Kutsugata chawan

Kutsugata chawan ( Japanese 沓 形 茶碗 ) is the name of a tea bowl ( chawan ) in the shape of a shoe. This shape is concise for Oribe-style tea bowls . Furuta Oribe (1544-1615) was a samurai and tea master and under his influence the Oribe pottery named after him was created .

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  Oribeguro, ca.1620.

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  Kuro-Oribe

First references to this ceramic can be found e.g. B. in the records of the merchant Kamiya Sotan . These contain a sentence with reference to a tea meeting in Oribes tea room in 1599. It reads: "For the usucha (thin tea) wonderfully vaulted Seto ceramics were used." This description literally conjures up the tea bowls designed in "shoe shape", which have been made in the Mino ovens (pottery) since then .

Dated evidence appears for the first time in the "Notes for Followers of Tea", e.g. B. the Chaki bengyoku shu (differences in fine tea utensils; 1671), in which in the category “new ovens” ( nochigama ) “Furuta Oribe ceramics” is shown as ceramics for the personal practice of tea.

The shoe shape of the tea bowl itself is probably due to a deformation of the chawan during the burning process in a hanging oven ( noborigama ). In contrast to the ovens used up to then, this was the first time that several chawans could be burned at the same time, but the result could not be fully controlled.

If these chawan were originally regarded as a committee, the tea masters gave them special importance ( wabi-sabi ) related to the principles of tea ( chadō ) precisely because of this originally undesired and imperfect shape .

This led to master potters adopting this oven-made shape and consciously beginning to design Chawan in this new style. It is not easy to describe this shape with one word. Perhaps “organic” is the most appropriate.

literature

• Turning Point: Oribe and the Arts of Sixteenth-Century Japan. Yale Univ. Press, 2003, ISBN 0-300-10195-3 .