Part three of a dialogue with ceramic artist Yuji Muraki, reflecting on mishima ware, place, information, failure, and what changes or remains after forty-five years of making.
Our conversation drifted away from Mishima pottery almost without notice.
With Muraki, ceramics rarely remain just ceramics. One story leads to another, from old kilns to young makers, from history to his own early years, until everything quietly connects.
Muraki didn’t move to Izu because he dreamed of country life.
He grew up in the city. He came because pottery required space, for a kiln, for clay, and for fire.
At twenty-eight, he left the city. A year later, he built his own kiln and began working independently.
The pottery didn’t sell.
“I lived quietly,” he said with a smile.
It took nearly three years before ceramics became enough to support his life.
He tells the story without drama. There was no turning point, only the rhythm of making, firing and starting over.
In time, the place changed.
He married. His children grew up. Through family and neighbors, the workshop, the mountains and the surrounding community slowly became home.
Like a well-used vessel, belonging isn’t something you find.
It grows.
The conversation turned to the history of ceramics.
Muraki spoke about how techniques traveled from China to Korea and eventually to Japan. But traditions were never copied exactly.
Earlier makers saw only fragments of distant work. They filled the unknown with local materials and imagination.
“Not knowing” left room for something new.
Today, information is everywhere.
A phone can tell you who made a piece, what clay they used and how it was fired.
But information, Muraki believes, is only the beginning.
“You don’t make things with information.”
Knowing and making are different skills.
Clay changes.
Fire changes.
Sooner or later, every maker has to trust experience instead of answers.
Muraki believes failure teaches more than success.
“When things go well, you don’t always know why.”
Failure forces you to ask questions.
Was it the clay?
The shape?
The firing?
Over time, those questions become instinct.
His forty-five years of pottery are built not only on successful firings, but on countless failed ones.
He doesn’t believe craftsmanship is about finding the right answer.
“Just because something is correct doesn’t mean it’s the only way.”
If you only repeat what already works, you never discover your own way of making.
Individuality grows through experience, not certainty.
When Muraki first started making pottery, he simply made what he wanted.
Some pieces were heavy.
Some were difficult to use.
He didn’t know any better.
People loved them anyway.
Today, he says he couldn’t make those same pieces again.
Not because he lacks the technique.
Because the person who made them no longer exists.
“Once you know something,” he said, “you can’t unknow it.”
Experience gives you skill.
It also changes the way you see.
Looking back, Muraki sometimes laughs at his early work.
“They’re clumsy,” he said.
“But somehow… they’re good.”
Technical perfection isn’t everything.
What matters is whether a piece carries the maker’s intention.
Every work quietly records the person who made it.
The younger Muraki still exists.
In clay.
After forty-five years, Muraki still doesn’t speak as someone who has found the answer.
There are always new possibilities. A different gesture. A different rhythm. A different firing.
He experiments.
He fails.
He learns.
Then he begins again.
Perhaps a lifetime of making isn’t about reaching certainty.
It’s about remaining curious enough to continue without it.
Before leaving, I thought again about the rejected pots outside the workshop.
Many looked beautiful to me.
But Muraki had seen something missing.
Those pieces would never leave the workshop.
Yet their failures hadn’t disappeared.
They had already become part of the next vessel.
Perhaps every craft works that way.
Not every attempt becomes the finished work.
But every attempt becomes part of the maker.
