The Black Pulled from Fire: What Is Seto-guro?

Gallery Son Journal · on Seto-guro, and the work of Kato Takaya

Most pottery is left to cool slowly, over a day or more, in the sealed and darkening kiln. But there is one ware born of the very opposite — seized from the fire at its hottest, and cooled in seconds. Its black is not painted; it is caught. This is Seto-guro: the deep black tea bowl born in the Mino kilns four hundred years ago.

Hikidashi-guro — the black drawn from fire

Seto-guro is also called hikidashi-guro, “pull-out black.” While the kiln still burns red, at the height of the firing — around 1,200°C — the potter reaches in with iron tongs through a small side window and draws the bowl out. Those windows were made for watching the fire; it is said that one day, from a hole meant only for looking, a jet-black was born. The instant it is pulled, the bowl is plunged into water and cooled in moments. Its glaze is oni-ita, rich in iron. Drawn from the fire and chilled at once, the iron is fixed, in that single moment, into a deep and absorbing black.

“The kiln holds three at most — usually two,” says Kato Takaya. “And from one firing, only a single Seto-guro is born. Everything is decided the instant the tongs close on the bowl. If the hand trembles, it is over.”

A black decided in a moment

Why pull the bowl and quench it? Left to cool slowly inside the kiln, the same iron glaze turns a reddish brown. The deep black does not come gently. Only when the bowl is torn from the fire at its hottest and cooled all at once is that black caught. And the sudden shock of temperature runs a fine crackle, kannyū, across the glaze. There is no second attempt. To open the kiln, draw the bowl, and cool it is a single, irreversible decision.

The black Rikyū loved

In an age when only reddish-black bowls existed, the deep, true black of Seto-guro was welcomed by the tea masters. One Seto-guro bowl, named Oharagi, is said to have been treasured by Sen no Rikyū himself; it survives today as an Important Cultural Property in the keeping of the Omotesenke Fushin’an. In the quiet, austere, unforced beauty of this black lay the very essence of the wabi Rikyū prized. This way of drawing a bowl from the fire to catch its black is shared with Raku ware: the Raku black known around the world and this Seto-guro are, in a sense, siblings — born of the same handling of fire. The form, too, is distinct: where rounded bowls were then the norm, Seto-guro stands as a bold, half-cylinder shape on a low foot, its rim rising and falling like a mountain path. In New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a Momoyama Seto-guro tea bowl named Tettsui — “Iron Mallet.”

White and black — Shino and Seto-guro

Shino and Seto-guro are a pair, born of the same Mino fire. Shino’s white is cooled slowly, and waits for the fire to give it. Seto-guro’s black is torn from the fire and caught in an instant. The white that is given; the black that is seized. Both vanished in the Edo period; both were brought back in the early Shōwa era by Arakawa Toyozō, who built a kiln beside the old Mino kiln sites; and both have been carried, hand to hand, by Living National Treasures — Shino by Suzuki Osamu, Seto-guro by Kato Kōzō. Kato Takaya had the chance to learn from both men in person, and holds the white and the black together in his hands.

“Shino is a ware of waiting,” Kato says. “Seto-guro is a ware of deciding. One I give to the fire; the other I take from it. They seem opposite, and yet both come down, in the end, to trusting the fire.”

A fire that comes only once

In a single Seto-guro bowl, a moment that will never return is sealed just as it was. That black is the trace of one decision made without hesitation.

“When the tongs close on the bowl and I draw it from the fire, there is no more doubt,” Kato says in closing. “Hesitate, and the black goes cloudy. After forty years, that instant is still the most frightening, and the most beautiful. I trust the fire, and move my hand.”

The Seto-guro of Kato Takaya can be seen at Gallery Son.