{"product_id":"vintage-japanese-bizen-chawan-wood-fired-tea-bowl-natural-goma-ash-glaze-unglazed-stoneware-artist-signed","title":"Vintage Japanese Bizen Chawan, Wood Fired Tea Bowl, Natural Goma Ash Glaze, Unglazed Stoneware, Artist Signed","description":"\u003cp\u003eWide and shallow, with a gently flaring rim, this Bizen chawan takes the classic form used for whisking and drinking matcha in Japanese tea ceremony — a shape chosen as much for how it sits in two hands and how the tea pools and moves inside it as for its appearance.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLike all traditional Bizen ware, the bowl carries no glaze at all. Its warm purple-brown body is the clay itself, fired at high temperature until fully vitrified and watertight without any applied coating. Toward the foot, the color shifts into goma (胡麻, \"sesame\") — a natural ash effect where wood ash, carried by flame through the kiln during a long anagama firing, settled on the clay and melted into the surface, leaving a mottled, glassy band that ranges here from olive-gold to a faint blue sheen depending on the light. Bizen potters and collectors alike prize goma precisely because it can't be fully controlled or repeated — it depends on a piece's exact position in the kiln, how close it sat to the fire, and how the ash happened to fall that particular firing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe foot (kodai) is trimmed by hand, its spiraling tool marks left visible rather than smoothed away — a small, functional trace of the throwing process that Bizen ware traditionally leaves on display rather than hides. A seal is carved directly into the wet clay near the foot, marking individual authorship in the same unglazed surface as the rest of the bowl.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBizen chawan are also, famously, bowls meant to be used: the surface, slightly textured where ash didn't fully melt, is said by potters and tea practitioners to soften and take on a deeper sheen with years of handling and washing — a slow, visible record of use that many Bizen owners consider part of the object's appeal rather than wear to be avoided.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor the collector, this chawan offers an accessible way into serious Bizen appreciation: a classic, unpretentious form, honest unglazed clay, and a genuine goma effect doing the work that glaze and painted decoration do on other traditions — proof, held in the hand, that fire and ash alone can make a bowl worth keeping.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Chikoyaki","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46348951421007,"sku":"CKY-CER-222","price":170.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0667\/6588\/1423\/files\/IMG_7621_result.jpg?v=1785843002","url":"https:\/\/chikoyaki.com\/products\/vintage-japanese-bizen-chawan-wood-fired-tea-bowl-natural-goma-ash-glaze-unglazed-stoneware-artist-signed","provider":"Chikoyaki","version":"1.0","type":"link"}