Territorio Mingei

Mingei Territory

Mariana Villa

En el aeropuerto de Narita, en Tokio, lo primero que me colocó en el espacio fue el silencio.
Pensé que algo extraordinario había pasado, pero no; el silencio es algo ordinario en Japón.

In places I had assumed would be noisy and stressful, in that immense city, I felt more room in my chest.

The immigration form was elegant, written in kanji, printed on soft paper.
I felt embarrassed writing my name in little balls and sticks. I had the sensation of coming from the troglodyte side of the world, from the kindergarten of humanity where we still eat with knives and forks.

Then I went to the bathroom and stepped into the future.

It was gleaming. I sat without fear on a toilet with a command panel for water jets at precise temperatures and angles.

I don’t want to feed the Western fantasy of a futuristic, sci-fi Japan.
The future I’m talking about is more a result of deep consideration for others.
Everything seemed to be designed with moving dedication for the quiet comfort of the body and the spirit.

Japan showed me a balance between the urban and the rural.


In places where everything was in its place, there was still room for the wild:
untamed gardens that lived in harmony with bonsais and cultivated beds.

Japanese dichotomies are haikus.

Small poems that revealed to me the contradictory nature of everything.


Their mastery of time, and at the same time, their abundance of it.

For many years, I had felt a magnetic pull toward Japan and its arts.
It was finally ceramics that brought me to that land.

I went to Guadalajara to Maxine Álvarez’s workshop to take a course on urushi and wheel throwing with Koichi Onozawa, who was accompanied by Noriko, his wife. We also met Yuki Watanabe, who helped us translate and also works with urushi. A few months later, my friend Laura and I ended up in Japan, fascinated by the new techniques our new sensei had introduced us to.

Yanagi Sōetsu, Kawai Kanjiro, and Shoji Hamada are the founders of the Mingei movement 民衆的な工芸, which means “folk crafts.”
It emerged in the 1920s as a response to industrialization and defended the beauty of anonymity, the functionality of the ordinary, and the handmade for others.


Sōetsu’s The Beauty of Everyday Things is one of my oracles.
We crossed the city to visit the Japan Folk Crafts Museum (Mingeikan), founded by these three renowned potters in 1936.
A warm space, like a lived-in home, which we walked through in mandatory slippers.
It’s full of objects that were once useful—bowls, spoons, dyed textiles.
Suddenly, that careful and simple way of life felt almost extinct.

I thought: Mexico is also Mingei, especially in Indigenous and rural communities.
I felt a deep mourning for the loss of our crafts, and at the same time, a tender aliveness for those of us still resisting, even in urban contexts.

Fire as prayer


In Kyoto, we visited the house of Kanjirō Kawai.


The house is made of dark wood, two stories connected by a central void that allows for almost surreal lines of sight.
The paper windows let in a warm, soft light.


Everything felt like the result of carefully and consistently made decisions.

There is a central garden, wild and intentional down to the last corner.


A small kiln, like an altar, followed by a workshop with a dirt floor, containing very few objects.
Beyond that space, a massive wood-fired kiln—like a sleeping animal.

Eight chambers, each about two meters wide and five meters long.
We were told the firings lasted seven days and nights, tending the fire to keep it alive.

To me, that’s where the Mingei spirit lives:
in collectivity, in ritual, in fire as prayer.

When we left, we bought a book called We Do Not Work Alone by Yoshiko Uchida, who spent a year in the workshop with Kanjiro and his son Hiroshi.
In it, she shares, translated into English, some of Kanjirō Kawai’s reflections:


Fire in my hand,


A cold ball of fire,


Fire which has changed its shape


Hidden in the clay


                           …pottery


To everything


Goes the gift of fire.

Bake and harden!


The plea of fire.


The prayer of fire,

  To melt, to melt!

That is the prayer of fire.”

At the end of the trip, we returned to the beginning.


We reunited with our friends Koichi, Noriko, and Yuki in Mashiko.


For several days, we explored the largest ceramics fair in Japan.


Entire streets turned into a clay market: hundreds of stalls, thousands of utilitarian pieces wheel-thrown, hand-modeled, fired in different kinds of kilns.

Koichi introduced us to some colleagues, students, friends. Few words, many gestures.
Our teacher, who seemed very serious in Mexico, turned out to be someone who makes people laugh wherever he goes.


His work there, in his context, his community, his land, felt ancestral and, at the same time, timeless.

The plate I have from Koichi, in my kitchen, is the size of his hand. It keeps me company.

Koichi took us to the museum and home-studio of Shoji Hamada.


We walked, almost ran, through the spaces where he lived and worked.
It was like entering his way of thinking, embodied in architecture, tools, and ways of organizing.

Hamada chose a shared, local life.
He returned to Mashiko after his time in England to develop a kind of ceramics deeply rooted in his community.


He created a workshop where everything—the wheel, the kiln, the glazes, the clay—was part of an artisanal ecosystem.

He wasn’t seeking to stand out: he sought to integrate.
He rejected signing his pieces, championed collective work, and defended anonymity as a form of freedom.


His noborigama kiln, built on a slope, was fired for days through the shared effort of many potters.


It was an act of trust and collaboration, where each piece was subject to the judgment of fire.

Mingei thinking is not transmitted as theory,
but as a way of being in the world.

To make is not merely to produce.


All of them taught me:

To work for others.


To see beauty in the ordinary, in the useful.


To respect the cycles of the earth,


the rhythms of the body and of labor.


To hold the clay


and wait for the fire.

From my city, in the middle of noise and speed,


I invoke this way of being.

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Jorge Rosano Gamboa

Jorge Rosano Gamboa