can anyone identify Japanese characters? - bowls and chawan contemporary

I bought three bowls and chawan recently on a whim. Obviously I am having huge difficulty identifying even what they are made of or the glazes etc However so far I think...
the three bowls have some type of tenmoku glaze?? possibly Yuteki tenmoku??
but the chawan I have no idea on. The three bowls are labelled and signed though. Arita pottery, but no idea what the signature is. Any help would be much appreciated - anything at all the chawan have raised white ceramic dots on them. Are they raku? they have a glazed interior in sort of celadon maybe that is crackled. They aren't marked.
help....
Many thanks
m

label on marked bowls

sorry, meant to say the chawan have raised white glaze dots decor on them, not 'ceramic' dots.

Arita is a town located in Nishimatsuura District, Saga, Japan. It is known for producing Arita porcelain, one of the traditional handicrafts of Japan. It also holds the largest ceramic fair in Western Japan

Hi Dan
thanks :) I have searched Arita pottery but mostly I come up with the coloured porcelain. I have searched endlessly but all I can work out is that I think they are possibly yuteki tenmoku glaze. I've found one potter who specialises in this but without knowing what the sig says I can't tell if they are his. I then also found a bowl last night that looks similar in terms of decor and the way the interior is done and that refers to it being silver ??? which is confusing because I thought the glistening was not silver in any form but was the reaction of the glaze on firing.
Being able to read the sig will help - I've searched mostly everything on the net using Arita and nothing. Even the bowls I found didn't seem to be from that area.
m

sorry that meant to read 'even the bowls I found THAT WERE VERY SIMILAR TO MINE' didnt' seem to be from that area.

Hi, the only character I can identify is the square with the vertical and horizontal line inside that looks lika window. That is the `KANJI` for `RICE`.

so we know what they are for...

thank you!
although I can't imagine eating from them as they are way too stunning to use (and I quite happily use a lot of my pottery).
m

recently,after talking to a studio potter, I decided to use some of my collection for it's intended purpose,I now have Flowers in stunning vases and drink coffee from beautiful mugs etc

I love using my vases (of which I have a fair few) for flowers ;)
m

and I have a David Wright mug for my coffee - very gorgeous.

apologies, but this is a *bump* as well. I have searched interminably for these but am no further. Any help would be very much appreciated :)
many thanks
m

What you have, as the gold sticky label says, are 3 teabowls (chawan) and 3 rice bowls made in Arita. The first two characters on the gold label mean "Arita" and the final character means "ware". The Japanese would say Arita -yaki.

The rice bowls do appear to have a yuteki tenmoku glaze from a distance - this is called oilspot as well as it gives a silvery glisten as oil on water. However this glaze is very difficult to achieve and takes years of work and the close up of the calligraphy on the bowl suggests that it is done much more simply on your bowls with a blue glaze underneath and a dark glaze applied on top.

The teabowls are not raku (which is lower fired earthenware) but stoneware.

Arita is probably the pottery centre with the largest volume of production in Japan and is best known in the West for the Imari ware that was/is produced there.

I don't know what the calligraphy on your bowl says. It could be the mark of a potter (but not the person who made it) or a greeting or motto.

Basically the gold label gives the game away that these pieces are mass produced factory items and would cost just a few pounds each.

They are no doubt very good quality and much better quality than anything of a comparable price produced in the West but they were made for use and to be replaced when broken. There are a few large Japanese outlets selling this type of thing in the UK (certainly around London where there is a large Japanese population).

SP thank you so much - the person I bought these from bought them in Japan. I had begun to suspect from the fact they are so uniform and the small amount of reading I'd uncovered, that they weren't 'special' pieces. However I do love them as a set so I'm very happy.
m

If you bought bowls of a similar quality from a European manufacturer they would cost at least 10 times as much new as yours would have done so what I have said shouldn't make you feel any less pleased with them.

Uniformity and sticky labels are a good clue to factory manufacture and usually the best pieces of 20th century Japanese pottery come with a fitted signed wooden box.

A picture of the lid from one such box below:-



The far right downward script tells where the pot was made, the centre script what is in the box, the script on the left usually the name of the potter. Here the black seal (this is usually in red) is the potter's seal, which may or may not be the same seal as is found on the pot.

To make matters worse if you asked the average Japanese person to read a lid like this they would most likely to be only able to pick out a few words as there are thousands of different characters in three major scripts used in modern Japanese writing and the potter's seal is very unlikely to be in one of these.

thank you so much for so generously sharing your hard earned knowledge - I really appreciate that and the time taken to do so. Ironically, whilst I do love studio pottery with all it's quirks and absolutely appreciate the uniqueness of it, the thing I really love about this set is the uniformity. Funny how odd things appeal to the eye occasionally. It sits on a Chinese lacquer cabinet we bought in Macau many years ago and looks fab.
m