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Hiraga Gennai, a leading genius of the Edo period, wrote in his petition "Pottery Works Book" submitted to the then Amakusa County Magistrate in 1771 (Meiwa 8) that "the clay used for pottery is of the highest quality, unmatched in the world."
The "pottery clay" referred to here is Amakusa pottery stone, which Gennai praised highly.
Furthermore, the "Kouhōsho" stated that by training craftsmen and using pottery imported from foreign countries as models, "very good pottery can be produced," and went on to declare that if high-quality pottery that could rival that of foreign countries could be produced in this way, Japanese people would not need to buy expensive foreign pottery, but rather "people from China and the Netherlands" would purchase it, which would result in "permanent national interests."
This petition was written by Gennai when he studied in Nagasaki with the help of Tanuma Okitsugu, but it was groundbreaking that it was the first document to propose developing Amakusa into a production center for pottery stone, written by Hiraga Gennai, who was a leader in the promotion of industry at the time.
This happened nine years after Takahama village headman Ueda Dengoemon opened his kiln using Amakusa pottery stone.

© maruoyaki 2017

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