(b Kanagawa, 9 Dec 1894; d Tochigi, 5 Jan 1978). Japanese potter and museum official. In 1916 he graduated from the department of ceramics at the Tokyo Technical College. He then entered the Kyoto Municipal Institute of Ceramics, where he worked with Kanjiro Kawai, who was his senior there. In 1920 he went to England with BERNARD LEACH, who had been staying in Japan, and together they set up the Leach Pottery studio in St Ives, Cornwall. Hamada worked there until 1924, when he returned to Japan. He settled in Mashiko in Tochigi Prefecture, where he continued to produce ceramics using reddish brown iron glaze and black-and-white devitrified glazes and clay from the surrounding region. He absorbed traditional technical methods and emulated the organic beauty of various forms of Korean ceramics and of the folk crafts of Japan, and in particular Okinawa. In 1926 with Muneyoshi Yanagi and others he promoted the MINGEI (‘folk crafts’) movement. In his later years he established a simple, bold style working with such techniques as salt glazing (e.g. Pitcher, salt glaze on Chinese cobalt, 1960; Ohara, Mus. A.). In 1962, succeeding Yanagi, he became head of the Japan Folk Art Museum (Nihon Mingei-Kan) in Tokyo, and in 1968 he was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit. In 1977 an exhibition comprising folk objects collected by Hamada and many of his own works was organized to inaugurate the opening of the Mashiko Ceramics Museum (Mashiko Sankokan).

• Hamada, Shoji
  • Japan, §XV, 3(iii): Folk art ceramics in the modern period
  • Mingei, §4: Legacy
  • Showa period
  • collaboration
    • Leach, Bernard
  • groups and movements
    • Black Mountain College
    • Mingei, §1: Early years
  • patrons and collectors
    • Ohara
  • pupils
    • Japan, §VIII, 4(i)(d): Traditional ceramics, after 1868: Post-war developments
  • works
    • Japan, §VIII, 4(i)(a): Traditional ceramics, after 1868: Folk art movement
    • Kyoto, §III, 3: Centre of ceramics production, after 1868