Tetsuya Kobayashi: Handmade Japanese Tablewa

Tetsuya Kobayashi pottery works in Ibaraki with one recurring pairing: an iron-dark surface cut with tokusa, the fine vertical ridging that takes its name from a segmented reed. The same treatment turns up on a coffee dripper, a rice bowl, a soup cup, a tea cup and a pot, and it does a different job on each one.

Ridging you can feel before you can see

On the small rice bowl above, the tokusa lines run the height of the wall at 5.9cm. Run a thumb across them while holding the bowl and the ridges register before the eye finishes reading the pattern — which is the practical reason tokusa shows up on things meant to be gripped rather than just looked at. A plain iron glaze at the same size would feel smoother and, wet from rinsing, slightly harder to hold onto.

The larger version of the same bowl stands 6.4cm, against 6.2cm for a separate iron tokusa bowl in the range. All three sit close together at the wall, which means the choice between them comes down to how the ridging is cut rather than how large the bowl is.

The same lines on a different job

This dripper measures 10.6cm by 9.2cm at the mouth, with a rise of just 2.54cm from base to rim — low and wide rather than tall, built to sit over a cup or carafe. Here the tokusa ridging is not primarily about grip; the dripper is handled by its edge, not gripped through the body. Instead the ridges break up the surface so the piece reads as made rather than moulded, which matters on an object that spends most of its life sitting exposed on a counter rather than tucked in a cupboard.

Ridging scaled down to a cup

On the soup cup, the same ridged surface meets a smaller footprint and a different task: something held at chest height, often two-handed, often hot. Vertical ridging on a cup wall does what it does on the bowl — it gives the fingers and palm something to register against, which matters more with a hot liquid than a cool one, since a smooth wet wall is easiest to lose your grip on exactly when the contents are warmest.

The same ridging appears again at a smaller scale: 3.6cm on a flat plate and 3.7cm on a small bowl, both lower-walled pieces where the tokusa lines are close to the only decoration on the piece, since there is little depth for a pattern to recede into.

Where the range goes from here

Beyond the three pieces above, the same iron tokusa treatment carries through to an iron tokusa tea cup and an iron tokusa pot, so a table can be built around the one surface across drinking, pouring and serving without mixing finishes.

Choosing a starting piece

A dripper is the odd one out functionally — buy it only if pour-over coffee is already part of the routine. For everyday use, the rice bowl at 5.9cm or 6.4cm is the easier entry point, since it is handled the same way the tokusa ridging was made to be handled: gripped, not just set on a table.

Where to start

The Tetsuya Kobayashi collection lists the full Ibaraki range, iron tokusa and otherwise, together.