname, Japan is a shared destiny: that of technicians who proudly carved brass in Elkhart, Indiana for quality band instruments in the factories of C.G. Conn, King, Selmer, Buescher, which now assemble rather than make; that of cobblers who welted leather in Brockton, Massachusetts, for quality shoes that first were run south for lower costs, then discarded into a history museum that opens for but two hours every other Sunday; that of bladesmiths grinding steel into shape in Sheffield, England for quality cutlery, lost to the same plight as the nation’s coal miners; that of seamstresses who punched thread in Greensboro, North Carolina for quality jeans in the Cone Denim White Oak Plant and its selvedge denim mills; and innumerably many, many more.

We once did not have to make the difficult decision to trade quality for abundance. Now goods have encamped in opposing banks on the river of consumption—as luxuries, even and especially those made by craft revival, and as the ever-cheaper commodity at its ever-lower quality. We, by force of wallet’s habit, almost always choose the latter. What of the former we buy, we buy as indulgence rather than as part and parcel of a staple diet.

What was responsible for the rise is now responsible for the fall. The business school has impressed upon me that capital's appetite for alpha knows no moderation by nature. Only briefly did the happy marriage of craft and industrial scale last as it did, having long since divorced. Where the two still meet, once in a while, is under government’s trellis: under tender labels and protected designations.

Accessibility has long been capitalism’s greatest defense. The democratization of everyday goods is well-evidenced by history. Thus it does not matter how rich the rich get, so the saying goes, if the poor get less poor. Andrew Carnegie rests upon this premise, in the opening salvo of The Gospel of Wealth, the realist virtue of capitalism, a mandate once held high by no less a place than Tokoname and no less a craftsman than Nakano Yukizou: “The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us today measures the change which has come with civilization…The poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford.”

In turn, I ask: what does more matter if the good afforded me is of no good?

Alex Qi (MBA '27) is from Irvine, California. He studied philosophy, politics, and physics at New York University. Prior to HBS, he worked in corporate strategy and M&A at Northrop Grumman in Virginia.