"I couldn't find a teapot I actually wanted."
The words came out easily, almost casually. But they stopped me cold. Here was Araki-san — a fifth-generation ceramicist, raised in a household where teapots were as ordinary as chopsticks — and he was telling me that none of them had ever felt right in his hands.
If you have spent any time browsing Japanese lifestyle shops or specialty tea stores, you have likely seen his work: matte black, quietly modern, the kind of teapot that looks like it has always existed. Nankei Pottery, based in Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture, makes those. What I did not know, until I visited the workshop, was how personal the origin story was.
"I just wanted one for myself."
Araki-san joined the family business about thirty years ago. He had been around teapots his entire life — seeing more of them, he says, than most people see in a lifetime. And yet nothing on the market matched what he wanted to hold, to pour from, to set on a table in his own home.
Three to four years. That is how long he spent researching before he produced a teapot he genuinely wanted to own.
He liked matte textures. He did not have a fixed image of what the teapot should look like — only a feeling for how its surface should behave under fingertips. What emerged was Kuroneri: a matte black teapot made from iron-rich clay, fired until the surface tightens and the color deepens to something between charcoal and wet stone.
The color is not applied. It is the clay itself — shidei, the iron-heavy earth native to this region — transformed by heat. No glaze, no coating. Just earth and fire.
What happens in the kiln.
"The thrill of pottery is the firing," Araki-san says. "What I can control is the clay I choose and the temperature I set. Everything else belongs to the kiln. You receive a baptism from the god of fire — you do not know how the piece will come out until you open the door. It is the last step. The sacred one. That is where I want to put my focus."
This is how the workshop's making goes. Not with certainty, but with preparation and then surrender — a respect for the moment when clay stops being raw material and becomes something else entirely.
From selling earth to shaping it.
The story begins not with teapots but with soil. In 1913, Araki-san's great-grandfather started a clay business — digging earth from the nearby mountains, hauling it by ox cart, and refining it into material suitable for pottery wheels.
"They dug the mountain, carried the soil by cow, and spread it across terraced fields to refine the grain," Araki-san explains. "Then they left it to rest. Over time, microorganisms multiplied in the clay, and that is what made it suitable for firing."
Yokkaichi had around two hundred kilns back then. Clay sold as fast as it could be dug. But the family eventually transitioned from supplying raw material to working with it themselves. In 1972, they restarted as a teapot workshop. Today the workshop's catalogue holds roughly fifty types of kyusu alone, down from a peak of nearly two hundred.
Alongside their own line, the workshop produces OEM pieces for other brands — a fact that means you may already own something their hands have shaped without knowing it.
The clay is running out.
The mountains that once supplied unlimited raw material are disappearing — not geologically, but economically. Landowners now find it more profitable to develop hillsides into housing and commercial lots than to sell the earth beneath them. The specific clay the workshop relied on was nearly cut off entirely.
What remains is often lower-grade soil. Impurities that would have disqualified a batch twenty years ago now must be painstakingly removed — filtered, refined, reworked — before the clay reaches a usable state. More labor, more cost, for material that was once simply dug and carted away.
We hold a teapot and see a finished object. It is easy to forget that the object began as a hillside — that ceramics, for all their permanence on the shelf, are borrowed from the earth and cannot be borrowed forever.
The pottery region nobody knows.
"Most people cannot even read the characters for Banko-yaki," Araki-san says. "That tells you everything about our visibility. We are the third-largest pottery-producing region in Japan by output, and nobody has heard of us."
The reason is structural. Yokkaichi's ceramic industry was built on wholesalers and trading companies — Banko-yaki workshops produced behind the scenes, making OEM ware and private-label goods. The makers' names never appeared. In the thirty years since Araki-san joined the business, the number of active kilns has dropped to roughly a fifth of what it was.
"A production region where the craftsman's name never surfaces," he says. There is no bitterness in the way he puts it. Just clarity.
For me, it was actually Banko-yaki that first made me pay attention to where pottery comes from. The first kyusu I ever picked up happened to be a collaboration between Nankei Pottery and the ceramicist Yumiko Iihoshi.
Tucked inside was a small card explaining what Banko-yaki was — placed there by Iihoshi-san, who wanted to draw attention to a region most buyers would never think about. That card was the beginning of something for me. I had no habit of drinking Japanese tea at home at the time. I bought the teapot purely as an object — drawn to the weight of it in my hand, the smoothness where the handle met the body, the way the lid settled into place with a soft, precise click. I have used it almost daily for years now, and the satisfaction of that click has not faded.
From personal to product.
The Kuroneri teapot was never intended for sale. Araki-san made it for himself — one piece, for his own kitchen. A buyer at a well-known department store saw it and would not let it go.
"He kept insisting. 'Let me sell this.' I kept saying no. It wasn't at a level I could put in front of customers — not as a product."
When Araki-san uses the word "product," he means something specific: an object that carries the warmth of a one-off studio piece but can be reproduced at a consistent quality. That tension — between the handmade and the repeatable — is the core of what the workshop does. Achieving it with Kuroneri took until November 2000.
"It was genuinely hard," he says. "You cannot offer something to a customer if it has not reached product level. That is exactly why I kept saying I would not sell it."
Today, Kuroneri kyusu appear in select shops across Japan. What began as one man's dissatisfaction with the teapots around him — a private itch he could not stop scratching — became the piece that defined a workshop.
The projects nobody else will take.
Araki-san's reputation for solving difficult problems brings a steady stream of clients who arrive carrying ideas that other workshops have refused.
"He takes on projects that have been turned down everywhere else," says his wife, Rei-san, laughing.
Araki-san does not disagree. "Figuring out what other people cannot do — that is the most enjoyable part. I cannot always give a client exactly what they ask for. But there is always a way to get close. Finding that way together, arriving at the point where we say, 'this we can do' — that process is the reward. And when the finished piece makes them happy, it is going to sell. You can feel it."
From finalized design to stable production, each new piece takes roughly a year — time spent training staff, building custom tools, adjusting and failing and adjusting again.
"It is hard on the staff, and there is no profit in it," Rei-san says, though she is smiling. "But because of that, we have accumulated techniques for shapes that most workshops would not attempt."
"Honestly," Araki-san says, "a maker wants to keep doing the same thing forever. It is easy. But it is not interesting. If you want to do something enjoyable, difficulty comes attached — things you have to do, problems you have to solve. Staying comfortable means declining. So you need to light a fire under yourself. I am not very good at that, though. That is why when a hard project comes in, I take it."
While most workshops in the region repeat the same catalogue year after year, Araki-san's team releases roughly one hundred new pieces on a two-to-three-year cycle.
A tool that follows the tea.
Araki-san's guiding principle is simple enough to state and difficult enough to sustain: the teapot is a tool, and the tea is the main character. Everything else follows from that.
When tea changes, the teapot should change with it. The mesh of the built-in strainer, for instance, has been adjusted across generations — its hole size calibrated to the leaf styles of each era. "More people are choosing single-origin teas now," he says. "The strainer has to match that."
I remember the moment I first held a Nankei kyusu — before I knew anything about the workshop, before I even drank Japanese tea at home. What caught me was the lid. The way it dropped into the rim and sat there, flush and still, with a fit so precise it felt engineered rather than handmade.
"We grind every lid against its body with a whetstone, one by one," Araki-san says. "That friction is what creates the seal. It means the tea does not leak. But beyond function, I want the user to enjoy the feeling of that lid — the way it settles. It may be more effort than necessary. But that is our commitment."
The spout, too — shaped to pour cleanly to the last drop, to cut without dripping. Usability as a brewing instrument and presence as a piece of contemporary design, held in the same object. That balance is what Araki-san cares about most.
When the feeling is genuine.
"If I cannot vouch for a piece myself, it will not sell. What we can do is keep making things that people will genuinely want."
Only what they truly want to make reaches the production line. The distance between that statement and the reality of executing it — the years of research, the kiln failures, the material shortages — is larger than most people imagine.
There is a small story that captures this. The photographs and text in the workshop's product catalogue were created by a university student who showed up at the factory one day, unannounced, asking for a tour. "I want to make your catalogue," the student said. Araki-san handed over the project.
"Work done out of genuine feeling is powerful," he says. "When someone's enthusiasm is real, what they produce is different. It was a good connection — the kind you cannot plan for. Honestly, that is how we run our entire business."
The finished catalogue is unlike any standard product brochure. It reads like a letter from someone who fell in love with a workshop and could not keep quiet about it.
Perhaps that is the thread running through everything Nankei Pottery makes — the conviction that the feeling behind the work is inseparable from the work itself. A teapot that exists because someone needed it to exist. A surface that earns its color in the kiln. A lid ground by hand until it sits just so.
