Tomimoto Kenkichi

Tomimoto Kenkichi (富本憲吉, 1886-1963) was a Japanese ceramic artist and one of the founding figures of the Mingei (folk craft) movement, later designated a Living National Treasure (Ningen Kokuhō) for his work in overglaze enamel porcelain. Although his name appears on rosters of modern Japanese printmaking because of his association with the Mingei circle around Yanagi Sōetsu, Hamada Shōji, Kawai Kanjirō, and the English potter Bernard Leach, Tomimoto's primary medium was clay rather than paper, and his catalogued holdings at major museums consist almost entirely of porcelain dishes, jars, and brush pots rather than woodblock or other prints.

Born on June 5, 1886 in Ando (Andochō), Nara Prefecture, into a wealthy landowning family, Tomimoto studied design — including architecture and interior design — at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō), submitting his graduation work in 1908 before departing on a self-funded study trip to England. In London he attended the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where he absorbed the legacy of William Morris and the British Arts and Crafts movement — a formative influence that he carried back to Japan and that helped shape the eventual Mingei doctrine of beauty in everyday useful objects. After returning to Japan he was introduced, through the painter Reginald Turvey whom he had met on the voyage home, to the English potter Bernard Leach; the two became close friends during the years when both were turning seriously to ceramics.

After settling in Nara, Tomimoto built his own kilns in Ando and began producing the unglazed and slip-decorated earthenware that established his early reputation, before turning toward white porcelain (hakuji) and ultimately the overglaze enamel work (iro-e jiki) for which he is best known. He was one of the original signatories, with Yanagi Sōetsu, Kawai Kanjirō, and Hamada Shōji, of the 1926 prospectus for the establishment of a Japanese folk-craft museum, though he later distanced himself from the strict Mingei insistence on anonymous folk craft, arguing for the value of the individually signed studio piece. In 1955 he was named the first holder of the Living National Treasure designation for overglaze-enamel porcelain (iro-e jiki), and from 1950 he served as a professor at the Kyoto City University of Arts.

Tomimoto was awarded Japan's Order of Culture (Bunka Kunshō) in 1961 and died on June 8, 1963 at the age of seventy-seven. His ceramics are held by major museums in Japan and abroad — among them the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art — as well as by the Tomimoto Kenkichi Memorial Museum in his native Ando, Nara. For Hanga's purposes, however, Tomimoto's catalogue lies almost wholly outside the print medium, and his death in 1963 means that any photographic reproduction of his ceramic work remains under copyright in both Japan (under the life-plus-70 term, clearing in 2034) and the United States as a Japan-source work until that copyright clears.