One of my most lasting cultural impressions of Japanese aesthetics came not from a museum or a famous site but from an unexpected moment in the Okinawan mountains. We were driving along muddy back roads in my old Toyota 4Runner, wandering without much plan. The hills were covered in thick jungle, and the trails looked as if they had not seen many vehicles. When the trees opened, we found a place that felt as if it had stepped out of another century.
Built directly into the hillside was a large kiln. The structure blended with the earth around it, half-buried and half-exposed. Scattered nearby were pieces of pottery, some leaning against stones, others arranged with no clear pattern. Everything looked simple and honest. Nothing was colorful, polished, or prepared for visitors. Nothing hinted at tourism or display. It was a working site, or it had been one not long before.
Next to the kiln was a wooden Japanese-style workshop. The boards were worn from years of use. Inside, the floor was dark and uneven. In the center of the room was a square hearth in the floor, with an iron hook holding a kettle above it. On the raw-wood shelves were stacks of pottery, all earthy and unglazed. They looked made for daily use, not for decoration. It was impossible to tell if the place was abandoned or simply resting on a quiet weekend. We did not touch anything. We stood there quietly and absorbed it with respect.
That memory stayed with me for the rest of my life. It was my first encounter with the deeper layer of Japanese aesthetics, the quiet side that does not announce itself. The place taught me more about wabi-sabi (侘寂), shibui (渋い), and the natural simplicity of Japanese craft than anything I had read or would later study. It showed me that beauty can be found in things that are used, worn, and shaped by hand. There is a calm dignity in objects made slowly, without the intention of impressing anyone.
Today, places like this still exist. Japan has modern cities, but many old pottery villages have survived with their character unchanged. Some are active, some are semi-abandoned, and some operate quietly on the edge of the tourist map. When I return to Japan, I would like to visit them.
In Okinawa, Yachimun no Sato (やちむんの里) in Yomitan is perhaps the closest to what I saw. It has shops, but behind the storefronts are hillside kilns built the traditional way and workshops that look untouched for decades. In Naha, the old back streets of Tsuboya (壺屋) still hide narrow alleys and kilns from the Ryukyu era.
On the mainland, places like Shigaraki (信楽) and Bizen (備前) preserve the feeling of old pottery towns where time moves slowly. Kilns built into hills, wood-fired ovens climbing a slope, wooden workshops with dirt floors, and shelves lined with simple clay work. These places are not staged to look old. They are old.
Visiting them today as a tourist is different from stumbling across a quiet kiln in the Okinawan jungle, but it is worthwhile. The same quiet, the same tools, the same natural shapes. The same sense of stepping briefly into another time.
I would like to go back and see these places, not for nostalgia but to understand more deeply what I saw when I was young. Back then, I did not know the words for the aesthetics that shaped that moment. Now I do. And the memory has only grown more important over time.
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