TRAVELING IN STYLE : OLD FLAME : The Ancient Canal-Laced Japanese Town of Hagi Draws Visitors With Its Famed Pottery Kilns but Seduces Them With Its Quiet Charms

AS A STUDENT LIVING IN Tokyo more than 20 years ago, in a neighborhood ceramics shop so narrow I could barely squeeze between the rows of shelves, I bought a teacup from the town of Hagi. It was cylindrical in shape; its glaze, netted with a nearly invisible web of fine cracks, veiled a rough stoneware body set on a high, unglazed foot, into which had been cut a triangular notch. One side of the cup was nearly russet, as if retaining the warmth of the fire that baked it. Month after month, I drank from it smoky tea made from the freshly roasted, coarse tea leaves called hoji-cha , holding the cup to warm my hands as I endlessly intoned Japanese syllables into my tape recorder. Eventually, both the inside and the outside took on a rich patina, the fine crackle of the glaze darkening from handling and from the tannin of the dark tea.

Hagi is famous for its ceramics. Its wares are ranked by Japanese connoisseurs among the most precious for the tea ceremony, second only to the famous raku ware of Kyoto. Though my own Hagi cup was hardly a museum piece, the museums of Japan display many old Hagi tea bowls--their porous skins lush with color and texture after centuries of careful use, their blushing, soft reddish and creamy white glazes suggesting the voluptuous warmth of living flesh.

But Hagi is also well-known in Japan as a particularly beautiful town, laced with canals and small rivers, full of whitewashed walls and orange trees. And Hagi is a place with great historical importance: Together with Kagoshima, on the island of Kyushu, it was one of the towns in which a group of political activists--the most famous of them being Hagi’s own Yoshida Shoin, much honored in Japan to this day--hatched the ideas that helped lead to the Meiji Restoration of 1868. This was the event that overthrew the repressive Tokugawa shogunate, restored the emperor as central authority and helped create modern-day Japan.

Inspired by tales of Hagi’s past, by rumors of its enduring beauty and, of course, by my affection for my Hagi teacup, I decided as a student that I had to visit the town one day. Nearly two decades later, well into the month of May, I finally made it.

Hagi is located 500 miles or so southwest of Tokyo, on the coast of the Japan Sea, near the tip of Honshu (Japan’s main island) and the straits separating Honshu from Kyushu. Hagi today has a population of more than 50,000, most of its residents inhabiting a triangle formed by the Matsumoto and Hashimoto rivers and the coast of the Japan Sea. Although it is surrounded by hills (many of its hundreds of pottery kilns dot their green slopes), the river delta of the town itself is relatively flat. There is a local bus system, but I quickly discovered that the most efficient, and enjoyable, way to get around Hagi is by bicycle, free from schedules and planned routes. Fortunately, bicycle rental shops abound, particularly near the Higashi Hagi train station and in Shizuki Park, which surrounds the ruins of Hagi Castle.

The castle, which is the city’s principal landmark, was constructed by the warlord Mori Terumoto, who had been allied with the losing side at the battle of Sekigahara, nearly 400 years ago. Following his defeat, he was demoted by the victor, shogun Tokugawa Isyasu, from the fiefdom of Hiroshima Castle to the less important domain of Hagi . It took Terumoto four years to build the castle and the surrounding town--and his descendents ruled Hagi for 12 generations.

But the Meiji Restoration abolished the feudal clan system, and, eight years later, the government ordered the castle demolished. Now all that remains are the heavy masonry foundation, looming over a wide moat clogged with waterlilies; part of the garden; the remains of several other structures, and the 19th-Century Hananoe teahouse. It was at this teahouse, among the leafy shadows, that the 13th and last Mori lord, Takachika, drank tea with local samurai and brewed plans that contributed to the toppling of the Tokugawa shogunate--and thus, ironically, to the eventual destruction of his own castle. Tea is still prepared for visitors here, in a perfunctory version of the traditional manner. Paths through the ruins are all but covered over with shade trees, and the dim green quality of the air fosters quiet. In early spring, the castle grounds glow with cherry blossoms.

The names of neighborhoods in the old part of Hagi, near Shizuki Park, evoke the everyday life of the old castle town: Gofukumachi (Clothiers’ District), Shioyamachi (Salt Dealers’ District), Taruyamachi (Barrel Makers’ District), Aburayamachi (Oil Dealers’ District), Furuuonotanamachi (District of Old Fish Shops)--to be distinguished from Imauonotanamachi (District of Present-Day Fish Shops)--and so on.

Houses in this part of town, once the property of merchants and retainers who served the Mori lords, form unbroken walls enclosing narrow streets. Rolling along on my rented bike one day between these walls of broken tiles filled with mud, straw and stones, past storehouses with criscross-patterned white plaster walls, I was overwhelmed by the fragrance of orange blossoms awakened by the morning sun. Along the road I saw natsu mikan orange trees--a variety introduced here in 1876 to help provide income for the town’s newly impoverished samurai--their white flowers still blooming among the glossy, dark leaves, though they were already bearing fruit.

One compound in this neighborhood, the Kumaya House, built in 1768, particularly embodies the wealth acquired by the local merchant class. Wooden grills, stained with red ocher, completely screen the front of the house. Three storehouses among the many outbuildings have been converted into an exhibition space called the Kumaya Art Museum. Here are displayed the family’s treasures, including paintings, old Hagi and European export ceramics and what is reputed to have been the first piano in Japan.

In the same part of town is the Kikuya House, given to the Kikuya family by Mori Terumoto in appreciation of its services to him. While most of the Kumaya House has been turned into a museum, the Kikuya House is preserved as an estate, much as it must have been in Terumoto’s day. The Japanese government has designated the main residential quarters, the main storehouse, the treasure house, the kitchen and the rice storehouse as important cultural properties. The other buildings are reconstructions of the originals.

Among the items displayed here are an impressive collection of painted screens, lacquered storage boxes, frames on which clothing was hung to be perfumed with incense, an entire set of silken bedclothes, including a mosquito net, dishes made of Hagi pottery and a bamboo blind used for the visit in 1890 of Prince Arisugawa Taruhito. The rooms themselves offer a vivid image of how this wealthy family, closely associated with the lords of Hagi for centuries, must have lived before the Restoration. (Descendants of the family still occupy parts of the compound.)

Across the Katagawa Canal, toward the park, is the officially designated historic district of Horiuchi (Within the Canals). Originally the outer perimeter of the castle grounds, Horiuchi was home to the Mori clan and the noblest of their samurai retainers. Just west of the canal, near the remains of the castle’s North Gate, is the Masuda family guardhouse and weapons storehouse, built on a base of fitted stonework.

Farther down the street, I passed a shop window hung with the delicate skeletons of shoji , paperless ghosts of the translucent-papered panels used in traditional Japanese houses in place of windows. Fragile ramma , the openwork transoms that often cap the sliding doors between rooms, were suspended like samples of wooden lace. Their slender splints formed the shapes of snowflakes, hemp leaves, hexagons and diamond lattices.

The soul of Hagi’s past seems to linger in another part of town, though, along another canal--the Aibakawa. Originally an irrigation conduit for the surrounding fields and rice paddies, the Aibakawa was enlarged in 1744 into a proper canal connecting the Shinbori and Afu rivers. Some of the old stone bridges remain, arched over the placid waters to allow boats, heavily laden with firewood and charcoal, to pass underneath.

As I walked along the canal one afternoon, the clear light of day changed to the opalescence of early evening, and old walls of blackened wood or graying brick, capped by little red-tile roofs against white gables, took on a special glow. A girl in an apron stood by the bank, breaking up crackers, tossing pieces to the red and white carp that roiled the smooth flow of the canal, stirring up dark sand from the bottom. Un-Japanese-seeming purple and yellow pansies in boxes lined the banks. A bobtailed cat stopped expectantly in the middle of the road. An old woman wheeled a baby carriage, empty except for a few green leaves. Irises had just started to bloom deep purple in brown-glazed pots against the chalky plaster walls for which Hagi is famous.

Just north of Horiuchi, I discovered yet another of Hagi’s attractions, and a pleasantly surprising one--the perfect, pine-rimmed white-sand beach, awash with clear blue water, called Kikugahama, which is barely mentioned and almost never pictured in the tourist brochures.

Hagi once had a small shipbuilding industry, but the old town was built with its back to the sea. Today, though, modern houses and small inns face the water both at Kikugahama and at Hagi’s other beach, Nishihama, west and slightly south of the castle ruins. Here there is a collection of stone sculptures and custom-designed benches, tables and shower facilities created especially for Nishihama by 24 sculptors from Japan, Europe and the United States.

THE STORY OF HOW Hagi came to be a ceramics capital is rather complicated. The cult of the tea ceremony developed in Japan from its origins in Chinese Ch’an Buddhist temples (Ch’an became known as Zen in Japan), and reached its zenith at the end of the 16th Century. Korean pottery was particularly valued by exponents of the tea ceremony--most notably the great Osaka tea master Sen no Rikyu--for its roughness and irregularity. (It might be noted that the earthy Korean bowls so prized by Japanese connoisseurs weren’t even used by the Koreans for tea; they were simple rice bowls.)

Following invasions of Korea in 1592 and 1597 by the military dictator Hideyoshi, who had been Rikyu’s patron, clan lords brought skilled Korean potters back to Japan and established seven kilns in the country’s western provinces--including one in Hagi. Hideyoshi himself ordered Mori Terumoto to import two particularly famous Korean potters, Yi Bukkwang and Yi Kyung, and they and a number of other potters accompanied Terumoto to Hagi in 1604.

Under Terumoto’s direction, the Koreans established more kilns in Hagi and in nearby Nagato, and also revived some of the older kilns that had fallen into disuse. Pottery had been made in Hagi for many centuries, but it was not until this time that Hagi ware began to enjoy the reputation it retains today.

The Ishii Chawan Bijutsukan (Ishii Tea Bowl Museum), in the neighborhood of Minami Furuhagimachi, displays both Korean and Japanese bowls. The Korean pieces, on the right side of the room, are breathtaking. One, a deep, rounded bowl, displays the pink blush spots--due to the presence in the clay of iron ore--that became characteristic of one type of Hagi ware. But it was another variety of bowl--rough, gritty and reddish--that, transposed from Korea to Japan, became most highly prized.

The Old Hagi bowls (made before 1770) seem a bit lackluster by comparison, but Hagi ware did develop its own identity and charm. Hagi’s artisans encouraged and treasured the accidents of color and texture resulting from changes in the clay and glazes during firing, and at the same time transformed the spontaneous imperfections of the simple Korean vessels into self-conscious roughness and asymmetry of form.

One common “imperfection” is the notch often found in the base of Hagi cups. There are several explanations of the origin of this tradition. According to one, because only samurai were allowed to drink from Hagi cups at first, enterprising local potters sometimes cut a notch into their wares to “spoil” them, thus making them available to the common folk.

One of my favorite pieces in the Ishii museum represents the transition from Korea to Hagi. It is of the type called hibakari Hagi, “fire-only Hagi ware.” This is pottery made by a Korean potter, using clay and glazes brought from Korea, but fired in a Hagi kiln. This one has a fine-bodied shallow bowl, its surface, originally creamy white, now clouded with purple-gray and brown.

All Hagi ware becomes more beautiful with time and use. I still drink tea from my Hagi cup.

GUIDEBOOK: Hagi Ware and What

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Japan is 81. The city code for Hagi is 8382 from outside the country, 08382 within. All prices are approximate and are computed at a rate of 122 yen to the dollar. Hotel rates are per person for one night.

Getting there: Northwest Airlines has five nonstop flights a week from Los Angeles to Osaka. Japan Air Lines, Delta, Korean Air, United Airlines and Varig all offer frequent nonstop flights to Tokyo from Los Angeles, and there are regular connections to Osaka. To reach Hagi, take the high-speed Shinkansen, or Bullet Train, from Tokyo, Osaka or points west to Ogori and then a bus to Higashi Hagi station. The Bullet Train takes about two hours and costs $95 from Osaka; the trip from Tokyo takes about five hours and costs $155. The pleasant, hourlong bus ride from Ogori to Hagi, through unspoiled countryside, costs $15. It is also possible to fly to Hiroshima, the nearest major airport to Hagi, from Osaka or Tokyo, but then it takes a taxi ride across Hiroshima, a 40-minute ride on the Bullet Train and the bus ride from Ogori to get to Hagi.

Where to stay: Tomitaya Ryokan, 61 Hashimoto-cho, telephone 2-0025, a Japanese-style inn. Rates: from $80, including dinner and breakfast. Hotel Clanvert, 370-9 Hijiwara, tel. 5-8711, a small Western-style pension. Rates: from $75, including dinner and breakfast.

Where to eat: Fujitaya, Kumay-machi, tel. 2-1086. A popular place, full of local color. Cold soba noodles with hot tempura ( tenszaru ) is a specialty, but regulars love the cold noodles, zaru soba.

Seeing and buying ceramics: Ishii Chawan Bijutsukan (Ishii Tea Bowl Museum), 33-B Minami Furobagi-machi, tel. 2-1211. Open 9 to 11:30 a.m. and 1 to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Monday; closed Tuesday and the month of January. Saitoan, Gofukumachi 1-3, tel. 5-3110, is a top ceramics gallery, offering a good choice of the best contemporary Hagi ware at a wide range of prices. Open daily 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.; closed the third Monday of every month.

There are hundreds of kilns in and around Hagi, but the most interesting are the old-style nobori-gama or “climbing kilns”--long, narrow structures built on hillsides, consisting of several consecutive firing chambers. The results are unpredictable, and potters will often discard a high percentage of each firing. Saito Takeo, proprietor of the Saitoan gallery, can offer advice and directions for visiting kilns (many of which have their own retail outlets attached). A representative sampling: Tenchogama, Maeobata Ichiku, Hagi, tel. 2-2468, open daily; Senryuzan, Mae-obata, Chinto 4404, tel. 2-2448, open Thursday through Tuesday; Sakagama, Tsubaki-higashi Nakanokura, Hagi, tel. 2-0236 (call ahead to make sure a visit will be convenient); Oyagama (featuring the work of Hamanaka Gesson), Hagi, tel. 2-0150 (call ahead). Two of the best ceramic artists, with their own kilns in nearby Nagato, are Sakakura Shinbei, 1487 Fukagawa Yumoto, tel. 5-3826, and Tahara Tobei, 1403 Fukugawa Yumoto, tel. 5-3406. Most potters speak at least rudimentary English.

Hagi in L.A.: The George J. Doizaki Gallery at the Japanese-American Cultural and Community Center will present an exhibition of Hagi ware next year, from Sept. 16 through Oct. 17. The center is at 244 San Pedro St. in downtown Los Angeles. For information, call (213) 628-2725.

For further information: Contact the Japan National Tourist Organization, 624 S. Grand Ave., 1611, Los Angeles, 90017; (213) 623-1952.