Round Lidded Box

This round lidded stoneware box is characteristic of Kawai Kanjirō's middle Mingei period, when his domestic-ware production focused on closed vessels — boxes, jars, lidded bowls — that drew on Korean Joseon-period and Chinese Tang and Song prototypes filtered through the disciplined austerity of his early Yanagi-influenced reorientation. The form is a wheel-thrown low cylinder with a fitted domed lid that sits comfortably on a recessed gallery rim, finished in a saturated dark stoneware glaze that pools gently at the foot ring and on the underside of the lid. Boxes of this kind were used in Japanese households for storing tea, sweets, incense, or small accumulated possessions of daily life, and the Mingei circle considered them — alongside rice bowls and sake bottles — exemplary instances of the kind of utterly functional object whose accumulated daily handling produced the warmth and patina that Yanagi's aesthetic philosophy located at the heart of true craft beauty. The piece is held in the Honolulu Museum of Art collection and has been released to the public domain under a Creative Commons CC0 dedication via the museum's Wikimedia Commons documentation programme.