Kakiemon white, the grain of understated ceramics, and two Japanese ways of looking at a ceramic surface
Light does not gather into a sharp reflection on a plate from the Raw Earth collection. Instead, it reveals a quiet grain, fine speckles, and a colour somewhere between mist and sand. The square plate carries a woven pattern. With or without a pattern, the surface asks for attention before any food is placed on it.
The Raw Earth collection is made in Arita today. In the same region, another ceramic surface once changed the way people looked at porcelain. Its name came from something ordinary: the water left after washing rice.
A white named for rice water
In the Saga dialect, nigoshi is the cloudy, pale water from rinsing rice. From this comes nigoshide, 濁手, the name of a milky-white porcelain body developed at the Kakiemon kiln. Where other Arita porcelains can have a bluish cast, this white has a softer warmth.
The story begins with colour. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Sakaida Kakiemon family developed coloured overglaze enamels; an orange-red close to ripe persimmon became a defining colour. To show those pigments well, the ground mattered too. By the 1670s, the nigoshide body had been refined to provide it.
A ground made to support painted motifs became part of the composition. On Kakiemon-style pieces, flowers, birds, and foliage often gather to one side, while much of the milky white remains visible. The decoration did not disappear. It gained room to breathe because the space around it had become a deliberate choice.
A white that had to be recovered
The Sakaida family preserved a Clay Mixing Diary, or Doai-chō, recording materials and their combination. Historical records and Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs name Izumiyama porcelain stone, Shirakawa mountain clay, and Iwayagawachi stone. This white required more than painting less: it depended on preparing a particular body and bringing it through the firing.
In the eighteenth century, tastes and trade changed. The more lavish gold-and-red kinrande style gained favour, while exports of Hizen porcelain declined. Production of nigoshide stopped. The white survived in old objects and family papers, but not as a continuously practised method.
In 1953, the twelfth Kakiemon and his son, the future thirteenth, recreated it using family records. In 1971, the Kakiemon (nigoshide) technique was designated an Important Intangible Cultural Property in Japan. The history of this white is also the story of a lost practice found again.
The white travelled
Kakiemon porcelain had already travelled to Europe. In Saxony, its palette and compositions inspired eighteenth-century designs at Meissen; the manufactory still lists patterns bearing the Kakiemon name. A way of arranging white and colour could cross borders without making the materials or the workshops the same.
Another way of seeing: wabi-sabi
Another Japanese history brings the material itself into view. From the sixteenth century, tea masters began to value rustic vessels from Korea and Japan, whose forms could be simple or irregular. A tea bowl was not only looked at: it was held for its warmth, and its colour was seen against the green of the tea.
This attention is often discussed through wabi-sabi: beauty found in restraint, the passage of time, and subtle variations of form and texture. It does not mean that every flaw or break makes an object more beautiful. Tea practitioners considered a vessel’s shape, surface, and relationship to a particular gathering.
This is not the history of nigoshide. One tradition gives luminous white space a role beside painted colour; the other asks us to look closely at more rustic surfaces in use. Their sensibilities differ, but both show that material is more than a neutral background.
Back to the plate
These pieces are neither nigoshide porcelain nor antique tea utensils. It has its own mist-grey and warm-sand tones, matte finish, and intentionally visible grain. On a plate, the space around food lets those qualities appear; on the square dish, the woven pattern meets the texture rather than hiding it.
These stories lead us back to a contemporary object: what remains visible when it enters daily life? Before the first bite, light, colour, and the hand have already met the ceramic.
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Cover image: milky water while rinsing rice. Adapted from an online photo by JIb_Enjoy / Pixabay, available for commercial use under the Pixabay License. Not an OrienX product or a historical photograph.