Crisis Point
Many traditional arts and crafts are in danger of extinction due to a global mass-production economy that is beginning to dominate markets around the world.
Few sectors have been more impacted than Japanese ceramics, where suppliers and retailers have watched demand for domestic products, especially Japanese-style tableware, plummet over the last fifteen years. Japanese are increasingly choosing cheap stoneware produced by machines in China and sold through Amazon, Alibaba, and stylish urban-modern stores like Ikea, Loft, and Muji.
“Many people are buying mass-produced goods, and that makes it difficult for me to get them interested in something traditional that is handmade,” explains 29-year-old ceramics artisan Yūta Kōzuru of Kōshin-gama, a 3-generation family studio in Fukuoka Prefecture.
A Market Under Assault
This shift in consumer behavior has helped send Japan’s ceramics industry into serious decline. Since 2003, overall production quantity has fallen by nearly 70%, while manufacture of Japanese-style kitchen and tableware have similarly dropped by 65%. [1]
The primary factor is a flood of cheap imports from China that has swelled by 1900% and 1500% in quantity and value, respectively, over the last thirty years. [2][3]
China’s rise to dominance of the Japanese domestic ceramics market has been prolific. Their share of all porcelain – the highest quality ceramic material – imported into Japan surged year over year from 23% in quantity in 1991 to 89% in 2019, a sea change that has completely displaced incumbent market heavyweights like South Korea, Italy, Great Britain, Taiwan, and Germany. Chinese non-porcelain earthenware and stoneware import share likewise soared from 13% to 87% in this same period.
These dramatic increases compounded an already declining domestic market that together have turned Japan from a net ceramics exporter into a net importer within a single generation. [4]
Lost in Location
Another key factor in Japanese producers' market share freefall is an outdated system of getting goods made in faraway regions onto store shelves in front of customers.
As the trade-restrictive Edo period gave way to the wide-open Meiji economy, producers in the power centers of Japanese ceramics tradition – Arita, Bizen, Hagi, Kutani, Mino, Seto, and Shigaraki – expanded their reach throughout the country through a system of distributors and resellers that supplemented, and sometimes exceeded, direct regional sales and ensured demand stability.
In a market flooded by cheap imports sold through foreign big box retailers, and with Japanese interest in their own national products waning, however, fighting for position becomes problematic for domestic businesses rooted in these remote locations and mired in networks of middlemen and retailers whose loyalties are first and foremost to the hottest-selling items.
Boosting direct sales is also especially difficult. The most renowned producing areas are in far western and northwestern Japan, meaning both residents and tourists in Tokyo, Yokohama, and Osaka would have to make a special and costly trip across the country to buy directly from the makers. Thousands do this for singular events such as seasonal or annual ceramics festivals, but these are one-off opportunities that simply cannot provide consistent demand year-round.
Failure to Launch
Ecommerce should have provided both large and small producers with options to free themselves from this problematic legacy, but few have been daring enough to break out of the notorious Japanese domestic comfort zone.
“We’ve tried moving into foreign markets, to have our products sold overseas,” one producer confided. “The up-front costs were high, and the language and business culture barriers are still difficult, so we gave up.”
This sense of risk and unfamiliarity with the outside world keeps producers fixated on maintaining their share of an ever-shrinking domestic market, not unlike animals in the savanna trying to draw enough water to survive from a smaller and smaller puddle. Ignoring the vast sea in plain view on the horizon, many will simply die.
Some businesses have stepped tentatively online, but their websites are designed for Japanese customers and are thus largely inaccessible by Western audiences. The few with an English option simply plug into a machine translator that defeats any attempt at meaningful expression, while web searches in English rarely return a Japanese site: shoppers have to search in Japanese to find them.
In 2020, then, nearly all players in this industry remain effectively shut off from the world outside their shops, both physically and online, leaving many with a precarious footing in their own domestic market and powerless against global big box chains and the ever-rising tide of Chinese mass imports.
Human Cost
Hidden in declining production statistics and decreasing profitability are the human casualties: artisans who have spent lifetimes of learning and sacrifice to perfect their craft, businesses small and large that once supported families and local economies, and a collective artistic community rich in history and culture that sees fewer and fewer of the youngest generations willing to carry these invaluable traditions into the future.
The rest of us are casualties as well because we lose special experiences and the richness and variety of different ideas and perspectives. We lose the power of our diversity and uniqueness, both on an individual and cultural level.
“We live in an era where you can get the same things anywhere you go, and because of this I have a sense that people are starting to reevaluate the value and importance of traditional products,” Yūta believes. “What I can do to help that resurgence is to refine my products so that traditional pottery is more attractive than products you can buy anywhere.”
[1] Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (日本経済産業省): https://www.meti.go.jp.
[2] Japanese Ministry of Finance (日本財務省): https://www.mof.go.jp/index.htm.
[3] Sonia Pupaza, Ceramic Products Market in Japan. EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation, April 2016.
[4] Japanese Ministry of Finance.