I’ll meet Seongiu on Dec 9th. She’s very lovely indeed and agreed to help me out a little. I’m pretty glad. The general outline of my paper will be as follows…

1.Grunddaten bekanntgeben:
–1a. Aussehen beschreiben,
–1b. Geschichtlicher Hintergrund in Korea,
–1c. Verwendung solcher Schalen in Korea (zB trinken von makari? dieser Cidre-Art, Nationalgetränk… essen von Reis, Gerichten, usw. ganz Alltägliches)
2. Koreanische Sicht– Bewertung der Schale aus koreanischer Sicht (Einordnen: deombeong?, eingetauchte Glasur, usw…)
3. Japanische Wertschätzung der Schale (kurz fassen)
–3a. Vergleich zu Ido – Kizaemon – eine koreanische Schale ist Nationalschatz in Japan
4. Persönliche Ästhetik, Berwertung der Schale

question of heritage
Es muss generell differenziert werden zwischen:
I. In Korea hergestellter Ware
II. In Japan von Koreanern hergestellter Ware und
III. Von Japanern nach Korea in Auftrag gegebene Ware

question of use in a japanese context
Teeschalen der japanischen Teezeremonie lassen sich prinzipiell nach drei Fragestellungen betrachten:
i. Ist die Schale für koicha (dicken) oder usucha (dünnen Tee)?
ii. Ist es ein Typ der karamono (China), kōraimono (Korea), wamono (Japan) oder nambam (Barbarisch)?
iii. Wenn vorhanden, von welchem Ofen bzw. Künstler stammt das Stück?

questions i still cannot answer
– on the japanese side: what’s the primary source? where are all those fuzzy termini written down, and in which context? who made them up, and when?
– on the korean side: how mcuh were they aware that the japanese claim certain cultural values as their own and how was this being discussed by korean literati?
– on my side: what exactly is the crux of this piece,… where lies the beauty? why is it unique? and what of all that jazz is worth being written down? -_o

—

My „Korean Book of Tea“ has arrived. I am not as glad as I’m supposed to be. I’ll write a more detailled review later. Actually, the coffee table book alert is ON. Lots of white space in the pages, which I personally do not prefer to pages stuffed up with ink up to the dog’s ear.

I want to start with a rather specific question. I saw there are different terms taken from Japanese for labelling. Please excuse my bad translations to English.

I. CLASSIFICATION OF TEA WARE
ie. Raku, Hagi, Karatsu and so forth;

II. DESCRIBING OUTER APPEARANCE OF TEA WARE
ie. 茶だまり cha damari (tea lake), 口造り kuchi tsukuri (mouth of cup), 目跡 moku ato (marks of stacking) and so forth;

III. DESCRIBING PHENOMENA
ie. 雨漏 amamori („rain-through“ or tea stains caused by semipermeablility), 緋色 hi-iro (fire stains), 巣穴 suana (pin holes in shino ware), ??? kin-zukumoi (gold repair) and so forth.

Well, this is how I would differenciate between types of labelling. I am open for other suggestions, but this might be a whole different discussion 😉
This is leading to my question. I am very disconcert by those terms in a whole. For group number one, „classification of tea ware“, one can easily fight for hours what Raku exactly is, and what can or cannot be called Raku.
For group number two, For me, this is the least troubling group, since archaeology did a good job on this and most of it is purely translation work IMHO. One has only to be careful not to mix these terms with group number three (like, is moku ato a general term that appears or can it be considered as a phemomena?)
Coming to the group causing me sleepless nights bathing in sweat: Number three.
*Where exactly are these terms coming from?
*Who labelled these?
*How open or differenciated is the label?
I read them every so often in catalogues, sometimes with, sometimes without Kanji, but I cannot stop wondering what they exactly describe. For example, what is the difference between 巣穴 suana and ゆず肌 yuzuhada (citron skin) exactly? What makes a tiny hole a 巣穴 suana? Shall or shant it be of black-ish colour? Can it only be applied to Shino ceramics or can it also be used describing other ceramics with those phenomenon? What about 雨漏 amamori? What’s the dfference between this and 茶渋 cha shibu, tea stains?

Lots of question marks above my head.