Cups + Pitchers

Everything on this page is for the second half of tea: pouring it out and drinking it. The collection is split into seven rows, and the size of the vessel is the quickest way to find the right one.

Cups And Bowls

Cups, guinomi and sakazuki are the small vessels: gongfu cups of 20 to 60 ml, Hagi tea cups of 150 ml, sake cups of 50 to 100 ml and the flat sakazuki. Chawan and bowls holds the matcha bowls, 300 to 500 ml, mostly Hagi ware, next to serving bowls by Takuya Kanamoto and Nora Kain. Yunomi, tumblers and mugs are the tall everyday cups of 100 to 250 ml, in Hagi clay and in glass by Daigo Kikuchi.

Pitchers

A chahai is the serving pitcher of the gongfu table: the tea is poured out of the pot into it, so every cup gets the same strength. Katakuchi and yuzamashi are the Japanese spouted bowls that cool the water for sencha and gyokuro and serve the tea afterwards, and a katakuchi for matcha whisking lets you whisk in the bowl and pour the matcha into a cup or a latte. Sake pitchers and shuki are the tokkuri and katakuchi for sake, mostly from our SAKE WARE exhibition.

The makers are the same across all rows: Hagi ware from Yamaguchi, David Louveau's hakuji porcelain, the Tokoname potters, glass by Daigo Kikuchi, Miki Inoue and Chiaki Asanuma, and the soda-fired work of Wang Yufeng and Nora Kain. Our article on the katakuchi explains where the pouring bowl sits between Japan and Europe.