There's a good chance you've already eaten from Hasami ware without knowing it. For centuries it travelled under another name, and for the last fifteen years it has been quietly remaking the Japanese tableware shelves of cafés, design shops, and curious kitchens around the world. It's a porcelain that has never wanted to be precious — which is, we think, the most interesting thing about it.
This is the slightly longer story of where it comes from, how it's made, and why it has the place it does today. (For the broader Japanese craft tradition that frames everything we carry, our Kōgei explainer is a useful starting point.)
Where Hasami is
Hasami (波佐見) sits in the north of Nagasaki Prefecture, against the Saga border. It is small — about fifty-six square kilometres, around fifteen thousand people, with mountains on three sides and an inland basin in the middle. Roughly a third of the town works in porcelain in some capacity, from kiln to wholesaler. The eastern hills carry the porcelain stone that made the whole industry possible.
Porcelain-making here is over four hundred years old. The story begins, as it does in several Kyūshū traditions, with Toyotomi Hideyoshi's late-sixteenth-century invasions of Korea — sometimes called "the pottery war," because the daimyō brought Korean potters home with them. The Ōmura clan brought a group to Hasami in 1599, built three kilns, and started making earthenware. Within a few decades, porcelain stone was found at Mitsunomata in the south-east of the town, and Hasami pivoted — first slowly, then completely — to porcelain.
By the mid-1600s, civil unrest in China had interrupted the country's porcelain trade. European demand redirected to Kyūshū, and Hasami's volume rose with it. The wares left through the port of Imari and reached Europe under that port's name — "IMARI" — which is how the name lodged in the Western imagination, even though much of the porcelain inside the crates was made further down the road.
The kurawanka bowl, and porcelain for ordinary people
The early Hasami makers chose a path that mattered. While their neighbour Arita made finer ware for shoguns and lords, Hasami leaned into the everyday. The emblem of that approach is the kurawanka bowl (kurawanka-wan / くらわんか椀) — a generous, sturdy rice bowl painted with a simple karakusa scroll, sold to commoners along the rivers and roads. It was unfussy, durable, affordable, and made in volume.
Through the Edo period, Hasami built some of the world's largest climbing kilns — one site in the Naka-o-yama district, with thirty-nine chambers and a span of around 170 metres, still stands as a ruin. Porcelain that came out of those kilns spread through Japan in real numbers. There's a fair argument that Hasami changed how ordinary people in Japan ate.
The kurawanka attitude — porcelain for daily use, not display — is the thread that runs through everything else we'll say below. It's the reason Hasami still feels at home in a kitchen drawer, not behind glass.
The system that made volume possible
Hasami still makes around sixteen per cent of Japan's everyday tableware. The reason is a long-standing division of labour — bungyō-sei — in which almost every step of porcelain-making sits with a different specialist workshop: kata-ya make the plaster moulds; kiji-ya cast the bodies; tōdo-ya supply the clay; kama-moto fire the wares; uwa-e-ya print the patterns; sanchi-don'ya pull orders together and arrange shipping.
It isn't a romantic system, but it's the reason a small town can produce porcelain at the scale it does. When the chain works, each workshop sharpens its own craft, and the whole region's standard rises with it. When it strains — as it does today, with ageing specialists and rising material costs — the region feels that too.
The two-thousand reset, and the revival that followed
For most of the twentieth century, Hasami's porcelain didn't travel under its own name. From the Meiji period onwards, the goods were shipped through the railway station at Arita and labelled as Arita-yaki. The two traditions had different characters but shared a brand and shared a market. By the late 1980s, Hasami and Arita together were responsible for one of the largest porcelain industries in Japan.
The arrangement ended quite suddenly. In around 2000, place-of-origin labelling reforms tightened across Japan, and Hasami had to start using its own name. A region that had spent a century inside someone else's identity had to learn how to introduce itself.
The story of how it did so is, in good part, the story of one wholesaler. In 2010, a third-generation Hasami merchant called Maruhiro launched a brand called HASAMI. Its opening product was a stackable mug — thick-walled, plain, finished in a single flat colour — at a time when the rest of the industry was still chasing thin, ornate "fine" porcelain. The HASAMI Block Mug became the visual shorthand for the revival that followed, and the brand-led wave it set off helped pull production turnover back into growth from 2014 onwards.
A note on names
A brief clarification, because the language gets muddled online. "Hasami Porcelain" is a contemporary tableware brand. Hasami ware — Hasami-yaki, 波佐見焼 — is the wider porcelain tradition of Hasami town, made by many makers over four centuries. The brand is one slice of the wider tradition. When we say Hasami at Karintō Edition, we mean the region's porcelain in the broader sense, and we carry several makers within it.
The Hasami we carry
The pieces we keep on our shelves come from two makers, each one making sense of Hasami in a slightly different way.
Nakagawa – the everyday bowls with co-fired lids, a porcelain set that stores, reheats, and serves from the same vessel — plus a lemon squeezer and a multi-grater plate that earn their keep in a working kitchen.
Maruhiro — the wholesaler we wrote about earlier, whose 2010 launch helped pull the region back into view. Their pieces come to us under two brands, gathered on a single shelf as the Hasami | Barbar collection. Under the HASAMI brand, the Stackable Block Mug — the piece many people first met the region through. Under Barbar, hand-painted in Hasami, the Chōjū-giga, IROHA, and Iroe lines: soba choko cups, small plates, and a hand-painted IROHA teapot that joined our teaware shelf this spring.
What they share is a place. What they don't share is a single style — which is, in the end, what makes Hasami Hasami. It has always been a town of many hands working in slightly different directions, and the porcelain that comes out of it is varied for that reason.
We think it belongs on most tables. The kurawanka makers four centuries ago would probably have agreed.
