Gifu vs Shiga: How Region Changes Japanese Tableware

Gifu and Shiga sit close enough on a map that it is easy to assume their pottery looks alike, and in one sense it does: both regions work mostly in pottery rather than porcelain. Gifu vs Shiga pottery is really a question of what happens to that clay after it leaves the wheel, and the glazes, colors, and shapes below make the difference easy to see once you know where to look.

Gifu's painted surface

Yoshihei Kato's boat-shaped plate is a clear example of what Gifu's pottery can carry on top of the clay: a low, 3.2cm form glazed yellow, with a peony flower painted across the surface rather than carved into it. The shape itself, curved like a small boat, is meant to hold food along its length rather than pile it in the center, which makes the painted flower visible from almost any angle at the table.

Shiga's fired surface

Shigaraki, the pottery town Shiga is best known for, tends to let the clay and the kiln do more of the talking than a painted design does. Furutani Pottery's iron splash apple plate shows this directly: an iron-toned glaze scattered unevenly across a 2.2cm plate, closer to a fired texture than a drawn pattern. Where Gifu's peony plate leads with color applied on top, this piece leads with what happens to the clay itself inside the kiln.

A sharper line from Shiga

Not everything from Shiga follows the loose, fired look of the iron splash plate above. Denpei Kiln's inner red-line square diamond plate takes a more geometric route, with a straight red line set inside a squared, diamond-angled form measuring 9.7cm by 7.1cm and standing 1.7cm tall. It is porcelain rather than pottery, a reminder that Shiga's shelves hold more than one register, from rough-fired texture to a crisp red line on a smooth white ground.

Where to start

For Gifu's painted pottery, start with Mino ware or go straight to Yoshihei Kato's plates. For Shiga's fired texture, Shigaraki ware and Furutani Pottery's collection are the closer match.