conception of pottery. And it is chiefly through its vague perception of our gropings towards a new synthesis that we individual potters exist. * Barriers of time and place have broken down and we craftsmen who have been named "artist" have the whole world to draw upon for incentive beauty. It is struggle enough to keep one's head in this maelstrom, to live truly, and work sanely without that sustaining and restraining power of "tradition" which guided all the yesterdays of applied art. Such nevertheless, as I see things, is our task and our priviledge.
The outward changes I am making in my Pottery are very gradual, for any sudden alteration of equipment to a mechanical basis is out of the question. Each power driven device for saving monotonous human effort has to be tested not only, as in the industrial world, for efficiency, but also for what I have called its artistic faithfulness, An illustration may be useful:- In a Japanese pottery the impure cobalt ore which yields the lovely blues of old porcelain, is ground by hand for months on end by some old woman, who reads the paper, or chats, or sings to the quietly working painters. I have asked the latter repeatedly what difference there was between colour so ground and the same ore ground by power, and they have invariably said that the "quality" of the power-ground pigment for fine painting on porcelain was very inferior. It would seem that the microscopic granules of the hand-ground colour have greater variety, and that the tendency, as with the use of every new source of power, is towards abuse, or thoughtless overuse.
Actually, my first steps have been to begin with a change from wood to oil-firing, and from hand-grinding to power-grinding, and I shall not hesitate to put in an electrically-driven potter's wheel as soon as I can find a silent and efficient one. When it comes to the question of multiplying production, the complexity increases. I have not gone further than to have tiles made in quantity by semi-mechanical means, thereby halving the price, and to devote the time saved in wood-cutting, grinding etc., to the reduplication of the more useful stoneware jugs, vases, bowls etc., by the old hand processes.
It may seem to some critics that craftsmen like myself can serve the most useful purpose, and incidentally be a great deal happier, by remaining free in our crafts, and not attempting tasks which they would probably describe as foredoomed to failure. Though they may be right as far as immediate success is concerned, I beg to differ. Instead I ask for support for a tentative and difficult undertaking.

*In my own case the problem has been circumstanced by my birth in China and education in England. I have naturally had the antipodes of culture to draw upon, and it was this which caused me to return to Japan where the meeting of East and West has gone furthest. Living among the younger men, emancipated from the shackles of the past, I have with them learned to lean forward in the faith of a binding together of those elements from the ends of the earth which are now welding the civilization of the coming age. The potter, in his concepts, must possess such a sheer love of truth as will carry him past the dangers of revivalism on the one hand and of futurism on the other. With his elements of clay, water, fire and air he must, as long as he lives, strive fearlessly to clothe his vision in a garment of living beauty.