Porcelain is a different material
Most older Japanese pottery was earthenware or stoneware, made from clays found in many places. Porcelain is harder and whiter. It is generally made from kaolin (a white clay) combined with a stone-based material, and fired to a high temperature. The result is dense, translucent in thin sections, and rings when struck. Porcelain was first made in China, and for centuries Chinese and, later, Korean porcelain were prized imports in Japan. Japanese potters could not make it themselves because they did not have the know-how or, at first, a known source of suitable material.
Korean potters and the Kyushu kilns
The turning point came in the late sixteenth century. After Japanese military campaigns on the Korean peninsula in the 1590s, a number of Korean potters were brought to Japan, often by force, and settled in domains in Kyushu, including the Saga area. Their skills transformed pottery in the region, and kilns around Karatsu and elsewhere developed. This is an uncomfortable part of the history, and many Japanese pottery towns today acknowledge both the craft they gained and the suffering involved.
Within this setting, porcelain stone was found near Arita in the early seventeenth century. Tradition credits a Korean potter often named in the sources as Yi Sam-pyeong (Ri Sampei) with finding the deposit and helping set up the first porcelain kilns, around the 1610s. The details are partly traditional and have been debated, and historians use more cautious language about who did what. What is clear is that by about the middle of the seventeenth century, Arita was making true porcelain at a considerable scale.
Early Arita wares
The first Arita pieces were mostly white or decorated in underglaze blue (cobalt painted before glazing), often in styles that look like Chinese and Korean models. Over time the potters developed their own taste. They added colored overglaze enamels, red, green, yellow and blue, applied after the first firing and fixed in a second, lower firing. This was an important step in making Japanese porcelain distinct, and it ties into the wider story of glaze colors in Japanese pottery.
The trade ports
Arita is inland, so its porcelain had to travel. Goods were carried to the port of Imari on the coast, and from there shipped around Japan and abroad. This is why much of the early export porcelain is called Imari ware, even though it was made in the Arita area; the name refers to the shipping point and later became a decorative style label too.
In the mid-seventeenth century, political upheaval in China disrupted its porcelain exports. Dutch merchants of the Dutch East India Company, who traded from Nagasaki, turned to Japan to fill the gap, and Arita porcelain began to be shipped to Southeast Asia and Europe in significant quantities from about the 1650s. Chinese merchants also traded Japanese porcelain. Scholars generally describe this as an export boom lasting several decades, though the exact quantities are difficult to state and should be treated cautiously.
Styles that grew from Arita
Several well-known styles emerged in or around the Arita kilns.
- Kakiemon, with a milky white body (often called nigoshide) and delicate enamel painting in red, blue-green, yellow and light blue, leaving generous space around the design. The sparse composition reflects the concept of ma, or valued empty space, found elsewhere in Japanese art.
- Imari style, a dense, colorful look combining underglaze blue, red enamel and gold, with crowded decoration.
- Nabeshima ware, made for the local ruling family as gifts and for official use, and known for refined designs and careful finishing. Some pieces are celadon.
European courts and collectors admired these wares, and workshops in Europe imitated them. This early taste for Japanese goods is separate from the later Japonisme influence of the nineteenth century, but it shows that the exchange began much earlier.
Later history
By the later seventeenth century, Chinese exports recovered, and Japanese porcelain exports declined in Europe, but Arita continued to serve the domestic market through the Edo period. After the Meiji modernization, the kilns adapted again, participating in international exhibitions and shifting techniques. Today Arita and its neighbors still produce both tableware and art porcelain, and the white, even surface that Japanese porcelain is known for remains central to the tradition.
Why the story matters
The story of Arita is not a simple tale of invention. Porcelain reached Japan through a combination of foreign knowledge, local discovery, trade and, at its start, forced migration. Looking at a plate from this tradition, a viewer can see in it the meeting of Korean technique, Chinese models, Japanese taste and a trading world that stretched across oceans. Dates and details in this field continue to be refined by scholars, so the outline given here is deliberately general.