Tea ceremony bowl

Hamada Shōji started studying ceramics at the Tokyo Technical College and then went to work as a glaze technician at the Kyoto Ceramic Institute. In 1918 he befriended the English potter Bernard Leach (1887-1979) and two years later he accompanied Leach to Britain to help him build a Japanese-style kiln at St Ives in Cornwall. He returned to Japan in 1923 and established a workshop at Mashiko, north of Tokyo. Hamada went on to become a major figure of the Nihon Mingei (Japanese folk art) movement and had significant international influence on 20th-century studio pottery. Inspired by the writing of aesthetic theorist Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961) and championed by Hamada and his friend Bernard Leach, the Mingei movement claimed that beauty was most evident in everyday objects made by craftspeople, achieved through their care and design constraint. In 1955 Hamada was designated a Living National Treasure by the Japanese government.