I want to dig a little deeper into the idea of succession.
Many people, I suspect, imagine that succession — or tradition — means repeating the same thing over and over. And there is also a well-worn phrase that says the opposite: “tradition is a continuous chain of innovation.”
Neither is entirely wrong. It is precisely because succession holds both faces at once that it can be carried on at all.
Something is handed down.
Across long years, across generations.
For that handing-down to be recognized as succession, there must be some sameness binding past, present, and future together: land, family, bloodline, technique, material, thought, aesthetic sensibility, style. In most cases, these are intertwined as they are passed on.
And yet society never stops changing. It is therefore impossible to pass on exactly the same thing in exactly the same way. If a succession appears entirely unchanged, then it is its relationship to society that has changed.
At Asahiyaki, we have clay that past generations dug and laid down to sleep. Clay cannot be used the moment it is dug from the ground. Only by resting for many years does its character settle and mature into good clay. The clay I use today was prepared by my grandfather — not for himself, but for his grandson’s generation. And I, in turn, will leave clay behind for the successors to come.
Whenever I think about this practice, my attention turns to what lies inside the word “succession.”
Time Beyond a Single Life
Craft has a temporal structure that exceeds an individual life.
Seen within the time frame of a single maker, there is no rationality in letting clay sleep for fifty years. You will not be the one to use it. But seen from the standpoint of the kiln — of succession across generations — a rationality certainly exists.
It is a mechanism for handing on materials, techniques, and the criteria of judgment through time.
Where art often seeks the uniqueness and permanence of the individual, craft stands within time that is passed from generation to generation. Neither is superior to the other. They simply keep different company with time.
The Value of Myth
In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari reframed the word “myth” — not in its everyday sense of superstition or fable, but as “shared fiction,” or “imagined order”: a social creation that serves as the driving force behind large-scale human cooperation.
I believe succession and tradition also require a “myth” of this kind — similar, yet somewhat different in nature. Where Harari’s myths are fictions that move whole societies, what I want to consider here is something that arises after the fact, as time accumulates upon a single practice: something like a stratum of meaning.
We do not know exactly when Asahiyaki’s clay began to be aged and handed down across such long stretches of time. I heard about it directly from my grandfather, and it was certainly already being done this way more than a hundred years ago. Just as certainly, the first generation did not begin by letting clay sleep for fifty years.
I imagine it began simply. Digging clay is hard labor, so one would dig more than needed while at it, and set the surplus aside. The clay that had been set aside then proved easier to work with than freshly dug clay. Gradually the practice became habit, and the resting period grew longer. That, I suspect, is how it happened.
At first, the purpose was surely the plain, practical benefit of more workable clay. But at some point, that clay began to take on a special meaning: clay left to us by our ancestors. And the consciousness of continuing to use that clay became something symbolic for the succession of Asahiyaki — not only for the generations of heads of the kiln and the craftsmen who actually work with it, but, I believe, for those who support Asahiyaki, and for people well beyond them.
This is what I would like to call, for the sake of convenience, the myth of succession.
The act of letting clay sleep has become Asahiyaki’s myth of succession.
What fascinates me is that once an act has been mythologized, it begins to carry a force that benefit alone cannot explain. Because it bears the meaning of “continuing to use the clay our ancestors left us,” the practice of resting clay is sustained beyond the bounds of utility, and handed on again to the next generation. If more workable clay were the only benefit, the act of digging clay for a maker fifty years in the future would long ago have been eliminated by economic rationality.
Myth does not merely interpret a practice; it becomes an apparatus that maintains and renews it. The myth of succession is what makes succession itself possible.
What looks like the same thing repeated forever is, in fact, changing little by little. From the first generation until the middle of the Edo period, the clay was dug at Mount Asahi; by the late Edo period, the site had moved to Mount Orii, on the opposite bank of the river, where it remains today. The digging site, the resting period, the way the clay is refined — all of these have shifted. And yet, even though the very place of digging has changed, the act itself — letting clay sleep and passing it on to the next generation — secures a sameness that runs through time. Here lies the strangeness of succession.
Letting clay sleep: upon the practical benefit of better clay, time accumulates, and meaning settles, layer upon layer, until it matures — and so a myth of succession is born. This maturing of meaning, I believe, is the root of what allows succession to hold across such long spans of time.
This feels like a moment to think anew about the practice of succession and its value. Craft, without question, carries that practice into the present day in its deepest form.
Next time, I want to explore how this myth of succession takes shape in mutual influence with the culture that carries it — and from there, to move toward a larger question: the Japanese sense of succession, and the cultural character of Japan itself.
That is all for today.
The original Japanese version of this essay is published on note.