Perfect Golden Kutani Toki Chawan by Hasegawa Suiko

A perfectly thrown and golden glazed contemporary Kutani Chawan made by one of the best Kutani-yaki artists, Hasegawa Suiko - please see! The beauty of the painted poetic motifs is simply breathtaking. Waves, a crescent moon and a toki, the Japanese crested ibis bird, so significant for Japan. The exceptional purity of the golden glaze is not found in any other work by Suiko as high class as in this tea bowl.

Hasegawa Suiko, born in 1958, lives in Ishigawa Prefecture. His work is exhibited in a lot of museums worldwide and a desired object of desire by collectors of Japanese tea bowls.

It comes with the originally signed and sealed wooden box without cracks or repairs in perfect condition.

Size: 7,8 cm height x 12,5 cm in diameter.

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The crested ibis is a figure deeply rooted in Japanese history and culture. The oldest record of the bird is found in the Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan), a history of the nation compiled in 720. Three references are found in the text to toki, the Japanese name for the crested ibis. The term appears in the names of imperial tombs and is written with the characters 桃花鳥, meaning peach-flower bird—an allusion to the delicate pink of the crested ibis’s plumage.

In another ancient work, the Engishiki, a book of laws and rituals compiled in 927, it is noted that the legendary Sugari no Ontachi, a sacred sword of the Ise Grand Shrine, is to have two crested ibis feathers wrapped around its hilt when used in ceremonies.

This includes the ceremonies revolving around the rebuilding of the two main structures in the inner sanctum of the Ise Grand Shrine, a major event that takes place every 20 years, known as the Shikinen Sengū. This practice was started in 690 by the Empress Jitō and has continued for 1,300 years, interrupted only by the Warring States period (1467–1568). The most recent rebuilding, the sixty-second, took place in 2013.

It is customary at this time to also replace the shrine treasures and furnishings, but in 1993, at the time of the sixty-first rebuilding, a problem arose. A new sacred sword had been prepared, but there were no crested ibis feathers to wrap around its hilt. This was the same year the crested ibis was declared an endangered species. Eventually, the problem was solved with feathers provided by someone who just happened to have them.

By the Edo period (1603–1868), references to the crested ibis are found in a number of writings. Records of the Kaga domain (present-day Ishikawa Prefecture) report that 100 crested ibises were brought over from Ōmi (today’s Shiga Prefecture) in 1639 and released along the river Oyabe to provide feathers for arrows. There is one theory that the wild crested ibises last seen on Sado Island and the Noto Peninsula were descendants of these birds.

Crested ibises feature, too, in the chronicles of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Tokugawa jikki, which include detailed descriptions of hunting excursions. Mention is made twice of the capture by the eighth shōgun, Tokugawa Yoshimune, of crested ibises on a falconry hunt along the banks of the river Nakagawa in Higashikasai (currently Edogawa in eastern Tokyo).