Kutani Kosen Kiln

This guide to the Kutani Kosen Kiln in Kanazawa traces the five secret glaze colors that gave Ko-Kutani ware its name after 1655, and the unexplained silence that fell over the kilns for nearly a century afterward. It follows the potter Shinsuke Matsubara, who took the name Kosen and reopened a kiln here in 1870, and the family that has kept it firing for five generations since. The workshop still stands on the same Nomachi street his son moved it to in 1920.