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Abstract
This study examines the tradition of Raku ceramics, a low temperature, lead-glazed ware first produced in the city of Kyoto, Japan, in the late sixteenth century. Potters developed the technique to meet the demands of tea practitioners, whose tastes were stimulated by the new mixture of regional and imported material culture in the increasingly diverse urban marketplace. One of these potters was Chōjirō, attested to by an inscription on a ceramic roof-tile dating to 1574. Initially Raku wares were popular with a small group of tea practitioners in and around the capital city, but by the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries amateur and professional potters across Japan had adopted the technique.
Twentieth-century research on Raku ceramics has tended to focus on a small group of individual potters and ceramics attributed to them, but this study places equal emphasis on producers, consumers, competitors, and those operating outside the orthodox Raku lineage. Chapter one contrasts the tale of the tea master Sen no Rikyū's patronage of Chōjirō with analysis of documents and archaeological evidence. Chapter two looks at the participation of tea practitioners in the Raku production process, exemplified by the tea ceramics of Hon'ami Kōetsu. Chapter three considers the reinvention of the Raku workshop as the Raku house (ie) in the late seventeenth century, coinciding with a revival of interest in Sen no Rikyū. Chapter four examines the relationship of the Raku house with the iemoto tea schools. Chapter five looks at the emergence of information on Raku ceramics in the print and manuscript culture of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the resulting spread of the Raku ceramic technique. Chapter six considers elite warrior patronage of the Sen tea schools and Raku potters in the early nineteenth century, and the effect of the collapse of this patronage after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The conclusion examines the attempts of the Sen tea schools and Raku potters to reposition themselves within the new cultural constructs of modernity.
