Arita

Arita, a small town in Saga Prefecture on the island of Kyushu, is where Japanese porcelain began. In 1616, the potter Yi Sam-pyeong — one of many Korean potters brought to Japan following Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea in the 1590s — discovered porcelain stone at Izumiyama, a mountain near Arita, and Arita kilns began producing Japan’s first true porcelain: a dense, white, high-fired ware that Japanese potters had previously imported from China and Korea rather than made themselves.

Arita’s signature look started with sometsuke, cobalt-blue designs painted under a clear glaze, a technique borrowed and adapted from Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. Within a few decades, Arita potters had also developed rich overglaze enamel styles — most famously Kakiemon, known for its restrained asymmetric designs on a milky white body, and Nabeshima ware, an exceptionally refined style historically produced under the patronage of the local Nabeshima domain and reserved for gifts to the shogunate rather than sold commercially.

Arita’s export trade took off specifically because Chinese porcelain production collapsed during the civil war between the Ming and Qing dynasties in the 1640s–1650s, leaving the Dutch East India Company (VOC) without its usual supplier at a moment of strong European demand. From the mid-17th century, Arita porcelain was exported to Europe in large volumes through the nearby port of Imari, with an estimated 190,000 pieces shipped through the VOC in 1659 alone. European collectors came to know the ware by the name of the port it shipped from rather than the town that made it. That naming gap only started closing in 1897, when a rail line finally reached Arita and let potters ship directly without routing through Imari, after which “Arita ware” gradually became the standard name for the town’s own output, while “Imari ware” settled into meaning the older export style or antique, collector-grade pieces (and today also names the Okawachiyama kiln district in Imari itself; see the imari region entry). Arita porcelain remains one of Japan’s most recognized ceramic exports, and the government designated it a national Traditional Craft Product, jointly with Imari, as “Imari-Arita ware” on October 14, 1977.