Tamura Seito: Calligraphy on Kutani Ware, Connecting Across Time

The fine tip of a brush dipped in black pigment touches glazed porcelain. Though just a few hairs thick, its bristles barely bend as they glide across the surface. A single stroke complete, the brush briefly lifts, then touches down again. It seems to quiver, yet its movements are certain as they tease out a new stroke: a thicker serif. Two more strokes, and seemingly disconnected lines join together. A Japanese hiragana character has emerged. Soon, an entire poem takes shape, thousand-year-old words breathing with life atop ceramic.

This is the work of Tamura Seito, the fourth-generation successor to a technique known as Kutani mohitsu saiji, or Kutani brush-writing micro calligraphy. The only remaining artist of this style, she skillfully combines expressive glazes with waka poems to create unified pieces where the empty spaces between the characters tell as much of a story as the words themselves.

We sat down with her to talk about going back to her roots, the creativity that lives within negative space, and how the poems of people more than a thousand years ago still resonate today.

Re-Discovering the Value of Where She Started

“To be honest, I wasn’t interested in taking over the family business at all,” Tamura confesses. “Instead, I really wanted to go abroad and try working an office job. I wanted to see what a company was like.”

It’s hard to imagine, surrounded as she now is by her tools of the trade: at least five jars of brushes lined up on her desk, the bat of a potter’s wheel at her elbow, and in-progress works neatly stacked on shelving in the corner.

“My father was always doing the same work by himself at home, so it just seemed rather plain.”

Though she did study Kutani mohitsu saiji under her father, Tamura Keisei, Tamura also graduated from the University of Tsukuba, School of International Studies, in 2004. She spent the next three years working in sales, a job she found thoroughly enjoyable. It was also during this time that she began to see her father’s work in a different light. The products she encountered in stores simply didn’t measure up to the pieces she had watched him create every day.

“Other things seemed superficial in comparison. When that level of quality is simply part of your daily life since childhood, your eye naturally becomes accustomed to it.”

Tamura also began to think that she wanted to create something she could continue building over time—something that would last and remain.

“Around that time,” she continues, “as I was thinking about the kind of work I wanted to devote my life to, I realized that my father was the last craftsperson practicing Kutani mohitsu saiji. Once he was gone, the technique itself would disappear.”

She decided to go back to school, this time to study ceramics, completing a training course at Ishikawa Prefectural Kutani Ware Technical Training Institute in 2007. She began exhibiting as early as 2008 and has been diligently engaged in the craft ever since.

Although she takes inspiration from her father and grandfather, the second-generation Tamura Kinsei, she has been steadily forging her own artistic voice.

“I want to write gentle characters,” she says of her lettering techniques, using a word that can translate equally to gentle, soft, or kind. “Characters with a sense of suppleness or flexibility. I design my pieces so that they look good from any angle. Ultimately, I hope the person welcoming my pieces will be the one to complete the work.”

In this way, “gentle” characters become not only about shape or technique, but about consideration for the user. Calligraphy that is responsive not just to the vessel on which it is painted, but also to the very mood of the person enjoying it—that is what forms the core of Tamura’s work.

Letting the Work Speak

Yet Tamura’s art doesn’t stop at micro calligraphy. In fact, it begins long before the calligraphy brush even touches the ceramic. Another hallmark of her creations includes expressive glazes, as well as designs painted in Kutani ware’s traditional five colors, the Kutani gosai.

The way Tamura combines techniques reveals another aspect of her flexible and responsive artistic approach. Her Washi series, for example, features a textured white glaze reminiscent of fine washi paper. The glaze is sprayed on, creating a different pattern every time. Tamura adjusts the placement of the characters to match the glaze’s natural shifts. She letters all her work with the naked eye. No magnifying glass is involved, even for the tiniest of characters.

The colors, too, vary with each piece. Some come out of the kiln with pink undertones; others tend toward yellow. Only then does Tamura decide the direction of the work. She might choose cherry blossom motifs or spring-themed poetry for a pink piece, while bringing autumn leaves and themes to yellow-tinted vessels. The artwork is thus found anew at every stage.

The poems Tamura chooses, and the surfaces of her works, are in dialogue with one another.

“With this white glaze, if I put in a poem themed on snow, it looks like snow; if I put in a poem about cherry blossoms, it looks like petals scattering in the wind.” Giving another example, she says, “Sometimes I intend from the start to use a red glaze because I want to include a maple-leaf poem; depending on how it turns out, I might decide it suits cherry blossoms instead, or it might suit a poem about dusk. So I don’t decide everything in advance. The work comes together through that process of seeing new possibilities in what emerges.”

Yet Tamura intentionally leaves blank space, both literally—very few of her vessels are completely covered in text or pattern—and conceptually.

“I like to create an atmosphere that allows viewers to interpret a piece themselves,” she says.

Poems on a Journey

The poems lend themselves well to this art of negative space. Most are waka from Japan’s most ancient poetry anthologies: the Manyoshu, compiled in the latter part of the Nara period (710–794 CE), and the Kokin Wakashu (ca. 905–920 CE).

“Waka contain only thirty-one syllables,” Tamura says, “so you’re left to fill in the blanks with your imagination. You end up reflecting on the poem while calling to mind something within yourself.”

Written in classical Japanese, the content isn’t particularly easy to understand even to most native Japanese speakers. But to Tamura, that is part of the appeal.

“I think it's good not to fully understand. There’s no allure in a list of what happened that day, or in one conclusion after another. Instead, even if you can’t read what’s written, if it still feels like Japanese, I think that’s just right. When it’s just on the edge of ‘can read it, can’t read it.’ That’s the sweet spot I’m aiming for with my calligraphy.”

The Japanese writing system contains three scripts: kanji, or characters borrowed from Chinese; katakana, a phonetic system often used for loanwords; and hiragana, the main phonetic script.

“The beauty of hiragana, which is asymmetrical, is something unique to Japan, and I really want to treasure that. That scattering quality, that sense of being irregular yet harmonious, is what I’m aiming for.”

Their visual qualities can be appreciated in their own right, whether one understands their meaning or not.

While Tamura started with love poems, today she finds herself drawn to poems about people on journeys. It seems fitting for an artist who found her life’s calling by leaving home and coming back again.

“I feel like I rely heavily on these poems’ power.” Though her work may be solitary, Tamura doesn’t create alone. The poems, the language, and the sensibility they carry have been passed down for centuries. Her role is to borrow their power and beauty, add her own perspective, and let them speak once again through Kutani ware.

Letters Sent Across One Thousand Years

“That a poem composed by a person so long ago has been carried down to us today—it’s just amazing, isn’t it? Though that person lived so far in the past, they were still human, just like us. The emotions are the same. A waka is a song, but it’s also like a letter. To read those words and empathize with someone born over a thousand years ago—there’s just something deeply moving about that.”

Tamura’s work, too, is like a letter. A moment captured in time, responsive to the recipient, it is only truly finished once it reaches another human being. Each of Tamura’s vessels is meant to be completed by the one who holds it. An ancient traveler setting out on a journey, a fourth-generation artist painting in her studio, and, across an ocean, a person placing a flower in a calligraphy-adorned vase, turning it to catch that day’s light just right. Each person and each moment is connected, a gentle letter of humanity that is always in the process of being written.

View Tamura Seito Collection