Mingei (Japanese Folk Craft)

In the 1920s, in Japan, a philosopher named Yanagi Sōetsu was thinking about beauty. He was unhappy with where his country's design culture was heading. Meiji-era Japan, since 1868, had been racing to absorb Western industrial methods, and the visual arts had followed: Japanese painters were learning oil techniques, Japanese furniture was being designed in Victorian and then Art Nouveau modes, traditional crafts were being marginalised as backward. At the same time, what was being celebrated as "Japanese art" abroad was largely the work of named individual masters — the famous tea-bowl by the famous tea-master — sold for prices ordinary people could never imagine.

Yanagi proposed something different. The most profound beauty, he argued, was not in the famous masterpieces but in the mingei — the "art of the people," the everyday objects produced by anonymous rural craftsmen for ordinary use. The plain rice bowl. The handwoven cloth. The wooden tool. The earthenware jar made by a country potter who had never signed a piece and never would. These objects, Yanagi argued, had three qualities that the famous artworks had lost: they were made for use, not for display; they were made by hand, with the irregularity that hand-work always brings; and they were made without self-consciousness — the craftsman wasn't trying to be an artist or to make a statement. The beauty was a side-effect of doing the work honestly, with attention, in a tradition.

In 1925, Yanagi and the potters Hamada Shōji and Kawai Kanjirō formalised the movement, founding the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo (which opened in 1936 and is still operating). They began collecting and exhibiting work by anonymous craftsmen from across Japan and Korea, often spending months travelling rural areas to find producers who had no idea their work was beautiful. They wrote, lectured, and trained a generation. The English potter Bernard Leach, who had lived in Japan and become close friends with Hamada, carried mingei thinking to Britain, founding the Leach Pottery at St Ives in 1920 and shaping a century of British studio ceramics. Through Leach, mingei entered Western craft consciousness in the 1940s and 1950s and has remained influential ever since.

The philosophical core of mingei — best read in Yanagi's 1972 book The Unknown Craftsman, which is required reading for anyone who designs anything — has had a quiet but pervasive influence on global design culture. The Bauhaus had also celebrated craft, but in a very different register: the Bauhaus wanted craft industrialised. Yanagi wanted craft preserved — and beyond that, he wanted designers and consumers to learn to see the beauty of irregularity, asymmetry, modesty, and use. The aesthetic of wabi-sabi (which is older than mingei but adjacent to it) — the appreciation of imperfection, impermanence, and the worn-by-use — entered Western design vocabulary largely through Yanagi's writing and Leach's pottery.

Today, mingei thinking is everywhere in design culture, often unattributed. The contemporary obsession with handmade ceramics, raw wood, exposed material, slow-craft branding, and the rejection of plastic perfection — all of these are downstream of Yanagi. So is the entire Muji aesthetic (which is a kind of industrialised mingei). So is much of the Scandinavian design philosophy that brought "hygge" into English. So, in a more rarified way, is the contemporary slow-design and biophilic movement. Yanagi's claim — that there is more beauty in an unsigned country tea-bowl than in a famous one — is one of the deepest counter-arguments to modernist heroism that the twentieth century produced, and it has not stopped resonating.