IN LONDON - BUT FOCUSING ON JAPAN

Back in London, I found time to pay a long-planned visit to the Leach Pottery in St. Ives, Cornwall. Bernard Leach (1887—1979) is regarded the “father of British studio pottery” but he got much of his inspiration from Japan. Born in Hong Kong in 1887, his mother died in childbirth. His father then took him to Japan, where he spent the first three years of his childhood before returning to Hong Kong and then to England, where he studied art. At the age of 22 he returned to Japan, where he met the folk potter Hamada Shoji. Together they set up the Leach Pottery in St. Ives and built a traditional wood-burning Japanese nobongama (climbing kiln). The two of them made and promoted pottery as a combination of Western and Eastern arts and crafts — and philosophies. Leach's “ethical pots” stand in opposition to what he called “fine art pots.”

In 1965, Toyoko and I had visited Hamada at his home and kiln in Mashiko, about 100 km north of Tokyo. Now, 30 years later, and long after both Hamada and Leach had passed away, I finally visited Leach's St Ives pottery. I was received by his ageing widow, Janet Darnell Leach, also a potter, whom Bernard had married in 1955. I bought one of her creations. (She died two years later. The Tate St Ives has a permanent collection of ceramic works by both Bernard and Janet Leach and Hamada and other potters influenced by them.)

Soon after the start of the new millennium, we moved into our spacious new apartment on Queen's Gate. I decided to refocus my literary activities more specifically on Japan, by writing a memoir of my long residence there, from 1950 to 1974.

In 2002 and early 2003, I made a few taps to Japan with Toyoko, mostly to research my writings. It would be trite — though true — to observe that Japan seemed to have changed enormously in the physical sense since we left in 1974. Tokyo had reinvented itself as a giant, multi-hub, imposing metropolis largely replacing the collection of jumbled neighbourhoods of yesteryear.