When we were asked to decide what CIP to do based on our interests, I knew I wanted to take up an activity that had to do with art. This led me to taking pottery lessons at Fujihira, a pottery shop in Higashiyama. Fujihira is a pottery shop with a number of artisans that specialize in traditional Japanese styles of pottery, like many shops in the Higashiyama area. My goal during the semester was to pick up a new style of pottery, but also come to understand the art community in Japan.

Taking pottery lessons at Fujihira was different than I imagined, coming from a background in arts in the U.S., where individualism is prized when it comes to art. It is oftentimes the case that something deviating from the traditional is the goal in contemporary art. However, Fujihira demonstrated that in Japan, the expression of individuality comes from the details. Most importantly in Japanese art, the artist is recognized as having perfected his craft by being able to replicate traditional designs to a T. Fujihira taught me this through interactions with my teacher where he showed me different methods, like coiling to build cups, and reiterated that the measurements and thickness were important to achieve the desired result. This was also evident when my teacher showed me the pieces he was creating, that they were uniform in shape, but differed in how he painted the details on them. My relationship with my teacher is probably more indicative of the art world than any normal teacher-student relationship in Japan, in part because I was his only student at the time. We talked often using short form, but occasionally in long form, as opposed to using formal. We also joked a lot, mostly about how I was doing learning the techniques from him. It was a more relaxed relationship than I expected going into the shop, but it was nice that in addition to the pressure I felt to live up to his expectations as a student, I was able to look forward to him joking about how difficult it was when he was in my position. I still maintained some aspects of the student position in that after he showed me where things were, it was my job to clean up after lessons and put things away for next time. I was able to understand through my interactions and by observing other artists’ interactions in the studios, how the art community in Japan works.

There were some difficult aspects of my CIP, such as unexpected translating between my teacher who only spoke Japanese and foreigners who came to the workshop to look around and only spoke English. By translating, I was able to use my Japanese in a way I hadn’t inside of class, which allowed me to push the boundaries of what I thought I was able to do in Japanese. Besides this, the biggest difficulty was perhaps that I was the only student. This meant that while I had the sole attention of my teacher, I was not able to form a community with other people my age and interact with other students. I was able to compensate this with making lots of Japanese friends in other areas, but it would have been nice to experience that type of Japanese community.