Continuously produced since the thirteenth century, ceramics from the Bizen area in Okayama Prefecture, western Honshu (the largest Japanese island), display beautiful firing marks. The local clay is carefully guarded by potters, who have traditionally enhanced its smooth, dense texture through repeated filtering. The mottled bamboo node-shaped bottle bears a shiny glaze formed naturally through a multi-day firing. The red markings and “sesame seed” spots around the top of Wakimono Hiroyuki demonstrate the material’s receptivity to reactions within the kiln. The varied tones and textures on Yokoyama Naoki’s vase show his non-traditional approach of mixing clay from different rice fields and leaving it unfiltered.