Shino Cup and Saucer

Some objects have the rare ability to turn an ordinary moment into one of quiet presence.

This Shino Cup and Saucer was crafted by Makimasa Imai, a ceramicist rooted in a three-generation lineage of Kyoto pottery. Before returning to clay and earth, Imai studied sculpture at the Tokyo University of the Arts, one of Japan's most prestigious institutions. That formative journey through sculpture gave him something rare: a maker's eye for volume, weight, and silence — the ability not simply to shape ceramics, but to enter into conversation with material itself.

To hold this cup is to welcome that philosophy into your everyday life.

The Shino clay — a generous, porous white stoneware rooted in the Japanese ceramic tradition — was carefully prepared by Imai, then entrusted to the flames of a noborigama: a wood-fired climbing kiln built into the hillside in Takehara, Hiroshima Prefecture.

A noborigama is no ordinary kiln. Its chambers ascend the slope like steps, allowing heat, ash, and smoke to rise through them in a living, breathing current. Craftsmen tend the fire for hours — sometimes days — feeding it with patient devotion, as one might tend a sacred flame. But in the end, it is the fire that decides.

It is the fire that lays its invisible fingers on the glaze — darkening it here, whitening it there, drawing clouds and shorelines and landscapes no painter's brush could have conceived.

What you see on this cup is not painted decoration. It is the living memory of a flame.

Born from the same firing, shaped from the same Shino clay, guided by the same quiet intention — and yet two irreducibly different beings.

Type A carries within it the complexity of a shifting landscape. On its outer surface, an ashen, milky glaze has settled in places — not covering everything, but falling like morning mist that leaves the warm red earth visible through it. One side of the cup burns with amber heat; the other softens into pale ash — two faces on a single object, depending on where your eye rests. The rim, barely kissed with white, draws the lips gently forward. The saucer tells yet another story: a grey-white ground threaded with brown drifts, like an ancient map carved in stone, as the surface of a winter lake caught still.

Type B is a cup of intimate contrasts. From the outside, it radiates an almost floral gentleness — a pale rose, the color of a faded cherry blossom — with white glaze settled broadly across the shoulder and belly of the cup. But lean in toward the interior, and another soul entirely awaits you. The inner surface is plunged in depth: dark chocolate and burnt iron, like the secret heart of an old forest. This contrast — the tenderness without, the intensity within — was not designed. It was revealed by fire. The saucer, warmer and earthier than that of Type A, grounds the whole in something wilder, more elemental.

One is a landscape that shifts with every angle, never quite the same twice. The other is a mystery that only reveals itself when you lean close, when you look inside.

Which one is yours?

Each piece bears the artist's personal seal, pressed into the clay before firing　

Yō no bi — beauty through use. This is the guiding philosophy at the heart of Life with Kogei.

Morning tea poured into this Shino cup becomes something quietly different. The faint texture of Shino clay beneath your fingers. The warmth that travels slowly through its walls. The contemplation of glaze tones that shift with the changing light of day, each one transforming a habitual gesture into a moment of genuine presence.

The saucer, generous and grounded, invites you to set things down, to slow down, to claim a space of stillness within the day.

This cup does not age. It develops a patina. Over time and through use, it becomes more yours — carrying the invisible traces of your mornings, your silences, your rituals.

This is the beauty of wabi-sabi: not perfection held still, but the living grace of what unfolds through time.

One-of-a-kind piece. Once sold, it cannot be identically reproduced.