Tea Bowl (Chawan)

This glazed stoneware tea bowl (chawan) by Kitaōji Rosanjin, held by the Honolulu Museum of Art under accession number 8828.1, is an early-career piece datable to the late Meiji or early Taishō period (around 1915), before the founding of the Hoshigaoka kiln. It shows Rosanjin working in the heavy, fully potted tea-bowl idiom inherited from Mino and Karatsu stoneware traditions, with a generously cut foot ring and a thickened lip designed for the tactile experience of drinking matcha. The glaze is handled in the manner of the historical chawan tradition that Rosanjin admired throughout his life: not the smooth even surface of commercial production but a deliberately allowed crawl and pool that registers the heat and movement of the kiln. The bowl is one of several Rosanjin pieces in the Honolulu Museum's substantial Japanese ceramics collection, which includes works by Hamada Shōji, Kawai Kanjirō, and other Shōwa-period potters in dialogue with Rosanjin's own position, and it provides a useful early reference point against which his later, more famous Shino and Bizen production from the Hoshigaoka and Kamakura years can be read.