Hexagonal Dish with White Glaze

This hexagonal dish exemplifies Kawai Kanjirō's Mingei-period mastery of disciplined geometric form combined with the rough integrity of folk-craft stoneware. The vessel is constructed as a flat-bottomed hexagonal plate with vertically rising faceted sides — a form derived ultimately from Korean Joseon-period domestic ware and from Okinawan stoneware prototypes that Yanagi Sōetsu was actively documenting at the Nihon Mingeikan in the same years that Kawai was developing this body of work. The hexagonal facet, rather than the perfectly circular wheel-thrown form, is a deliberate Mingei choice: it signals construction rather than turning, foregrounds the hand of the maker, and refuses the visual ease of the centred symmetry that pre-war Japanese collectors had come to associate with classical tea-ceremony ware. The dish is finished in a soft, slightly milky white glaze that pools deeper in the corners of the facets and thins along the rising edges, producing the subtle warmth and tactile variability that Mingei doctrine identified as the proper signature of unselfconscious labour rather than of self-conscious artistic design. The piece is held in the Honolulu Museum of Art collection (accession 6538.1), which has released its photographic documentation to the public domain under a Creative Commons CC0 dedication.