Tea pot with landscape, Mashiko ware

One well-known Meiji era Mashiko ceramics decorator was Minagawa Masu. Born in 1874, at around the age of ten she began painting decoration on pots using underglazes over white slip. It is said that in just one day she would paint 500-1000 pots such as teapots, bottles, and hibachi. The style of Minagawa’s sansui dobin painting aligned with the aesthetic values of the Mingei movement in which the natural handwork qualities of the decoration were highly praised. As sansui dobin and other forms of ceramics were introduced through the Mingei movement across the nation, Mashiko came to be known as “the home of Mingei.”