Craftspeople of Hokkaido

Potters, swordsmiths, weavers and glass-blowers in Japan’s cold north

A package arrives from Japan, from my old teacher. For the past decade and a half Willie Jones, who taught English literature to generations of pupils at Shrewsbury School, has been living in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago, where he is a professor at the Imperial University. Each year at this time his Christmas letter arrives, addressed in immaculate Roman and Katakana script (the Japanese syllabary for foreign words), usually with a book of verse or prose, published by a local small press or from his desktop in Sapporo, Hokkaido’s capital city.

Hideki Takai, a potter of Hokkaido.

The Japan revealed in these letters is a far cry from the place we tend to read about in western reportage. There’s no indoor golf; there are no company men; no gangsters nor geishas; no animé, no schoolgirl prostitutes; no genocidal millenarian cults. This Japan is rural, dominated by the volcanic landscape and spectacular winter climate of Hokkaido, which – in case you didn’t know – is the world capital of ice sculpture, site of a unique scientific and educational institution, the Museum of Snow. For the Japanese the rural areas of Hokkaido are their wild frontier, their Alaska. Willie Jones’s Hokkaido is inhabited by artists and craftspeople, votaries of the loom and the kiln, and by a variety of closely observed birds and mammals, creatures whose tracks criss-cross the pages of these letters home.

For most of his time in Japan, Willie has pursued his passion for visual art and natural history through essays in a local English-language cultural review called Northern Lights. The current number, enclosed with his Christmas letter, is dedicated to interviews he has conducted with potters, glass-blowers, weavers, dyers, scroll-painters and swordsmiths – craftsmen who live and work, like him, in Hokkaido. In the pages of this engaging magazine, between advertisements for local wine and weekends in Tokyo, tinned sweet corn, and Ikeda’s Fuku Fuku beans (the latter are recommended, it says, ‘For Those Who Like Talking’), a world is revealed, vigorously archaic, pre-electronic and pre-industrial, where the mysteries of craft are part of the everyday. Vats of indigo stand on the banks of a stream; a weaver works in fields of winter wheat; the swordsmith’s window glows late into the night; the solitary potter wrestles with his clay.

Such scenes are described in a style as far from journalistic as it is possible to get. Craftspeople may be less than articulate about their craft; and some of Willie’s subjects are awesomely reticent, laconic to the point of silence. They are strangers to the Fuku-Fuku bean. There are interviews here where nothing is said at all. It would be a journalist’s nightmare. But Willie admires the silence. He observes it lovingly. For him, silence dissolves the language barrier; it concentrates attention on the articulacy of hands. ‘It was his dream,’ he writes of the most reticent of all his subjects, the potter Masayoshi Sakata, ‘to move into the wilderness, to live beside his kiln, wrapping his isolation around himself even more tightly. As I haven’t heard of him for some time, he has perhaps found the place that he was in search of.’

The dyer’s hand

What interests Willie is the process of creation. His writing style is a kind of contemplative reportage, drawing comparisons between one craft and another. ‘The glass-blower,’ he writes, ‘doesn’t fill the back of his rib-cage as a singer must; he fills his cheeks and expels his breath in quick cherubic puffs.’ And he is a poet of the natural world, pursuing the origin of weaving in spiders’ webs and birds’ nests, or the beginnings of metalwork and pottery in the domestication of fire. Earthquakes, he says, are common in Hokkaido; eruptions are not unheard of. The hills there are young; they smoke; lava pours down them like glaze down the sides of a pot.

The craft of ceramics is said to have been restored to the status of high art in Japan by a foreigner, Bernard Leach, who championed the work of a Japanese potter, Shoji Hamada. Willie Jones is following this tradition. In his disquisitions on other people’s craftmanship there is pedagogical intent. As a teacher, he provides students and readers with an analogy for his own craft, the writing he practises and teaches. Those of us who have been his students – both those who knew him in his incarnation as an English schoolmaster, before he took the narrow road to the deep north, and those who have been in his classes in Japan – know that he is much struck with one specific metaphor, from Shakespeare via Auden: the dyer’s hand, the craftsperson subdued to the medium in which they work. His descriptions of the expertise of craftspeople and his admiration for the deceptive casualness of their long-practised skills, reveal, in their ease and lucidity, his aspirations for his own writing, and that of his students.

For the author of pots or the maker of books, achieving this ease is a life-long task. Shoji Hamada, according to Bernard Leach, said that making a pot should be like ‘walking downhill on a pleasant afternoon’. But to walk downhill, as Willie-sensei points out, you first need to get to the top. ★

Afterword

I visited Willie Jones in 2014, in Hokkaido. At the age of 83 he was still teaching – as he continued to do until his death in 2025. During my stay in 2014, I acted as a teacher’s assistant for his weekly class on Shakespeare, an event attended by a number of distinguished professionals living in the city. One of them, Takafusa Tanaka, a retired professor of ancient Greek philosophy, remarked that in the piece I wrote I had observed ‘the eastern traditional rule of composition: ki 起 –shou 承 –ten 転 –ketsu 結’, a rule that prescribes opening, confirmation of the subject matter, change of tone, and conclusion. My unwitting observation of this rhetorical principle, I have no doubt, can be traced to having being one of Willie Jones’s pupils at Shrewsbury School.