Yoshikawa Setsudo

Setsudo Yoshikiawa is a teapot potter who represents Tokoname.

There is no other teapot potter who can make such exquisite teapots.  It makes sense that many people come to buy his teapots from far away.

At first glance, it looks like a regular plain teapot.  However, it isn’t just a normal teapot.  Usually most teapots, if you take a look at it very closely, have little lines and bumps.  But on Setsudo’s teapots, there are none.  It is perfectly smooth.  There is nobody in Japan who can make teapots this perfectly.

Another feature about his teapots is the tea strainer.  The tea strainer has five hundred holes, with each of them less than one millimeter in size, on the hemispherical clay.  For the bigger teapots, there are close to one thousand holes.  There are only a few people who can make this type tea strainer even in Tokoname.

These techniques are not so showy, but are something a modern machine is not capable of achieving.  It is something only Setsudo can do.

His father, Setsudo the 1st, is a teapot potter as well.  His elder brother, Yoshikawa Kodo, is a carver.  Almost all of Setsudo’s teapots are for Kodo to carve paintings, but there are a few plain ones that Kodo does not carve.

“I make about five hundred holes on the tea strainer, but the holes of the last five after four hundred ninety five are the most difficult part.  Soft clay gets hard because of the heat of hands, and by the time I do the last five holes, it gets so easy to have cracks between the holes.  Moreover, I put the finished tea strainer into the big hole opened on the teapot for the pour spout, but to do this I need to put it right into the very center of the hole.  Because if I do not make it into the very center of the hole and try to move it, the tea strainer becomes misshapen and starts to crack.  In order to make one teapot, I need to prepare three parts for each part of the teapot”, Setsudo comments about the difficulty something only teapot potters would know.
 
Setsudo never gives up, until the very last moment.  He polishes the teapot to give luster to it.  “Nobody does this nowadays, because even if you do it, you cannot raise the price of the teapot.  But I can’t stop doing this.  You can say it’s my obstinacy (laugh).”

People usually don’t have chances to notice this kind of hardships of the potter.  The teapots are filled with lots of techniques that are definitely a genuine professional work.