Plates, small dishes, and the pottery styles behind them. How to choose, use, and care for authentic Japanese tableware — from Mino to Arita — without the mystique. Written from Japan.
A tin sake cup that holds 60 ml costs around $40 to $70, which is five to ten times what a perfectly good porcelain ochoko costs, and almost every page selling one carries the same sentence: tin softens sake. I went looking for where that sentence comes from. It comes from the people who make tin….
Buy a jubako by the shelf it will live on, not by the number of people you plan to feed. The headcount printed on the listing is not a measurement — the same 6.5‑sun three‑tier box is sold as feeding three people, four, five and six, depending on who is writing the page. The width…
The 18 cm ohitsu that Japanese kitchenware shops ship abroad is listed at 630 ml. Take a tape measure to the same container and the inside is about 15 cm across and 10 cm deep — a little under 1,800 ml. Neither figure is a typo. They are measuring two different things, and almost nobody selling the box in English…
A soy sauce dispenser is the only piece on the Japanese table that gets judged on a single question: does it stop? Everything else — the glaze, the shape, the maker’s name — is decoration hung on that one mechanical fact. And the answer has almost nothing to do with the lip you are looking…
A three-piece set of Japanese cooking chopsticks costs $1.95 at Korin — 33, 29 and 27 cm, bamboo, three pairs. A single 33 cm pair is $1.10 at MTC Kitchen. At that price the question of which length to buy looks like it cannot possibly matter, so most people take whatever the set gives them and get…
In a kitchen shop in Tokyo you can pick up two wooden drop lids, both with 18 printed on the label, and find that one of them is fifteen centimetres across and the other is eighteen. Neither is mislabelled. They are answering two different questions, and the shop assumes you know which one you are…
The paddle that came free with your rice cooker worked for about a year. Then one morning you lifted a scoop out of the pot and half of it stayed welded to the paddle, and it has done that every morning since. Nothing broke. You did not change your rice. What ran out was the…
For most households the answer is the 30 cm tub. Not because 30 cm is a lucky number, but because a Japanese maker’s own sizing chart says a 30 cm hangiri holds three gō of rice at a depth of 26 mm — and 26 mm is a layer that cools. Buy the 24 cm…
Two Japanese kitchen sites, two sets of instructions, and they read almost identically: go slowly, move in circles, don’t lean on it. One of them is teaching you to make wasabi as hot and as fragrant as it will ever get. The other is teaching you to make grated daikon mild enough that a child…
A renge is not a spoon with a handle attached. Cut one down the middle and you find a single hollow that begins at the lip and runs all the way to the end of the thing you have been calling the handle. It is a scoop, not a shovel. That one fact decides everything…