T.A.E.’s Book Review – The Japanese Pottery Handbook by Penny Simpson, Lucy Kitto, and Kanji Sedeoka

The Japanese Pottery Handbook is the kind of book that quietly reveals its seriousness by refusing the vanity of seriousness. First published in 1979 and later revised in 2014, it presents itself not as an ornamental art book but as a working manual: compact, bilingual, and deliberately hands-on. That practical identity is not a limitation; it is the book’s aesthetic argument. The publisher describes it as beloved for its “practical, step-by-step approach” and “homespun charm,” and those qualities frame the book’s larger achievement: it turns pottery into a discipline of attention, patience, and cultural continuity rather than mere technique. 

What gives the book its literary interest is the way its utility becomes a style. The revised edition preserves a “simple, friendly, and distinctively Japanese sensibility,” while also updating the layout, redrawing illustrations, and expanding sections on under-glazing, over-glazing, tea ceremony utensils, brushes, and workshop information. In other words, the book does not merely transmit instructions; it stages a conversation between tradition and revision. That tension matters. A handbook can often feel static, but here the text becomes an artifact of translation in the broadest sense: between generations, between Japanese and English, and between inherited craft and contemporary practice. 

One of the book’s most admirable qualities is its refusal to separate making from meaning. The description calls it “a manual to the way pots are made in Japan, their forms, and their decorations,” and that triad—making, form, decoration—suggests an integrated poetics of craft. Pots are not treated as isolated objects; they are the visible end of a system that includes tools, materials, glazes, firing methods, and workshop organization. The book’s bilingual terminology strengthens this sense of cultural embeddedness. By listing pottery terms with their Japanese equivalents, it does more than help the foreign student; it acknowledges that words themselves carry craft knowledge, and that naming is part of learning to see. 

The illustrations also deserve special attention. The publisher notes that Lucy Kitto’s drawings “infuse each page with life and clarity,” and that claim is important because clarity is not a neutral quality in a craft book; it is a form of pedagogy. Good drawing can do what prose alone cannot: show gesture, proportion, sequence, and relation. The book’s visual intelligence therefore becomes part of its argument for apprenticeship. A pottery manual of this kind does not merely explain how to make a vessel; it trains the reader to think in surfaces, edges, and process. That is why the Ceramic Review praise quoted by the publisher is so apt: the book is “not a coffee table publication” but “a very practical guide.” Its usefulness is precisely what grants it elegance.