Raku ware

Timeline

1. 1574–1579Kyoto · KyotoChōjirō's family excelled in low-temperature lead glazes and hand-molding, and once fired roof-ridge ornaments for Toyotomi construction projects. Raku family records state his father Ami-ya came from China, bringing sancai techniques. Around 1579, the same set of hand-molding and indoor small-kiln techniques was used to make tea bowls, with deliberately plain forms contrasting with the Chinese tenmoku then popular in Kyoto.
2. 1580–1591Juraku-dai area, Kyoto · KyotoWhile serving as Hideyoshi's tea master, Sen no Rikyū required tea bowls to embody the "beauty of insufficiency" of grass-hut tea. The black and red Raku bowls made by Chōjirō were recorded at the time as "Sōeki-form tea bowls." Hand-molding made each piece unique, and small kilns could fire within the castle, fitting the rhythm of Kyoto tea gatherings. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that the claim Rikyū personally supervised Chōjirō is a later construction, but the correspondence between 1580s tea bowls and wabi tea can be confirmed.
3. c. 1584–1600Kyoto · KyotoToyotomi Hideyoshi granted the potters a gold seal bearing the character "Raku" from Juraku-dai; the wares changed from imayaki and Juraku-yaki to rakuyaki, and the potter household took Raku as its surname. The second-generation Jōkei inherited the kiln business, and tea bowls became core implements of the Sen school tea ceremony. The exact year of the seal's grant varies in documents, but by the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries Raku ware had gone from an individual craft to a heritable Kyoto specialty.
4. 1601Kyoto · KyotoAfter the Sen school tea ceremony became institutionalized in the Edo period, Raku tea bowls and the Raku family kiln registry became one of the orthodox lineages of tea implements. The Raku family has transmitted the craft continuously to the present, and Kyoto still fires black and red Raku ware. 20th-century Western "raku" workshops reduced Raku ware to quick-cooled novelty glazes, which should be distinguished from the low-temperature hand-molded tea pottery tradition of the main kiln.