Manabu Minamide

Manabu Minamide's teapots bring to life the essence of Iga-yaki, or Iga-ware. Subtle greens, blues and purples stretch across their elegantly curved surfaces, made all the richer by the scorch marks and rough patina that define this ancient style, hailing from Iga, Mie Prefecture.

Electric and gas-fired kilns are the standard for many potters today, producing uniform pieces with a flawless finish. Traditional wood-fired kilns are far trickier to work with: Wood can shatter pieces when it is tossed into the kiln, and holding pieces at the wrong temperature can warp them. Two neighboring works can even melt together. Working with these temperamental devices entails a certain amount of failure -- or, at least, trusting to luck whether pieces will come out as intended.

Only in a small section of a wood-fired kiln can the true beauty of wood-fired pieces -- the magnificently colored patina that comes from melted ash -- be fully realized. Many artisans reserve that ideal space for a vase or large jar.

Lidded pieces such as teapots carry unique risks. The more ash accumulates on a piece, the more rich and varied the patina will be. Yet this also increases the risk that fallen ash will melt a pot's lid and body together, making them impossible to separate and rendering the piece unsellable.

Minamide is one of the only artists in the Iga region -- or possibly in all of Japan -- willing to ignore those risks, creating teapots that exhibit the very best of what wood firing has to offer.

"I was always fascinated by the scorched patina of Iga-ware, the balance between bright colors and black scorch marks," Minamide says. "Work that mankind cannot do -- only the gods of fire. I wanted to try and bring that to life on teapots."

Yet Minamide began his ceramics career relatively late in life. Born in 1958 and now 60, he worked as a schoolteacher into his mid-40s. As a teenager, Minamide was fairly uncomfortable dealing with people, and so spend much of his childhood in Misasa, Tottori Prefecture buried in sports or drawing. When the time came for college, he wavered over whether to pursue sports or the arts. Winning a prefecture-wide pole-vaulting competition ultimate pushed him toward the former.

As a college junior, he had to opportunity to work with children with autism and Down syndrome -- an experience that led him to work at a school for the disabled.

"The kids were like me, in that they had trouble dealing with people," Minamide says. "It was very moving to have them gradually open up to me."

At the age of 26, while working at a school in Iga, he was asked to teach his students a lesson in ceramics at a local pottery workshop. While Minamide had studied ceramics to a limited extent while training to become an art teacher, this was essentially his first time experiencing the art in earnest. But the process of teaching pottery quickly drew him into the craft.

At 34, Minamide began studying under the ceramics artisan Keizo Atarashi alongside his teaching career, and at 44 began studying during the weekends under two artisans making teapots in Mie Prefecture's famous Banko-ware style, Suigetsu Shimizu and Masaki Tachi. He would continue this study for three years.

"I can't really explain it, but I was somehow taken with teapots," Minamide said. "I decided to make them in the local Iga-ware style."

At 45, when he learned his employer was offering early retirement, he took it without a second thought.

"I just quit, without thinking about the risk I was taking," Minamide says. "I don’t think I would have done so had I never come into contact with teapots -- I picked them over my career as a teacher, despite the uncertainty."

"It's thanks to my wife that I can live as freely as I do -- I'm grateful."

Now, each morning, Minamide sets off for a walk around the neighborhood with his two goats -- a habit that has endeared him to the neighborhood children.

"These goats are my comfort," he says.