DAIJOUBU DESU

I reached out to Kohyama Yasuhisa a short while back wanting to make sure everything was fine on his end and received an email back the next morning. All was fine and Sensei was getting ready, making work toward a firing possibly this month for a show in July. It was comforting to know that things were just daijoubu there and he was still cutting clay as it were. I have a lot of extremely fond memories of my time in Asanomiya from picking large stones out of clay to being lucky enough to help stoke the kiln during the firing of the anagama and it still seems like just the other day.

I took this photo of Kohyama Yasuhisa while he was loading his anagama for the firing I was there for. I had been involved in wood firings before this but this was a very careful and methodical process of getting the exact right pieces in the exact right places with gaps and spaces so well thought out that you may have sworn he was following a plan some engineer had come up with based on the exact volume and dimensions of the kiln interior, the selected group of pots to fire and the type and amount of each wood to be used. I know that I use the terms happenstance and serendipity when describing wood firing and they certainly do have their place but there is a science born of experience and intuition that ultimately gets the job done and Kohyama is that calculator.