Onta is a potter’s dream destination. Internationally renowned, Onta (also known as Onda), is a mountainside village which lies in the centre of Sarayama, a valley in Kyushu’s Oita Prefecture, Japan.
Within its picturesque rural setting, there are just 10 families that keep the tradition of a particular style of pottery making alive using only hand techniques, clay sourced locally and timber sustainably maintained and harvested from nearby to fire their kilns – practices that have remained unchanged for the past 300 years. The village is famous for Onta-yaki (each village throughout Japan is identified by its point of origin, combined with the word yaki, meaning 'ware') – robust, functional stoneware with a distinctive decorative style and for the sound of the clay crushers, the kara-usu, that create a rhythmic, almost hypnotic tempo that is the heartbeat of this village.
So powerfully does the resonate throughout the village that the sound has been designated one of the 100 best soundscapes of Japan worthy of preservation’.1 These hefty timber clay pounders are driven by the running waters ofcrushed material up the side of the basin until its own weight drops it back into the centre, and the cycle starts again.2
