Mino ware 美濃焼

What is Mino ware?

Mino ware is pottery made in the Tono region of eastern Gifu Prefecture, mainly in the cities of Toki, Tajimi, Mizunami and Kani. The name points at a place, not at a look. That is the first thing to get straight, because a Mino plate can be thin white porcelain with a printed rim, or heavy stoneware under a thick crackled glaze, and both are correctly called Mino ware.

It is an official name as well as a regional one. Mino ware was designated a traditional craft by Japan's then Ministry of International Trade and Industry on 22 July 1978, and the designation covers more than fifteen separate ware types rather than one house style.

I have been in the Japanese-goods trade since 2013. Mino is the name I type more than any other, and if you own Japanese tableware bought in the last few decades, some of it is probably from there.

Where is Mino, and why did pottery grow there?

Mino is the old province covering the southern half of what is now Gifu Prefecture, and the kiln towns sit in its eastern corner, the Tono area. Firing there goes back a long way. The local account starts in the 5th century, when Sue ware techniques arrived from the Korean peninsula, with ash-glazed wares following in the Heian period (794-1185).

What turned it into a craft centre was the tea ceremony. Potters from the neighbouring Seto area settled in Mino during the Azuchi-Momoyama period, and between then and the early Edo period the demand for tea utensils pushed the kilns from plain storage goods into deliberately artistic work.

Then it swung back. From the second half of the 17th century the kilns moved into household containers and white-glazed wares. Porcelain production started in the late Edo period, the Meiji period brought copper transfer and screen printing, and mechanisation arrived in the Taisho period. That last stretch is why Mino is an industry and not a handful of studios.

What glazes and styles come from Mino?

Four styles are the ones people name, Ki-Seto, Setoguro, Shino and Oribe, and together they are called Mino-Momoyama ware. All four came out of the same short, intense period around the turn of the 17th century.

Ki-Seto is a pale yellow glaze, usually carved with lines or floral motifs and often mottled green where copper has run. Setoguro is black, and its older names, tensho-guro and hikidashi-guro, refer to the Tensho years (1573-1593) and to the practice of pulling the piece from the kiln at heat. Shino is a thick feldspar glaze that appeared in the Azuchi-Momoyama period; the grey version, nezumi-shino, gets its colour from an iron-rich slip that is scraped back before firing. Oribe is green and black with geometric pattern, and it carries the name of the tea master Furuta Oribe, under whose influence it developed.

Worth saying plainly: those are Mino's historical styles. Modern tableware borrows the vocabulary all the time, and a green-glazed dinner plate gets called "Oribe style." That is fine, but it is not the same claim. I don't describe anything as Oribe or Shino unless the maker's own title says so.

Why is so much everyday Japanese tableware Mino ware?

Because the Tono kilns industrialised early and stayed at it. In METI's 2021 economic structure survey, Gifu Prefecture produced ¥19.71 billion of a national ¥36.61 billion in ceramic tableware, a 53.8% share. Gifu's own tourism body puts the figure at around 60%. Either way, roughly half the country's output comes out of a few towns.

The practical result for anyone buying is that Mino covers both ends of the material range. Fine bowl can feel completely different in the hand and still share a vendor name. It also means "Mino ware" on a label tells you where something was made and very little about how it will behave. For that you have to look at the body.

How do you use and wash it?

Hand-wash it in warm water with a soft sponge, dry it properly, and never stack it damp.

The split that matters is porcelain against stoneware. Porcelain is fired hard with kaolin, absorbs almost no water and is generally fine in a microwave. Stoneware and earthenware are porous, so water held in the body expands fast under microwave heat and can crack the piece. In a dishwasher, any piece can knock against another and get scratched or chipped, so hand-washing is the safer choice, particularly for porous ware.

Two rules apply to everything. Don't go from the fridge straight into the microwave, because the temperature jump is what cracks things. And keep gold, silver or platinum decoration out of the microwave entirely, since metallic overglaze can spark.

If a piece is porous or has a crackled glaze, potters recommend sealing it before first use, a step called medome. Simmer it gently in rice-rinsing water for about fifteen minutes, let it cool in the pot, then wash and dry it completely. Porcelain and semi-porcelain generally don't need it.

Dry pieces upside down with air around them for a day before they go in the cupboard, and put a sheet of paper between anything you stack.

You can browse the Mino ware collection here.