From kitsch to ruin: exploring the absent presence of Japan’s post-war ceramic figurine industry through creative ceramic practice.

Pottery has been made in Seto, Japan, since at least the Muromachi Period (c.1336-1573). Less recognised is how the city reinvented itself after the Pacific War through the production and export of a range of ceramic novelty figurines. From religious icons to depictions of Mickey Mouse and Elvis Presley, these slip-cast figurines constitute a material record of international commerce and changing tastes throughout the post-war period.
Now largely defunct, the absent presence of this industry haunts the once bustling city in the form of abandoned factories and obsolete material culture. There is a threat to this cultural heritage as these sites are steadily demolished, leaving empty lots dotted around the city. Meanwhile, the former business owners and workers are ageing, and the city is gradually being emptied of the tacit skills and embodied knowledge upon which it relied.
While dormant plaster moulds may be revisited and reanimated as stores of memory, the figurines themselves are subject to complex material trajectories, leading a multiplicity of ‘lives’. They may be cherished as heirlooms or be discarded as kitsch, to languish in the doldrums of charity shops. Clay dug and shaped into commodities in Seto has been shipped around the world. This migration of material and cultural capital has resulted in a gaping hole in the city – a vast clay quarry known colloquially as ‘Seto Canyon’. Focusing on a series of ceramic artworks which embody art-archaeological research undertaken at abandoned sites in Seto, this paper will explore this phenomenon of material and cultural emptying. It will be argued that a creative ceramic practice may play a role in materialising these fragile histories of human-object interaction. Although these places may no longer be loci of embodied memory, their changing materiality offers potential for alternative forms of remembering.