Chawan, Japanese tea cup

The chawan is the tea cup for the Chanoyu, the Japanese tea ceremony, this nice and delicate chawan has a great blue color, very unusual in Japanese chawan. The colour is a secret of the potter Munakata family and he is the seventh generation of this pottery making family. A couple of years later I wend back to visit the Munakata family in Aizu-Hongo, Fukushima prefecture, and discovered a new member of this family, the young son, he was coming back from Kyoto where he went to study pottery and brought home new ideas and different tradition to pottery making, now the long family history is moving into the eight generation!