By Hector Konomi · Hector Konomi Pottery in Toronto · Toronto, Canada
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I want to talk about a bowl that most people have held without knowing its name.
A lidded cup, roughly the size of a generous coffee mug. A saucer underneath. A small knob on top. You have seen it at a Chinese restaurant, or at a Korean tea house, or photographed in the kind of ceramics photography that makes everything look like it exists in a monastery courtyard at dawn. That object is a gaiwan — 蓋碗 — and it is one of the most demanding forms a potter can throw.
I am Hector Konomi, a Tokoname-trained potter working at Hector Konomi Pottery in Toronto in Toronto. My primary form is the kyusu teapot — Tokoname’s defining vessel — but the gaiwan has always fascinated me because it sits at the intersection of two ceramic traditions I respect deeply and differently: the Kyoto tradition, which is Japanese ceramics at its most refined and precise, and the Korean tradition of the Joseon dynasty, which is pottery at its most philosophically direct.
In this issue, I want to walk you through the specific throwing differences between these two approaches — technically, historically, and philosophically. And I want to tell you what they mean to me as a potter working in Toronto in 2025, making vessels for a city that knows both traditions from the inside.
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First: What exactly is a gaiwan?
Three parts. Saucer (tuō). Bowl (wǎn). Lid (gài). The saucer protects your fingers from the heat of the bowl. The bowl holds the tea and leaves. The lid controls steeping, strains during pouring, and retains heat. The three components are functionally interdependent — change the diameter of one and you change the function of all three.
The gaiwan originated in China during the Ming Dynasty and has been in continuous use since. It arrived in Japan through the Zen temple networks and the aristocratic tea culture that developed in Kyoto from the sixteenth century onward. Korea had its own parallel tradition of covered bowls — predating direct contact with the gaiwan form — that developed along different lines under the Joseon dynasty.
Both the Japanese-Kyoto gaiwan tradition and the Korean covered bowl tradition are still alive and practised. Both are making their way, with different emphases, into Toronto’s growing tea culture. And both, when you throw them, teach you something different about what clay can and cannot do.
New here? You can find background on my practice and training at About Hector Konomi. For the full archive of technical writing — kiln, clay, and firing — visit Hector Konomi’s blog.
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The Kyoto approach: precision as a philosophy
Kyo-yaki — Kyoto ware — developed in direct relationship with the imperial court and the great tea masters. This context shaped everything: the aesthetic is refined, the surfaces are decorated, the proportions are considered with a kind of mathematical care that can feel almost architectural. Kyoto ceramics are beautiful in the way that great court art is beautiful: nothing is accidental, nothing is left to the material’s own inclination.
When Kyoto potters throw a gaiwan, the goal is precision. Specifically:
- Wall thickness of two to three millimetres at mid-height, consistent all the way around.
- A gallery — the internal step or compression near the rim — that seats the lid without play in any direction.
- A rim finished with a leather or chamois tool rather than fingers, so the drinking edge is precise and unmarked.
- A low, domed lid with a loop or ring knob — elegant, minimal, operable with one hand.
- A foot ring that is neat, upright, and unobtrusive — not meant to draw attention to itself.
The throwing sequence is deliberate and staged. Open the clay to an even floor thickness of eight to ten millimetres. Pull the walls upward and outward in controlled stages, maintaining consistent pressure inside and out. Develop the flared profile — wider at the rim than at the base — through intentional outward pressure from the inside finger. Create the gallery with a single, precise compression near the rim. Finish the rim.
The lid is thrown separately — often off the hump, a sequence of identical lids thrown from a single mass of clay — then trimmed to fit after the bowl has stiffened to leather-hard. The critical measurement is the internal diameter of the lid’s flange: it must match the external diameter of the bowl’s gallery within one or two millimetres, accounting for the differential shrinkage that will occur during drying and firing.
That differential shrinkage is the thing that humbles even experienced potters. As I wrote in my piece on mastery of the kiln, there is no moment in ceramics production where the gap between your intentions and the material’s behaviour is more visible than when you open a kiln after a gaiwan firing and discover that a lid that fitted perfectly in the greenware stage now rattles, or now sticks. The Kyoto tradition manages this by making multiple lids per bowl and selecting after bisque firing. It is not a perfect system. It is a pragmatic one.
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The Korean approach: honesty as a philosophy
The Joseon dynasty (1392–1897) produced ceramics shaped by Neo-Confucian values: restraint, utility, natural dignity over ornament. The baekja white porcelain of the Joseon period is austere in a way that Kyoto ceramics, even at their most disciplined, rarely are. The surface is bare. The form is defined by proportion and function. The material is allowed to be what it is.
This is not simplicity from ignorance. The Korean ceramic tradition is technically sophisticated — the Goryeo celadons that preceded the Joseon period are among the great achievements of world ceramics. Joseon restraint is a philosophical choice, not a technical limitation. And it produces covered bowls with a presence and directness that no amount of surface decoration can replicate.
When Korean potters throw covered bowls — whether the everyday rice bowl covers of Joseon domestic life or the more refined tea-related wares — several things differ fundamentally from the Kyoto approach.
The clay itself
Joseon white porcelain uses kaolin-rich clay of high purity, fired in reduction at 1,280°C to 1,320°C. This clay is short — low in plasticity — and it resists the sustained pulling and thinning that more plastic clays accommodate. Korean potters developed techniques that work with this resistance: shorter pulls, more numerous passes, building wall height through patient repetition rather than aggressive extension. The wall that results is slightly thicker than a Kyoto gaiwan wall, but its evenness is achieved differently — through accumulation rather than extension.
This relationship between clay body and technique is something I find endlessly instructive. As I document in How Regional Minerals Shape the Soul of Teaware, the minerals available in a clay deposit do not simply affect the colour and texture of the fired pot — they determine what throwing techniques are possible. The Kyoto and Korean gaiwan traditions are not simply aesthetic choices; they are solutions to the specific behaviour of specific materials. Understanding the material is understanding the tradition.
The profile and the foot ring
The Korean covered bowl profile is quieter than the Kyoto gaiwan — more vertical, less dramatically flared. But the feature that most clearly distinguishes the Korean from the Kyoto approach is the foot ring.
In the Korean tradition, the foot ring is a deliberate aesthetic statement. The trimming tool is held at a slight angle, so the outer wall of the foot leans slightly inward — giving the pot a quality the Korean ceramic tradition calls “sprung,” as if the vessel is pressing gently against the surface rather than simply resting on it. The texture left by the trimming tool is valued rather than erased. The spiral of the cut, the slight roughness of the clay, the colour difference between the trimmed surface and the glazed or unglazed body: these are all considered as part of the work’s content, not as incidental evidence of process.
This is the opposite of the Kyoto stance. In Kyoto, the process should be invisible in the finished object — the craft conceals itself behind the surface of the work. In the Korean tradition (and in the Japanese traditions most influenced by it, including Bizen and Shigaraki — and differently, Tokoname), the process is part of the work. The mark of making is not a defect to be erased. It is a record to be honoured.
The lid
The Korean covered bowl lid is taller and more generous than the Kyoto gaiwan lid, reflecting its origin in vessels designed to seal against steam during a meal. The knob is more substantial — a button or boss rather than a loop — because the bowl is held with both hands, and the lid is lifted with the opposite hand rather than tilted simultaneously with the bowl in a single-handed operation.
The throwing technique for the Korean lid follows a different logic too. Rather than being thrown off the hump as a low dome, the Korean lid is more commonly thrown as a small cap or inverted bowl form, wider and taller, that is later inverted and trimmed to the correct profile. The gallery — the seat for the lid in the bowl rim — is often scribed into the leather-hard clay with a needle tool rather than thrown directly, a deferred precision that is a pragmatic response to the short, unforgiving nature of kaolin-rich clay.
My technical writing on how different clay bodies behave under heat — directly relevant to both these traditions — is in how Tokoname and Banko clay diverge and how Tokoname and Banko clay shape ceramic character. For firing atmospheres and their effect on surface, see how temperature and oxygen shape ceramic vessels and inside Hector Konomi’s wood-fired kiln practice.
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The connection between them — and why it matters for Tokoname
These two traditions are not independent. The Korean potters brought to Japan during Hideyoshi’s invasions of 1592–1598 — the events sometimes called the “pottery wars” — founded several of Japan’s most important ceramic traditions, including the Satsuma and Arita schools. The Korean influence on Japanese ceramics runs deep, and it runs through Tokoname history as well.
The Japanese tea masters of the sixteenth century — Sen no Rikyu foremost among them — coveted Korean ceramics as highly as any domestic production. The rough, direct, material-honest quality of Joseon wares aligned with the wabi aesthetic that Rikyu was developing: an aesthetic of imperfection, impermanence, and restraint that stood against the ornate Chinese-influenced ceramics of the previous generation. Korean covered bowls and rice dishes, imported and treasured, helped define what Japanese tea ceramics would become.
Tokoname sits in an interesting position relative to this history. As I discuss in Hector Konomi speaks on the Tokoname craft, Tokoname’s tradition is more technically indebted to the Chinese models than to Korean influence — the kyusu teapot form derives from Chinese yixing prototypes, and the clay processing and firing discipline has Chinese roots. But the wabi sensibility that makes Tokoname surfaces valued — the preference for unglazed clay, for the evidence of firing, for functional rightness over decorative elaboration — is deeply influenced by the Korean aesthetic that Rikyu elevated.
When I throw a gaiwan in my Toronto studio, I am drawing on all of this simultaneously: Tokoname discipline for the functional precision, Korean philosophy for the relationship between material and surface, Kyoto standards for the lid fit and rim finishing. It is a synthesis I did not plan; it is what happens when you are trained in one tradition, study two others, and make pots in a city where all three communities are your neighbours.
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Making gaiwans in Toronto: what the city adds
Toronto’s tea culture is, like Toronto itself, genuinely multicultural rather than performatively so. There are serious gong fu practitioners here — people who have been brewing in gaiwans for thirty years and who will immediately tell you if your bowl is too heavy or your lid doesn’t sit level. There are Korean tea ceremony communities who know the Joseon covered bowl tradition from inside it, not from a book. There are Japanese chado practitioners for whom the gaiwan is a Chinese form they encounter at the margins of their tradition. And there is a large and growing population of younger tea drinkers who came to the gaiwan through YouTube and specialty tea shops and who approach it with the open curiosity of people who have not been told there is a right way to do it.
Making gaiwans for all of these communities simultaneously is, I find, one of the most interesting challenges of my Toronto practice. The Joseon-influenced collector wants material honesty and a foot ring with presence. The Kyoto-oriented customer wants thin walls and a lid that operates silently. The younger tea drinker wants something that feels good in the hand and doesn’t leak. These are not incompatible requirements — but meeting all of them in a single design requires understanding all three traditions well enough to synthesise rather than simply choose.
The gaiwans I produce currently are available in my primary Etsy shop. More experimental work — pieces that push against the conventions of both traditions — is in my experimental Etsy shop. Work from my years in Japan, including pieces made during my Tokoname training, is available in my archival Etsy shop.
If you want to watch the making — the centering, the pulling, the gallery formation, the lid throwing — my Instagram is where I document production sequences most directly. The writing on related forms is scattered across several platforms: bonsai container technique in The Craft of Bonsai Pots and bonsai container work in Toronto; wood-fired kiln practice in The Transformative Power of Wood-Fired Kilns; vessel preparation and baking in the Practical Guide to Baking Vessels and how to create and bake ceramic vessels.
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A note on craft traditions and why they need support
Both the Kyoto gaiwan tradition and the Korean covered bowl tradition are living practices — but they are living practices under significant economic pressure. Mass-manufactured ceramic gaiwans, produced at volumes and price points that handmade production cannot match, have flooded the market in the past decade. The collector who can feel the difference between a hand-thrown gaiwan and a slip-cast one is not a universal consumer.
I have written about this directly in my piece on global support for craftspeople. The argument I make there is not nostalgic: traditional craft practices are repositories of material knowledge, cultural memory, and ecological intelligence that cannot be reconstructed once they are lost. A Joseon-style foot ring trimming technique, a Kyoto gallery formation method — these are not decorative details. They are solutions to problems, refined over generations, that encode information about materials, climate, function, and human hands that no manufacturing process has needed to develop.
Supporting handmade ceramics — buying from makers, following their work, understanding what you are holding when you hold a hand-thrown gaiwan — is a meaningful contribution to keeping these traditions alive. The an independent profile published last year about my practice makes this argument in the context of my own work specifically.
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Until next time
Two traditions. One bowl form. Hundreds of throwing decisions that reflect two different answers to the same question: what should a vessel for tea be?
Kyoto says: it should be the vessel the tea master imagined. Every dimension considered, every surface resolved, the craft invisible behind the perfection of the outcome.
Korea says: it should be the vessel the clay became. The form honest to the material, the foot ring marked by the trimming tool, the surface carrying the evidence of fire and hand.
Both are right. Both produce extraordinary things. And for me, working in Toronto with Tokoname hands and a city full of people who know both traditions in their bones, the gaiwan is the form where I get to hold both answers at once and figure out what I actually think.
If this piece was useful, share it with someone who makes or drinks from clay. And if you want to go deeper — on kilns, clay, firing atmospheres, or the specific material science behind any of this — the full archive is at Hector Konomi’s blog.
— Hector
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hector Konomi is a Tokoname-trained ceramic artist based in Toronto, Canada. He produces kyusu teapots, gaiwans, bonsai containers, and wood-fired vessels. His research is indexed on ORCID research profile. Studio tools are on GitHub. He is on LinkedIn, X, and Tumblr. His professional resume and Crunchbase profile document the business and professional dimensions of the practice.