I soon began to feel, however, that the pots Kanishiga left on the shelf were insinuating themselves into my consciousness. I stopped using a tool for trimming. I began rolling the pots around and hitting them on the table. I pushed asymmetry farther than I'd ever gone before, and my pots became looser and looser. I became more accepting of what Kanishiga had done, and it all fitted comfortably into my own discoveries in raku by allowing even more freedom.
     It was only years later that I realized that Japanese raku is totally different from American raku. First, Japanese black ware is fired at high temperature (cone 9), the black simply the result of colorant, the oxide for which is said to come from a special "magic" mountain, and Iwould assume there was a lot of manganese with iron. The red in Japanese "red ware" comes from raw sienna in an iron-bearing slip that is put on the green pot and fired in a charcoal kiln. The charcoal impinges on the surface of the glaze, producing carbon flashes. Then a lowfire glaze is applied and the pot is quickly refired, fast enough that the charcoal in the glaze becomes sealed as the glaze matures. The finished red ware is mottled from the carbon.
     I had a great problem trying to define what I did in raku. At first I used the term "happy accident" or "serendipitous," words that seemed to me to catch the meaning of raku in Japanese. For them it means something pleasurable, easy or relaxed. Once I asked Jun Kaneko if the word is used in any other Japanese context, and he said, "Of course, raku is a word to describe comfort." He went on to explain that, in the American sense, if you came to his house, he would ask you to make yourself "raku," while he slipped into something "raku"!
     Eventually I evolved a word that has become my personal concept of what raku is: "Effortless." But effortless only after discipline, as when Itzak Perelman plays the violin. It is the recognition of something known to be intrinsically difficult and yet seems easily done. First we must learn discipline, then struggle all our lives to become free of it.
     In Japan, raku is institutionalized within one family, even though other potters, including Hamada, also make °raku" tea bowls. Some galleries in Japan have recently invited outsiders to make tea bowls, because they say that tea bowls in Japan have lost their vitality. For many years, I refused to make a tea bowl because I felt it was not part of my culture, and therefore I shouldn't do it. Now that the Japanese themselves seem to recognize that raku is so ritualized as to be almost dead, and thus invite input from the outside, I enjoy trying to give them something I don't really know anything about, but can perhaps provide a fresh outlook on.

Stepping Toward The Cliff With Alacrity

Most potters are too insecure to let fire decorate their work. They want to control and dominate it. I have spent considerable time in my life trying to learn the secrets of fire and only recently have started to pin it down. For instance, when people saw the "halo" effect on some of my raku pots, they would ask how I got it. I would have to be perfectly honest and tell them that maybe it was the borax in the glaze or slip, or I would invent other maybes to explain why it happened.
     One day I pulled a pot out of the kiln. Hoping to get the halo, I put the pot in a can to smoke it. When I lifted the lid, the halo wasn't there. So I put the lid back on carelessly and lost interest in it. When I opened the lid later, the pot was cold, and the halo line had developed!
     I finally understood that the halo is not part of the glazing, the slip, the firing, or the smoking. After all that process, the pot must be re-oxidized and, for reasons I still can't explain fully, but feel it probably has something to do with the heat conduction of copper, the oxygen burns away a portion of the smoke, leaving a strong white line around the decoration.
It took many years for me to know enough to tell people that secret.The same thing is true of lowfire salt. I have been practicing lowfire salt for probably twenty years, using the well-known trial-and-error method. I used all kinds of kilns, and occasionally even when I used a kiln that didn't work well, the salting came out beautifully.
     Only recently have I discovered its secret. First of all, stacking the kiln is important, as with Bizen ware. The pots have to be placed tightly together with shards in between to resist the flames. Second, the salt can only be introduced into the flame of the burner and cannot be placed anywhere else in the kiln. The salt has to be placed very carefully into the flame, not below the flame. Third, the kiln must be fired with enough back pressure to enable the flames to be visible from the bottom peephole. Finally, the primary air must be closed down enough to produce an ugly yellow flame. If you follow these rules, I can almost guarantee success.
     In the early days, before Pete Voulkos came on the scene, teaching often involved withholding secrets, or at least not giving out critical information until the teacher felt the student had reached an appropriate level. But after Pete began openly sharing how he did his work, it no longer became important to keep such secrets.