Introduction
Hello everyone, so a while ago I went to see one of Japan’s leading potters and while I was there, the interview ended up turning into me asking him about my life and I kept filming the whole time. So it was just after I had come back from London where things had got so busy that I had lost sight of what I really wanted to do and what he said to me then really stayed with me. So this video is gonna be a bit different from my usual ones, but I really wanted to share this conversation with you.
It’s very short but I’m sure you will enjoy it. Especially if you are at a point where you are wondering what to do next. I think there will be something in it that stays with you.
So here it is.
When you don’t know what you want
There’s courage in quitting, too. I used to be a designer. Quitting is easy. For me it was easy.
But if you don’t know what you’re good at, or what you want to do, then you could, say, study something broad. Like economics. Just take a bite of something. You’ll notice it’s always the same one.
If you like the taste of it, then go that way. Once something starts to feel like yours, you can tell. I always go for this one. Always eating it.
Reaching for it. If you can’t choose, go with the one you reached for first. I still can’t decide. Right, forget it.
I’m dropping both. Go the way your heart lifts, the way that moves you. It’s fine to quit. But if this one looks like the more interesting life, you might fall a long way behind, but you think, right, I’m running flat out.
I’m going for it.
Why he waited five more years
My apprenticeship was ten years. That’s a long time. I started at 26. – Ten years as an apprentice?
Yes. I’d decided from the start, hoping I could say just one thing of my own. Ten years in all. In the tenth year, my first firing.
I’d made my mind up. I set up on my own at 35. I started at 26. Plenty of people set up on their own around 30.
I waited five more years. There was a plan behind that. The difference between me setting up at 35, and someone setting up five years earlier. Financially, and in all sorts of ways, I’d be miles behind.
But I told myself, the work itself would be half a step ahead. That was the only reason I stuck it out. As an apprentice you spend a lot of time helping out. But you get the time to push your own thing as far as you can take it.
Back then I didn’t want fame, or money, or status. None of it. All I wanted was the thrill in my hands when a piece was finished. So once I’d set up on my own, I never let up.
The train he was told he’d missed
A teacher said to me, Kakurezaki, the train you were meant to catch has already left. It’s gone. And there’s no last train either. – He said that after you’d set up on your own?
Yes. I was around 40. Just before 40, maybe. 38, 40, around then.
He said, the train you’re meant to catch has already gone. But a train doesn’t run in a straight line. It curves. It curves round from here.
Your train’s already left, but it comes back round to here. And here, you can get on. From 35, I really picked up speed.
What fifty years bought him
What I feel now, at my age, is that it isn’t work any more. A hobby, and my ikigai. Small things, really. Nothing better.
I can avoid people I don’t like. I don’t have to sell to them. Or answer the phone. I sleep until I wake up.
There’s no lazier life than this. So what is it that keeps me upright? Wanting to see someone’s face light up, and thinking, right, let’s make this. Or putting on a show, laying the room out just so.
And getting everything ready for it. I hardly ever take commissions. I make what I want to make. It took a good 40 years.
50. Half a century, I suppose. What is it inside you that feels best, that brings you joy? You chase that, and at 50 or 60 you’ll be glad you did.
Firing the kiln, it’s just me, feeding the fire. It doesn’t matter if it’s summer or winter. Eight, ten hours. I end up thinking about all sorts of things.
The hard times are what hold you up
Confession. The whole firing is like one long confession. Things like, ah, I was unkind to him that time. The hard things, the exhausting things, the painful things.
It all comes up at once. But those are the things that hold you up. Back then, five problems at once nearly finished me. And now I look back and think, over that?
I got through that, so I’ll be all right. Agonise over it. Struggle. Suffer.
Fall if you have to.
What all the detours were actually for
If you’ve come the long way round, and this is where you are now, then maybe the long way round was the shortest way. You can just think of it like that. If you take it as something that had to be. All the wandering, all the things you did, all the tedious stuff.
But you’re here, and it had to be this way. When you see you couldn’t have got here without taking that road, then it feels like you can start again from today.
What I took away from it
So how was that? I’d love to hear what you thought in the comments. So he’s such a lovely person, like really calm, with a lot of integrity.
It was actually a very long interview and he was saying interesting things the whole way through. So I want to share the rest with you little by little in my future videos. So stay tuned.
Have a lovely day.
