Our journey takes us along the Ancient Highway
right through Tamba
one of the six original pottery villages in Japan.
Mom is a professional potter
so of course we stopped to investigate.
Tamba's potters make ends meet by mass producing plates and cups
though they still have to finish each one by hand.
But what they really want to do is make pots the old-fashioned way -
slow fired in a wood-burning kiln.
If we really want to understand Japanese pottery
we have to see the entire process.
That takes a couple of months.
Mom can't stay around that long
but before she leaves we track down an American
Gary Moeller
who's been a potter in Japan for the last 25 years.
Gary doesn't do production work.
He fires his kiln just twice a year
and lives off the result.
Though since Japan's economy went bust he admits it's been hard to make ends meet.
He scrapes by in a house he built himself.
It has no central heating
and Gary uses a kick-turn wheel.
He's lucky if he makes three pots a day.
Why does he stay?
Only in Japan, he tells me, his pottery seen as a fine art
and can be sold for a very high price.
And I can see that pottery is the one thing Gary truly loves to do.
Once the pieces are completely dry
he lays in rice straw to create a pattern.
It's a risky process -
you never know quite how it's going to turn out.
And each of Gary's pieces is one-of-a-kind.
I noticed that Gary's short-handed this time around
so I offered to help out.
I had no idea what I was getting into.
The fire has to be fed every six minutes
day and night
for five days.
And burns through five cords of wood
not all of it chopped.
That's an armful every 15 minutes.
People will do strange things when they're bored.
It's not even a marshmallow.
It's a lump of pounded rice
rolled in sesame seeds
and stuffed with sweetened bean paste.
Six days.
At least the kiln is warm.
After five long days it's time for us to seal the kiln shut
and let it cool
and wait.
Gary only fires twice a year.
I know he can't afford to have anything go wrong.
And it doesn't look good.
I see a lot of breakage
but it's the showpieces that really count.
He's worked so hard to create something that's truly beautiful
and the Japanese
they understand.