Heian Tofukuji

From combs to pots, at forty

His father came from Seto and made combs; chrysanthemums and bonsai were his pleasures. Kisaburo followed him into the trade. Then Japan turned to Western dress, the comb business fell away with it, and at around forty he made his hobby his living.

From about 1929 he made pots and nothing else. The span ran roughly forty years, through the war and out the other side, to his death in 1970. He began late and never stopped.

櫛職人から、四十にして鉢づくり専門の陶業家へ。

Why the work covers so much ground

The first thing a collector notices about Tofukuji is range: form after form, glaze after glaze, at every size from the palm-sized upward. There is a structural reason for it, and it is not the one you would guess.

He never owned a kiln. To the end of his life he fired in rented ones — chingari-gama. That was possible only because Kyoto had built an elaborate division of labour around its potteries, where firing could be bought as a service.

For most potters, no kiln means no freedom. For Tofukuji it worked the other way: he was never married to one firing, and could reach for whatever a piece asked for.

“A pot that shows a tree well.”

The pots reward looking at on their own. But the phrase attached to them in Japanese is about use: 盆栽を植えてよく映る — plant a tree in it and the tree looks right. That is the whole ambition, and it is why growers rather than ceramic collectors made his name.

A borrowed name, and the temple that actually mattered

Tofukuji is the name of a great Rinzai Zen monastery in Kyoto, and it is tempting to read a connection into it. There is almost none. He took the name because he lived nearby. The monastery has some association with viewing stones; with bonsai and pots, effectively none. The name was borrowed, and that is all.

The temple that shaped his work was a different one — 東本願寺 Higashi Hongan-ji, seat of the Otani branch of Jodo Shinshu. The link was a man: Tsutazo Kawai 河合蔦蔵 (1886–1962), among the foremost bonsai connoisseurs of his day and founder of the Kyoto nursery Kosoen.

Kawai's ties to the Otani family ran deep enough that he built a house inside the temple's inner grounds and lived there, caring for the bonsai left by the twenty-third abbot, Otani Kozon — known to bonsai people by his haiku name, Kubutsu.

Around 1938, at the abbot's instigation, Kawai founded a society for making pots: Nento-kai 拈陶会. Its kiln stood inside the temple garden beside Kosoen. Tofukuji joined, and so did Kozan. Kawai's eye and Tofukuji's hand met there, and the survey is explicit about the result: of everyone involved, it marked Tofukuji most deeply.

禅刹の名を借りただけ。真に関わったのは東本願寺である。