Quick answer — which Japanese teapot?
A Japanese teapot for green tea is called a kyusu, usually with a side handle and a built-in strainer. For Sencha, an unglazed Tokoname or Banko clay pot of 200–300 ml is the standard choice: the iron-rich clay measurably softens astringency. Porcelain stays neutral. Cast iron with an enamel lining is a teapot, without it a kettle.
Japan has no single teapot tradition. It has at least six, and they disagree with each other: unglazed red clay in Tokoname, reduction-fired purple clay in Yokkaichi, soft porous glazes in Hagi, hard white porcelain in Arita. Each one changes what lands in your cup — and for two of these effects there are actual laboratory numbers, not just shop folklore.
This guide maps the field: the handle forms, the regional kilns, the measured effect of clay on taste, and how to tell where a pot really comes from. For a close look at the side-handle form itself, our kyusu guide goes deeper. This page is the overview.
What counts as a Japanese teapot?
The word kyusu (急須) is older than Japanese tea culture itself. It comes from a Chinese term for a small vessel "used at sudden need" — in Ming-era China it warmed sake, not tea. Japan borrowed the object and the word, first as kibisho (急焼), and repurposed it when steeped leaf tea arrived: the Ōbaku Zen monk Ingen brought Ming-style tea drinking to Nagasaki in 1654, the monk Baisao (1675–1763) sold steeped tea from a portable stand in Kyoto and made it fashionable, and in the Bunka–Bunsei years (1804–1830) the sencha boom put a small clay teapot in ordinary households.
What makes the Japanese teapot distinct is not one shape but a set of decisions: small volumes matched to how green tea is actually brewed, a strainer built into the pot, and — uniquely in the tea world — the side handle as the default. Four basic forms cover almost everything:
| Form | Handle | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Yokode (横手) | Side handle, ~90° to the spout | The Japanese standard. One-handed pour, thumb on the lid. Sencha for 1–2 people. |
| Ushirode (後手) | Handle opposite the spout | The Chinese-derived layout — the same one Western teapots use. Stable for fuller pots. Common on porcelain kyusu and Hojicha pots. |
| Uwade (上手) | Bail handle on top | Larger pots for several people. The restaurant and ryokan standard. |
| Hohin (宝瓶) / Shiboridashi (絞り出し) | None | Low-temperature brewing of Gyokuro and top-grade Sencha, where the water never gets hot enough to burn your hand. The shiboridashi is the flat version, built to squeeze out the last drop. |
Handleless brewing has its own logic and its own pieces — we cover it in the shiboridashi guide, and the pots live in the Shiboridashi & Hohin collection.
Tetsubin or tetsu-kyusu? The cast-iron confusion
The most common buying mistake happens before clay enters the picture. Two cast-iron objects look nearly identical and do opposite jobs:
A tetsubin (鉄瓶) is a kettle. Raw iron inside, made to sit on direct heat, and it releases absorbable iron into the water — that mineral note is the point. A tetsu-kyusu (鉄急須) is a teapot: the inside is coated with enamel, so it releases no iron, cannot rust — and must never go on the stove, because the enamel cracks. Functionally, an enamelled iron teapot behaves like a glazed ceramic pot that happens to weigh a kilogram. If you want iron to change your water, you need the kettle, not the teapot.
Tokoname (Aichi): the reference for Sencha
Tokoname, on the Chita Peninsula south of Nagoya, is the oldest of Japan's Six Ancient Kilns — pottery here goes back roughly a thousand years, to the late Heian period. For most of that time the town made storage jars and pipes, not teapots. The kyusu is a recent chapter: in the late Edo period a Tokoname potter copied teapot forms from an imported illustrated book, and Sugie Jumon developed the red-clay kyusu that became the modern prototype in the early 1860s.
Then came the direct transfer from China: in 1878 the potter and entrepreneur Koie Hōju invited the Chinese literatus Jin Shiheng to Tokoname, where he taught Yixing slab-building and engraving techniques to local potters. The Japanese side-handle standard and Chinese Yixing methods have been intertwined ever since — Tokoname is Japan's largest kyusu producer, and in 1998 Yamada Jōzan III became the only kyusu maker ever named a Living National Treasure.
The signature material is shudei (朱泥) — literally "vermilion mud". The clay carries unusually high iron. Fired in an oxidising kiln, that iron converts to hematite and turns the pot its familiar red-brown. Fired the piece stays unglazed, inside and out. The variants worth knowing: kurodei, shudei re-fired wrapped in rice husks for a black surface; mogake (藻掛け), a technique credited to Ina Chōza in the 1830s, where eelgrass wrapped around the body scorches scarlet marks into the surface during firing. And the flat hira shape for Gyokuro. Our Tokoname guide covers the town and its makers. The pots themselves — over 160 pieces — are in the Tokoname collection.
Banko (Mie): the reduction-fired counterpart
Yokkaichi Banko ware began with the merchant and tea devotee Nunami Rōzan around 1736–1740, who stamped his pieces 萬古不易 — "unchanging for eternity" — which gave the ware its name. Today the association's own numbers put Banko at over 80% of Japan's donabe (clay pot) production and third place in kyusu volume. You will often read that Banko makes 80% of Japan's teapots. That figure belongs to the cooking pots, not the kyusu.
The Banko teapot material is shidei (紫泥) — purple clay. The base is the same idea as Tokoname's: an iron-rich clay left unglazed. The difference is not the mineral deposit but the kiln atmosphere. Tokoname fires in oxidation, and the iron becomes red hematite. Banko fires in reduction — the kiln is starved of oxygen — and the same iron converts to dark magnetite-type oxides instead: purple-brown, darkening and gaining lustre with use. One clay family, two atmospheres, two colours.
In practice, Banko pots are the natural home for Hojicha, roasted teas and everyday Sencha. Many drinkers also reach for them with Chinese teas. That is a preference, not a law — the measurable behaviour of shidei and shudei in the cup is close.
Hagi (Yamaguchi): beautiful, porous, opinionated
Hagi ware is fired low and soft. The coarse clay stays under-vitrified and genuinely porous, and the glaze develops a fine network of crazing from day one. Tea seeps into those cracks and slowly changes the colour of the piece — in Japan this is celebrated as Hagi no nanabake, "the seven changes of Hagi", and it is why the old tea-ceremony ranking runs ichi-Raku, ni-Hagi, san-Karatsu: first Raku, second Hagi, third Karatsu.
For a teapot, that porosity is a commitment. A Hagi pot absorbs what you brew in it, so it rewards being dedicated to one tea rather than rotated across your whole shelf — tradition says an absorbed character carries into later brews, though nobody has measured it. Most Hagi is bowls, not pots, and that is the better entry point: our Hagi guide and the Hagi-yaki collection are here.
Arita and Hasami (Saga / Nagasaki): porcelain, the neutral option
Japanese porcelain begins in Arita — traditionally in 1616, when the Korean-born potter Yi Sam-pyeong (known in Japan as Kanagae Sanbee) found porcelain stone at Izumiyama. Neighbouring Hasami started in 1599 with Korean potters as well, and built its name on the opposite end of the market: the kurawanka-wan, cheap sturdy everyday bowls mass-sold along the Edo–Osaka routes. Refined Arita, democratic Hasami — both fire hard white porcelain.
Porcelain is the neutral instrument of the teapot world. Its water absorption is 0.00% — the fired body takes up nothing and gives up nothing. A porcelain kyusu shows you the tea exactly as it is, which is why tasters use porcelain when they want the pot's opinion removed. If you drink Gyokuro one day, Sencha the next and an Oolong on the weekend, porcelain (or a gaiwan) is the honest all-rounder.
Sado / Mumyōi (Niigata): the iron clay of the gold mines
Mumyōi-yaki comes from Sado Island, and the name is stranger than "nameless": 無名異 was originally the name of a Chinese medicinal mineral — the iron-oxide-rich red earth from the Sado gold-mine fissures was used as a folk medicine before anyone potted with it. Raku-fired pieces appear from 1819, high-fired ware from 1857. The silk-sieved clay is so fine that the fired body shrinks hard and rings like metal. Pieces are burnished before firing and polished again after it, traditionally with slag sand from the mines. The fifth-generation master Itō Sekisui was named a Living National Treasure in 2003, and the ware only received national Traditional Craft designation in 2024. Production is small and mostly stays in Japan — if you meet a mumyōi kyusu in Europe, someone carried it here.
What the clay actually does to the tea — the measured part
The claim that an unglazed iron-clay pot makes green tea taste smoother is old shop wisdom. Unusually, it has been tested — twice, in Japan, with instruments.
A 2022 study in the Journal of Cookery Science of Japan brewed identical Sencha (2 g / 100 ml / 85 °C / 90 s) in six vessels and measured the result. Tannin — the astringent fraction — came out at 73.2 mg/100 ml from a Tokoname shudei pot versus 88.9 mg from Arita porcelain: roughly 18% less astringency from the same leaf. Umami amino acids stayed essentially unchanged across the ceramics. An earlier study from Mie Prefecture's research institute ran thirteen pot materials across a taste sensor and found the same ordering — porcelain and glass at the astringent end, porous iron-rich stoneware at the mild end, with the gap large enough for most people to taste. The mechanism is thought to be physical: catechins adsorb into the pores of the unglazed surface and bind to iron compounds in the clay. The studies stop short of proving the exact chemistry, but the effect itself is not folklore.
Two smaller measured points from the same work. Heat: at the standard 3–5 minute steep, stoneware holds the ideal 70–80 °C window slightly better than porcelain. Colour, counterintuitively: the infusion brewed in porcelain came out palest and dullest of all the vessels tested — white porcelain flatters tea in the cup, not in the pot.
Strainers: sasame and steel
Built-in filtration is half the reason the kyusu exists. The classic solution is the sasame — a fan of fine holes formed directly into the pot wall, from the same clay, in front of the spout. It keeps the pour honest but clogs with very fine or deep-steamed leaf. The modern alternative is stainless mesh: the obi-ami, a band of mesh running around the inner wall (a Tokoname development), flat spout meshes, and removable basket inserts. Handleless hohin and shiboridashi strain the simplest way of all — through slits or holes formed at the spout lip. Fukamushi Sencha with its broken leaf wants mesh. Standard Sencha and Gyokuro are happy with ceramic.
Which teapot for which tea
| Your tea | The pot | Size |
|---|---|---|
| Everyday Sencha | Tokoname shudei or Banko shidei, yokode | 200–300 ml |
| Fukamushi Sencha | Unglazed clay with obi-ami mesh | 200–300 ml |
| Gyokuro, shaded teas | Hohin, shiboridashi, or a flat hira kyusu | 80–150 ml |
| Hojicha, roasted teas | Banko shidei or a glazed pot, larger and hotter | 300 ml+ |
| Rotating many teas | Porcelain kyusu or gaiwan — neutral | as needed |
| Chinese teas (Oolong, Puerh) | Chinese side-handle or back-handle pot | 100–200 ml |
The one rule that survives every regional argument: match the pot to the leaf you actually drink most, and keep the volume small enough that you empty it in one pour.
Provenance: how to know where a pot comes from
"Kyusu" on a product page is a shape, not an origin — side-handle pots are also produced in China and Vietnam and sold under the Japanese word. The honest signals: a named maker, a stamped or incised potter's mark (in Tokoname usually on the underside or the lid rim), and with better pieces a signed tomobako, the wooden box the potter titles and seals. A real Tokoname shudei pot is also unglazed inside — run a finger on the inner wall. A glazed interior on a "shudei" pot is a tell.
This is where a gallery has an unfair advantage over a marketplace: we buy from the potters. The Tokoname work in our collection comes from makers we show by name — Seiji Ito of the Jinshu kiln, Yutaro Yamada, Kanjo Omata, Yokei Mizuno, Teruyuki Isobe — most of it from our 2026 Tokoname exhibition, carried back with the boxes, marks and stories attached.
The teapots
More than 130 side-handle teapots from named makers — Tokoname shudei and mogake, Chinese side-handles, European stoneware. Every piece photographed individually, shipped from our gallery in Munich.
Care
Unglazed clay wants nothing but water: rinse with hot water, no soap ever (the porous body absorbs detergent as readily as tea), and dry fully with the lid off before storing. Porcelain tolerates anything. Enamelled iron: hand wash, dry immediately, keep off the stove. If a sasame clogs, a soft brush under running water clears it — never a hard object, the ceramic teeth are the most fragile part of the pot.
FAQ
What is a kyusu?
A kyusu (急須) is the Japanese teapot for green tea: small, with a built-in strainer, most often with a side handle set at ninety degrees to the spout. The word originally described a Chinese vessel "used at sudden need". Today it covers side-, back- and top-handle forms.
Why do Japanese teapots have a side handle?
The side handle lets you pour one-handed with your thumb holding the lid, a natural motion when pouring the last drops out of a small pot in repeated steepings. Japan is the only tea culture where this form became the default.
Which teapot is best for Sencha?
An unglazed Tokoname or Banko clay kyusu of 200–300 ml. Measurements show the iron-rich unglazed clay reduces tannin in the cup — about 18% less than porcelain in a controlled comparison — while the umami fraction stays unchanged.
What is the difference between a kyusu and a shiboridashi?
A kyusu has a handle and a built-in strainer, and works across everyday temperatures. A shiboridashi has neither — it is a flat, handleless bowl with a lid, made for cool-water brewing of Gyokuro and top Sencha grades, where the vessel never gets too hot to hold.
Is a cast-iron teapot the same as a tetsubin?
No. A tetsubin is a raw-iron kettle for heating water on a flame, and it adds iron to the water. A cast-iron teapot (tetsu-kyusu) is enamel-lined, releases no iron, and must not go on the stove. They look similar and behave like different objects.
What size teapot should I buy?
Smaller than you think. 80–150 ml for Gyokuro, 200–300 ml for everyday Sencha for one or two people, 300 ml and up only for Hojicha, Bancha or serving several guests. Japanese brewing empties the pot completely with each steeping, so oversized pots make weaker tea, not more of it.
