Vintage Japanese Bizen Ware Vase, Mimitsuki Ear Handles, Sangiri Fire Effect, Deep Purple Red, Unglazed Stoneware, Signed Tomobako

Rising in a tall, tapering cylinder to a wide, flared mouth, this Bizen vase carries two small sculpted ear handles (mimitsuki) just below the rim — a form and detail long associated with hanaire, the flower vessels used specifically in Japanese tea ceremony, where a vase's weight, texture, and asymmetry matter as much as its shape.

Bizen is one of Japan's six ancient kilns (rokkoyo), and the only one of the group whose defining technique has remained essentially unchanged since the Kamakura period: no glaze, ever. What color and pattern the pot carries comes entirely from the kiln itself — from where a piece sits relative to the flame, how thickly ash falls and melts against the clay, and how much oxygen reaches it during a firing that can run a week or more in a wood-fueled anagama. This vase shows sangiri (桟切), one of the most prized of these effects: patches of grey-black cloud across the body where the piece was packed in ash or charcoal during firing, starving that section of oxygen and shifting its color, set against passages of deep purple-red (murasaki) where the flame reached the clay directly and oxidized it fully. The result is a piece where every color shift is a small record of exactly where and how it sat inside the kiln.

The clay itself is left to speak plainly: no brushwork, no applied decoration, just the throwing lines visible in the body and the two hand-pulled ear handles, pinched and curled by hand rather than cast or stamped — a detail that took real time on the wheel and marks this as a considered piece rather than a routine production run.

The vase arrives in its original wooden tomobako, the lid inscribed hanaire (花入) — the specific tea-ceremony term for a flower vessel, rather than the more general kabin — alongside a small artist's signature and a red seal.

For the collector, Bizen occupies a particular place in Japanese ceramics: it asks to be judged not on painted decoration or fine porcelain whiteness, but on how convincingly fire, ash, and clay were allowed to do the work. This vase, with its sculpted ears and confident sangiri clouding, is a solid, characterful example of exactly that.