The first time most people use a suribachi, they lift the pestle, bring it down, and almost nothing happens. The sesame skitters up the side of the bowl and sits there, whole. Nothing is wrong with the bowl. You are simply using the wrong half of the tool. In a stone mortar the pestle does…
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…
The 120-prong whisk is the wrong first purchase, and not because of the price. It is wrong because 120 prongs is a specification for a job you are almost certainly not doing. Here is the fact that makes the rest of this make sense. A chasen — the bamboo matcha whisk — is not assembled….
You brought back a bag of sencha from Kyoto. At the shop it tasted like sweet grass and broth. At home it tastes like hot water with a bitter edge, and you have been blaming yourself — the temperature, the timing, the leaf-to-water ratio, the pot. Change all four and it will still taste wrong,…
Two rice bowls on the same shelf. Same white porcelain, same weight in the hand, same thin cobalt line around the rim. One is $16. The other is $44. The $44 bowl says Arita on the box. The $16 bowl says Hasami — and twenty-five years ago, it would have said Arita too. That is…
Lift the rice bowl. Leave the big one on the table. That is nearly all of Japanese bowl etiquette — and you do not have to memorize which bowl is which, because the bowl tells you. A vessel meant to be lifted is built to be lifted: it has a carved foot ring you can…
This is a reference page. Most guides to Japanese pottery translate the words; almost none translate the measurements — and the measurements are where buyers abroad get surprised: a bowl smaller than expected, a “300ml” teapot that pours two thirds of that, two pots both sold as “8-gō” that are visibly different sizes. None of…
A teapot listed at 300 ml that pours two cups and stops. An 8-gō donabe that turns out to be two centimetres narrower than your friend’s 8-gō donabe. A plate whose size is given in a unit you can’t convert, from a place you can’t find on a map, with nothing written anywhere about the microwave….
Open the lid at half past twelve and one of two things has happened. Either the rice is still loose — grains that separate under the chopsticks, dry enough to lift cleanly — or it has settled into a damp slab, there is a film of water on the underside of the lid, and the…
A donabe (土鍤) is the earthenware pot at the heart of the Japanese winter table — the vessel that carries a simmering hot pot from the stove to the center of the meal, still bubbling, and lets everyone serve themselves. It cooks rice with a faint crust at the bottom, holds a one-pot nabemono through…