An International Wood-Firing Exchange

After arrival at the Osaka airport, it was only a matter of hours until we reached Shigaraki with Mr. Shiho Kanzaki driving me up into the mountains, chased by a fiercely beautiful pink-orange sunset. It was dark when we pulled into the kiln yard, a similar pink-orange glow highlighting bundles of wood, a small table, a clock, and the hulking shape of the kiln. Karl Beamer was stoking, and had been in Japan for more than a month making enough works to fill Kanzaki sensei’s anagama. The firing was already midway through the 10-day event that would consume 20 metric tons of Japanese Red Pine − roughly the equivalent of 17 (US) cords of seasoned fuel.

Kanzaki and I immediately went on shift. And just like that, in less than 24 hours − and in an act of faith − I’d transitioned halfway around the world, from grey northern Indiana skies, to the fire-glow of a traditional Shigaraki anagama; from modest hopes, to experiences and relationships that far surpassed my highest expectations.

Kanzaki fired without pyrometer or pyrometric cones. I wondered how he knew when it was time to stop the firing. I learned that careful stoking notes from previous firings always guided subsequent firings with respect to stoke size, timing and frequency. These, along with careful observations of sight, smell and hearing guided the firings.

At the end of the firing, despite having no pyrometer or cone packs, I was convinced that that the firing temperature at the front of the Kanzaki kiln must be hotter than I’d fired before. The color and the radiant heat were, by comparison to the decades of wood-firing that I had done,