Interview: November 2, 2002

We are here today with Darice Veri. Darice originally came here from the American State of Ohio, and she’s never gone back. She came to study in the pottery town of Mashiko in Tochigi prefecture, and met her future husband—how long ago was it?
Seventeen years ago.

What made you come here? What made you stay?
Well, I had never intended to stay in Japan. I was going to study here for two or three years. I was a Fine Arts ceramics major in college at an art school in Columbus, Ohio. I liked the pottery of Hamada Shoji, who was one of the first potters to become a living national treasure in Japan. I thought, well, if I wanted to learn about making things of his caliber, I should go see it first hand. . .So that’s what I did. 

So you just came here and went to a pottery school? What did you do when you first came here?
When I first came here, I was originally supposed to study with a potter, but that didn’t work out. I went into town, and after a while I was eventually introduced to another potter. I ended up staying at the workshop and studying for three years. 

It wasn’t a school, it was an individual potter, he and I, one on one. I basically did all the grunt work and the small work and worked side by side with him. 

So now you work entirely out of your house? Your studio is in your house?
Our studio is in the house. The kiln is here. Everything is here. We live outside Mashiko so local materials are here and readily available. We use clay that comes from Mashiko. We have a workshop which is a blend of both modern and traditional. We kick wheels with a traditional Japanese wheel deck and some electric wheels.

Let’s talk a bit about the pottery town of Mashiko. Whenever anyone talks about Mashiko you think of Hamada Shoji and Bernard Leach who helped establish the Mingei [folk arts] ceramic movement in the 1950s and encouraged other potters to come here. Is there still a very distinct style today that embodies the key elements of Hamada Shoji or his apprentice Shimaoka Tatsuzo? Or are there a variety of styles at work here?
Mashiko is the largest pottery town in Japan, but it wasn’t always. There wasn’t a strong pottery tradition that the people followed before Hamada Shoji. He basically came to Mashiko as an individual looking for a place to work. There was lots of local material, lots of local clay. Since the 1950s, it has been a sort of a Mecca for people who want to make things in clay but don’t want to be tied to a particular tradition, even if they came from a traditional pottery making area. Within more traditional pottery towns, it’s very difficult to make what you want, even within that tradition.

Speaking of Hamada Shoji, what are the features of his work that are characteristics just of him that you can’t find in other pottery? 
Most definitely his use of shape and color. The way he used local materials to make several different kinds of new things from old materials. With some materials, people just used them one way, but Hamada Shoji used them another way.

For example?
Rice straw. The ash from rice straw. The local clays. Ash from wood that go into glazes. Just his whole approach to pottery has been and still is appealing to me.

How is that representative in your work? Maybe it is or isn’t indicative of the local artistic culture, but there are a lot of straight lines in your work. 
I use a Japanese comb to make the lines. But the lines themselves come from looking at rice fields around the studio. Just before or just after they are harvested, the earth is turned over in to these lines. When something is freshly planted, again you see these delicate straight lines. 

While you and your husband’s work are different, is there anything about them that is typically Mashiko?
No, I wouldn’t. I really wouldn’t, because I don’t know what is meant by “Mashiko” ware. 

When I think of Mashiko pottery, I think of browns and greens and blues.
We do use those glazes—brown and dark blackish brown. We use the same kind of glazes, some of the same forms, but in our own way. We don’t go out and say, “yeah we want to make this Mashiko looking stuff”—we just like using the materials but in our way, using the ideas to make different kind of table ware, our own version.

What influences your pottery?
What influences my work? I’ve never thought of that.

Well, I assume your work has evolved through the years—what causes that?
Sometimes when I look at my old stuff, I wonder, how did I think that up? When I start a big working cycle, I’m always in a panic. What am I going to make? What am I going to make? Then I start working and think, well I can do this, and I can do that. Then I’ll try things. . .I just respond to things. 

It’s like, why do I like Hamada Shoji’s work? I guess just respond to it I guess—visually, viscerally, as a tactile useful object in life.

Other potters I know go to museums and galleries to look at paintings and sculpture for inspiration in order to incorporate it into their own work. How about you?
Not recently but yes, I have done that in the past. Anything minimalist—like the drawings of Edgar Degas which are very fluid, very quick; a line or a form to evoke a moment. The drawings of Egon Schiele, a painter. He has very good ways of using a line to capture a form. In pottery, you have a line that extends into a form. Drawing isn’t as dimensional. To me, throwing on a wheel is like drawing, except you end up with something you can hold in your hands.

Is pottery an art or a craft? Is there a difference?
I think people think of it as a craft because you can use it, because it has specific purpose. This is a vase. This is a mug. The basic form has to be able to function for what it’s made for— I don’t see why this makes it any less valid than any other art form such as sculpture or printmaking. I never thought of it as a craft—there is no distinction in my mind

What do you find here in Japan, artistically speaking, that you don’t find in the US?
There is an appreciation for things that are handmade in Japan. People value handmade things and are willing to buy them. I was visiting my sister in the US, and I looked at her kitchen table; there wasn’t a single object that was not manufactured by machine. 

Japan has ten or twelve major pottery towns with very distinct styles, with very long traditions. Many Japanese consumers have some idea what Kiyomizu-yaki is versus Hagi-yaki, versus Shino-yaki. The awareness for hand made pottery seems much higher. If you ask me what about US pottery styles, the best I could come up is Corning.
[laughs] I even know potters in the States that use Corning. 

Any other differences?
The other not so great element is bit of disbelief I face when I say I make my own pottery—as if I’m supposed to be a helper to Masa [her husband], not a potter in my own right. It’s not expected [laughs]. While my husband and I work closely together, our work is different. Oddly enough, people often look at my stuff and say “I thought a man made it.” They then look at Masa’s stuff and say, “I thought a woman made it.” 

This disbelief, is it stemming from the fact that being a potter is an exotic profession, even in Japan?
People usually never meet the maker of things. That’s not just me, that’s Masa as well —people say, “That’s really what you do? That’s how you make your living?”

Well in the US, it’s fairly difficult to make your living out of pottery alone. You can’t earn enough—you generally have to have another job or teach. You can’t charge the prices you can here in Japan—I think that in the US, there isn’t the tradition or the market that exists here in Japan that highly values hand made craft. Unless, of course, a husband or spouse has another job that brought in the majority of the income and pottery is a part-time job, a hobby. 
True, some people tend to think that way. But even when people meet Masa, they don’t understand what potters do, what our day is like. I think that people think that potters just schlep it out whenever the inspiration grabs them—people have no idea of how hard it is. It is a business, after all. Every day, I sit down and face deadlines. 

At the same time, it is an art form, so you have to balance inspiration with more practical matters. You can’t allow one to cancel out the other. You have these responsibilities but you also want to approach these things artistically. At the end of the day, you have to put shoes on the kids.

Has Japanese pottery influenced American pottery?
That, I think, depends on the individual. There is no area in the US where everybody is making Japanese-style pottery. Also, there are many, many types of Japanese pottery, so any influence is minute, as it is an individual taking elements from various work.

Last time I was in the Boston area I was surprised to see a lot of raku ware—big, sculptural raku spheres, what have you.
Yes, but that is raku as a firing technique—not a style. A Japanese person looking at that would not say it is “raku”, as the style is associated with tea ceremony ware. 

Do you show your work outside Japan?
I once had my pieces in the New York Takeshimaya. That was a moment of pride—I was walking along 5th Avenue at Christmas time, and there it was, my piece in the window. 

What are you working on now?
Well, I have a show coming up in Tokyo in February. So I have to really gear up for that. I’ve been makings lists; thinking I need x of this, y of that. Recently, for some reason, I decided I had to make this shape I hadn’t made since I was an apprentice. When I was an apprentice I had to make hundreds—I think it was for an order—of these short little cylindrical vases that I then had to change into six-sided objects, and then make them all to size. For some reason, I thought, I’d like to make some of those, so I made a whole bunch of them. I made them a lot taller and a lot bigger this time.

Do you buy other potters’ or other artists’ work?
We love buying other people’s work. These plates are made by another wood worker friend. All the cups are made by somebody else. The glass is made by a friend. I like buying and using other people’s work. I’m attracted by pottery I can’t make.

What can’t you make?
Things that are rough, when the design is just chopped out. I need a bit more control. Also, I don’t have a climbing kiln; I don’t have an anagama, so I like the stuff with the really rough textures and lots of fly ash. Things like that. Like this cup—a friend of mine made it. I could never make that, but I’m glad he did. I like having things that my friends made.

And what is your life like these days? What is like to be a potter and what is like to be an American potter married to a Japanese potter in a very traditional Japanese town?
That’s a good question. What’s it like to be an American potter in Japan? I don’t know: I’ve never worked as a professional potter in the United States, so this is my only experience, my only professional experience. 

What’s it like? I have two kids, so that keeps me busy. It’s not like I can stay in the studio all day, every day, though I would like that. At this point in my life, the day evolves around family affairs, taking care of the kids. My kids are fourteen and four. 

When I didn’t have kids, I could stay in the studio all day, or all night. Now I try to get as many hours as I can in, depending on my schedule. I have a show in Tokyo once a year, so when I’m busy with that, my husband picks up the slack. And when’s he’s really busy, I pick up the slack. We used to have shows together, but we don’t do that anymore—it’s too hard being busy at the same time; things just ebb and flow. 

You can only be what you are. And I can only be an American living in this situation. It has its stress, which I suppose would otherwise be irrelevant to people who are not Americans living in this area. You just take it for granted: this is this, and this is that.

There are many things that are new. . .

For instance?
The school system. As years go by surprising things happen to me all the time. 

For example, when my older son was in the fifth grade, he was in the school play. The play was about the agriculture of the town, Motega, which is outside Mashiko. Historically the two main crops have been konyaku [devil tongue root] and tobacco. My son was in his class play, and I didn’t even think to ask him about it until a day or two before the performance. That’s when I asked him about his role was in the play.

My son said, “I’m a pack of cigarettes!” I said, “What? You mean you have to dress up like a pack of cigarettes?” I thought, “Oh God, why didn’t I ask before?”

Then he said, “And my lines in the play are ‘Smoke cigarettes and you will feel like an adult!’”

Who came up with that line?
The teacher. She was just trying to make a point that this is what you do with tobacco. I thought this was not what you should be saying in front of a whole school full of kids. When I mentioned it to other people, they seemed to think, “Well, so?” Then I complained about it to the teacher, and she looked at me as if I were a nutcase. 

In your limited time, what are you reading right now?
I’m not reading anything right now, but I do have on my shelf, The Red Tent [by Anita Diamant], but I just haven’t gotten around to reading it right now.

What books would you recommend to people on Japanese pottery or a primer on Japanese art?
There’s not a lot. There is one book, and I’m not sure if it’s even still published, by an English academic, Brian Moeran, called The Okubo Diary. It’s a very good account of a foreign scholar living in a traditional town in Japan with an almost balanced point of view. You can’t entirely be, though. . .I thought it was excellent. 

How about on Mashiko?
The Bernard Leach books, the Hamada books, but none specifically in English come to mind. . .I always wanted to write one. We all have our book in us.