Four Hundred Years in a Riverbank

In Arita the rivers are full of broken porcelain, and every year the water pulls a little more of it out of the banks. Four hundred years of it, early Edo through Meiji, and there is always a chance of finding something new.

You learn to read the pieces. Hand-painted work has a loose, looping cobalt line, and if you look close the horizontal banding matches the brushwork. That loose loop was the signature of Arita. A decal is flatter and more regular, but decals and transfers have been around for almost two hundred years, so even those can be old.

A shard with a wide curve was once a big pot. Hand painted, that one could be a hundred and fifty years old or more. Some of it has washed a long way down the river, so you never know what is going to turn up.

Most riverbanks reveal layers of rock and sediment. In Arita the layers are ceramic, stacked by decade and by century. The deeper it sits, the older it is. Around the war the town shifted from painted plates to industrial porcelain, and you can see that change in the bank too.

It is a good reminder of what fired clay does. Everything else around it has rotted or washed away. The porcelain is still here, still telling you who painted it.