--- title: "What is mingei? Hamada Shōji and Japan's folk craft movement" description: "Mingei means folk craft: everyday things made by unnamed craftspeople. How the word was coined in 1925, what it valued, and how the potter Hamada Shōji worked by it in Mashiko." url: https://kama-meshi.com/en/articles/mingei-and-hamada language: en published: 2026-11-11 category: "Tōge no Kamameshi › Mashiko ware and ceramics" tags: ["MashikoWare"] author: "Oginoya Editorial Team" publisher: "Oginoya Co., Ltd." translations: zh-TW: https://kama-meshi.com/zh-tw/articles/mingei-and-hamada ko: https://kama-meshi.com/ko/articles/mingei-and-hamada zh-CN: https://kama-meshi.com/zh-cn/articles/mingei-and-hamada zh-HK: https://kama-meshi.com/zh-hk/articles/mingei-and-hamada th: https://kama-meshi.com/th/articles/mingei-and-hamada de: https://kama-meshi.com/de/articles/mingei-and-hamada fr: https://kama-meshi.com/fr/articles/mingei-and-hamada es: https://kama-meshi.com/es/articles/mingei-and-hamada --- # What is mingei? Hamada Shōji and Japan's folk craft movement ![A long climbing kiln of pale clay with a row of arched side openings, under a timber roof, with bundles of straw in front](https://kama-meshi.com/_astro/mashiko-sankokan-kiln-2022.7hcwIgND_10soMg.webp) *Mingei* is the Japanese word for folk craft: the pots, cloth and tools that unnamed craftspeople made for everyday use. The word was coined in 1925 by the thinker Yanagi Muneyoshi with the potters Hamada Shōji and Kawai Kanjirō, and Hamada (1894–1978) was the potter who, from 1924, lived in the pottery town of Mashiko and worked with its clay and glazes. ## A word coined in 1925 *Mingei* joins *min*, from the word for the common people, to *gei*, from *kōgei*, craft. Yanagi, Hamada and Kawai began to use the word at the end of 1925. Until then everyday craft objects of this kind were called *getemono*, the word that traders at morning markets used for ordinary cheap goods. Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889–1961), also known as Yanagi Sōetsu, was a Tokyo-born thinker who had helped found the literary magazine *Shirakaba* in 1910. Korean ceramics opened his eyes to the beauty of everyday things made by unnamed craftspeople. From 1916 he traveled to Korea again and again, and in 1924 he opened a small museum in Seoul for everyday objects of the Joseon dynasty. In 1926 Yanagi, Hamada, Kawai and the potter Tomimoto Kenkichi put their four names to a prospectus for a museum of Japanese folk craft. The Japan Folk Crafts Museum (Nihon Mingeikan) opened in 1936 at Komaba in Tokyo, and Yanagi became its first director. The museum holds about 17,000 objects. ![A two-story building with white plaster walls, pale stone and a tiled roof; a wooden plaque on the stone gatepost reads 日本民藝館](https://kama-meshi.com/_astro/mingeikan-komaba-2009.8s8KTYg-_ZyqSsD.webp "The Japan Folk Crafts Museum at Komaba, Tokyo, 2009.") ## Beauty in use Mingei turned to the daily utensils that the world of art had ignored. Yanagi wrote that the beauty of craft lies in its fitness for use, and he and his friends found in these things a "healthy" and "ordinary" beauty. A mingei object was made to be used. It carried no maker's signature. It was made by hand, from the materials and traditions of its region, in large numbers and at a low price. The museum's collection shows the range: ceramics of the Joseon dynasty, old Japanese pots from Tamba, Karatsu, Imari and Seto, Ainu robes, pottery and textiles from Okinawa, and old English slipware, pottery decorated with liquid clay. The makers who joined the movement included, in pottery, Bernard Leach from England, Hamada and Kawai; in dyeing, Serizawa Keisuke; and in woodblock prints, Munakata Shikō. ## Kyoto, England, Okinawa, Mashiko Hamada was born in Kawasaki, just south of Tokyo. In 1913 he entered the ceramics course of the Tokyo Higher Technical School, where he met Kawai, two years ahead of him, and after graduating he joined Kawai at the ceramic research institute in Kyoto to work on glazes. In 1919, calling on Leach at Yanagi's house, he met Yanagi. In 1920 Hamada went to England with Leach, and at St Ives, a harbor town in the far southwest, they built a climbing kiln of the East Asian kind. He later summed up his career in one sentence: "My work in pottery found its path in Kyoto, began in England, learned in Okinawa and grew up in Mashiko." He came home in 1924 and moved in the same year to Mashiko, in Tochigi Prefecture north of Tokyo. He wanted the country life he had seen in England and a place of work rooted in a solid way of living. [Mashiko](https://kama-meshi.com/en/articles/mashiko-ware) was a town that fired water jars, bowls and teapots for daily use. In 1930 he bought a thatched farmhouse in a nearby town and had it moved to Mashiko, and with a house and a climbing kiln of his own he began to work in earnest. In England his pots had carried a seal with 庄, the first character of his given name. In Mashiko he stopped marking them. ## Mashiko clay, Mashiko glazes Hamada renewed Mashiko ware with nothing but the clay the town had long used and seven kinds of glaze, and then added what he had learned elsewhere, such as the red overglaze enamels of Okinawa. One Mashiko glaze is *kaki*, "persimmon," made from a stone quarried at Ashinuma on the edge of the town. Used alone, this stone fires to the persimmon color particular to Mashiko ware. One technique he favored was *nagashi-kake*, pouring. He filled a ladle with glaze and poured it in one motion from as far as 30 centimeters outside the rim of a large bowl. He had taken a plain way of decorating that was traditional in Mashiko and remade it in his own manner. A bowl of 1957, 57.6 centimeters across, carries a lattice of thick white lines poured over a blue-green ground. He also worked in salt glaze, and he painted a sugarcane motif that became his own. In 1955 he was among the first people recognized as holders of an Important Intangible Cultural Property, the title known as Living National Treasure, and in 1968 he received the Order of Culture. After Yanagi died in 1961, Hamada succeeded him as director of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum, which holds about 450 of Hamada's works. ## What Hamada left in Mashiko When Hamada's pots sold, many Mashiko workshops began to make similar ware, and Mashiko ware took on the character of folk craft. Shimaoka Tatsuzō, who studied with him and opened a kiln in Mashiko in 1953, was named a Living National Treasure in 1996. In April 1977, the year before he died, Hamada opened part of his home as the Mashiko Sankōkan Museum. *Sankō* means "reference." The museum shows the ceramics, lacquer, woodwork, furniture and textiles that he had collected in Japan and abroad and had used as references for his own work. His climbing kiln, about 16 meters long, stands in the grounds. Unused after his death, it was fired again in 2015 for the first time in about 40 years, with nearly 100 people taking part. ![A long wooden workshop with a tiled roof and paper-screened windows, in a yard scattered with fallen leaves](https://kama-meshi.com/_astro/mashiko-sankokan-workshop-2022.BAXTIbvO_Z1zH1Vv.webp "The workshop at the Mashiko Sankōkan Museum, 2022.") The pot of [Tōge no Kamameshi](https://kama-meshi.com/en/articles/what-is-kamameshi), the station bento that Oginoya put on sale in 1958, is also Mashiko ware. It is [an earthenware pot](https://kama-meshi.com/en/articles/the-kama-pot), [pottery](https://kama-meshi.com/en/articles/pottery-and-porcelain) of the town that has fired vessels for daily use since about 1853. ## References - [The Japan Folk Crafts Museum: History](https://mingeikan.or.jp/about/history/) - [The Japan Folk Crafts Museum: Yanagi Sōetsu and the museum](https://mingeikan.or.jp/about/soetsu/) - [The Japan Folk Crafts Museum: Collection, Hamada Shōji](https://mingeikan.or.jp/collection_series/hamada_shoji/?lang=ja) - [Shoji Hamada Memorial Mashiko Sankokan Museum: About the museum](https://mashiko-sankokan.net/top/about/) - [Shoji Hamada Memorial Mashiko Sankokan Museum: Climbing kiln project](http://www.mashiko-sankokan.net/noborigama-project/about.html) - [Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art: Former residence of Hamada Shōji](https://www.mashiko-museum.jp/facilities/hamada/index.html) - [Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art: exhibition on Hamada and Leach](https://www.mashiko-museum.jp/exhibitions/ex200628/index.html) - [Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts: Large bowl, blue glaze and white lattice](https://www.art.pref.tochigi.lg.jp/collection/title/0054.html) - [Mashiko Town: About Mashiko ware](https://www.town.mashiko.lg.jp/page/page000115.html) - [Kotobank: “Mingei”](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%B0%91%E8%8A%B8-140021) - [Kotobank: “Hamada Shōji” (Japanese encyclopedias)](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%B5%9C%E7%94%B0%E5%BA%84%E5%8F%B8-14645) - [Geological Survey of Japan, Chishitsu News no. 317 (January 1981): Mashiko ware (PDF)](https://www.gsj.jp/data/chishitsunews/81_01_07.pdf) Image credits (resized for display): - [FukuroWaraw / Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E7%9B%8A%E5%AD%90%E5%8F%82%E8%80%83%E9%A4%A8%E7%99%BB%E3%82%8A%E7%AA%AF.jpg), [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), 2022 - [Kamemaru2000 / Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nihon_mingeikan_meguro_2009.JPG), [CC BY-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), 2009 - [FukuroWaraw / Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E7%9B%8A%E5%AD%90%E5%8F%82%E8%80%83%E9%A4%A8%E5%B7%A5%E6%88%BF%EF%BC%9A%E7%B4%B0%E5%B7%A5%E5%A0%B4%E5%A4%96%E8%A6%B3.jpg), [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), 2022