So far much of what I have said has applied to Leach and Yanagi and only in passing to Hamada. Hamada had first visited Korea in 1919 with his friend the potter Kawai Kanjiro. He subsequently visited many times, both with Yanagi and Kawai, to purchase items for his craft collection that eventually became the Mashiko reference collection. Throughout his career Hamada absorbed much from the Korean potters and reinterpreted many of the forms and decorative treatments in his own work. He referred to his insatiable appetite for seeing, handling and collecting all aspects of folk craft as his 'food'. It was food for the soul. There are famous photographs that record Hamada sitting and carefully perusing Korean items from his own collection just as there are of Bernard leach doing the very same thing. The Korean legacy has passed to their students. I have a video of Shimaoka handling his own collection of Korean porcelain while potters like Bill Marshall, Shimaoka himself and those of the next generation, Jim Malone, Mike Dodd and myself for instance all owe a considerable debt to Korea either first or second hand.

As I have tried to indicate it was the casual somewhat unconcerned approach to pot making that was as influential as much as the pots themselves. The footrings on many of the Korean rice bowls in particular attracted the attention of Hamada and he used these unpretentious bowls as the model for what was to become his own 'style' in turning or trimming the underneath of Yunomi and Chawan. Of the footrings Hamada said…'The Koreans don't mind anything; they are casual and are not concerned at all about how they do things. They know what the pot needs and they do it… Whether the pot is crooked or not is not important to the Koreans; they turn off large chunks of clay - sometimes the foot is uneven, and often the bowl is better because of it….The clay is still extremely soft when they turn the footring. They are making very cheap ware and they work so quickly that often the pot is not perfectly centred or level for turning. Sometimes this results in one side of the footring being thinner than the other. This is the quarter moon footring that the Japanese admire so much. Hamada was also acutely aware that imitation without the deepest understanding and feeling for what is being done is almost doomed to failure…'The Japanese are able to do the Chinese style and do the Korean Style - in fact they are very proud of this skill, but this becomes their only Japanese style. This is not just true of the potting world, it is true in every direction of Japanese development'.

Hakeme was one decorative surface that Hamada came back to over and over. Hakeme is a technique which originated in Korea and was, I believe, a means of applying white slip to a dark body so that there was less risk of flaking or cracking as is very possible by the dipping method. The brushed slip creates a bond with the clay bodies uppermost layer. It was these seemingly random, unconscious brush marks that captured the imagination of the Japanese connoisseur and as Leach says…' to be treasured and labelled Hakeme'. Hamada observed that the Koreans never talked about Hakeme - they didn't have a word in their language that was its equivalent - it was merely a solution to a problem. Hamada said of it…'I like hakeme. I have tried my hand many times and I always feel defeated and give up although I know it is not a matter of winning and losing…In Japanese hands it became a self conscious technique, they began to make use of it as a pattern, and this is where they went wrong. It [hakeme] becomes artificial, lacking the freedom seen in the Korean works that were made unself-consciously.'

Faceting too was a technique that both Hamada and Leach borrowed from the Korean. Leach wrote… 'Their cut forms have had a considerable influence on Hamada and I wish to acknowledge my own debt to them'

Both men drew inspiration from Choson ceramics - white wares as well as punchong. Leach in particular enjoyed using porcelain not as a translucent material, but as the Koreans did, for the heavy, hard and lustrous stone-like qualities resembling jade or marble. Punch'ong , white slip decorated wares, figure strongly in the repertoire of both men. Hamada often translated that technique into his salt glaze work while Leach covered brushed slip with an under fired celadon sometimes almost oxidised, in imitation of the lower fired ash glaze that covered the Korean equivalent. The tear drop form so much favoured by the punchong potters, either faceted or slip brushed appears again and again in the work of both. Hamada was to make pots in the Karatsu style - Karatsu being related to the Korean through the transplantation of Korean potters in the 16th century, he made stoneware interpretations of English slipware and of medieval European pitchers, he obviously acknowledged Tamba and Leach, the potters of Onda. Throughout their making there was simplicity, a truth to material, an honesty and a commitment to the functional. Hamada never aspired to the complicated. He said that he wanted to make the sort of pots that anyone could make. He didn't want to show off, to present technique for its own sake. He was at heart a country potter making pots for everyday use in a simple straightforward way with function at the heart of things. Leach, on the other hand, as he became older and his pottery matured, became starker, more minimalist in his approach. Gone were the over decorated pieces of the pre war days. From the late forties Leach's own pots came more and more to rely on form and line echoing the purity of sculptural form so evident in much of the porcelains and white wares of the17th and 18th centuries from Korea. Ironically, in later years Leach was, to some extent, influenced by his former pupil. It might be true that this minor influence and his friendship with Hamada, Tomimoto and Yanagi is what has given rise to the popular misconception that Leach was a 'Japan' influenced potter.

As soon as pottery was taken from the hands of the artisan craftsmen and adopted by the artist maker 'influence' or 'inspiration' has become pivotal to the process. The intellectual approach to the crafts has dictated that makers look at a wide and ever widening frame of reference to feed the creative impulse. Before the advent of industrialisation and to some extent after it, the country potter worked with those materials close at hand and made pots that reflected the local geology and economy if not always the local taste.Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada recognised in Korean Pottery a wholesome, unrefined naivety that appealed to their cultivated sensibilities and fulfilled all the criteria; the imperfect, the irregular, the rough and the unconscious that William Morris had earlier outlined. We as makers will always make what we make as a reaction, result, response - call it what you will - to the things that we see and experience that, for what ever reason, really attract our attention or press the right buttons. Leach and Hamada were no exception. My only thought is that perhaps it was Yanagi who could be seen as the greatest influence in that it was he, through his own enthusiasm became the evangelist and directed Leach and Hamada toward something that he knew would find a sympathetic and enduring response.

Phil Rogers 2003