“Nukumori no Sato” is the final stop on your journey through fire and earth. The hot-spring baths here include one lined with Tambayaki tiles from Japan’s Six Ancient Kilns, and a rock bath built with local Tamba stone.

Embraced by the gentle waters of the mildly saline spring, you can spend one last moment as if returning to the earth and clay from which the pottery pieces were born.

And now, you may already have one piece in your hand. Perhaps it’s a piece you have just encountered. Or maybe it feels as if you’ve finally found something you’d been searching for all along.

Again, “What is Tambayaki?”

It may be a simple, humble beauty. It may be the clay’s sensibility that has a long history. Or it may be the gaze of the craftsperson, the warmth of hands feeding firewood into the kiln.

Your encounters at the potteries, the forms you contemplated in the museum, the weight of clay you felt at the wheel – all of these are memories of “everyday pottery” formed in this land.

Yet perhaps the greatest charm of all is that these pieces are “completed only in use.” The pottery formed here does not long to sit on a shelf as decoration. Only when food is served on it, when someone’s hands touch it, and when it resonates with everyday life does it truly begin to wear its own unique character.

For a piece of pottery, fire is what breathes life into it. For a person, everyday life is what lights the fire in the heart. Tamba is where those two fires have continued to live side by side.

Across 800 years, its shapes and appearances have changed, and yet its essence has not.
That is why Tambayaki is still very much alive today.

And if one of the pieces of pottery you met on this journey is now to become part of your daily life, what kind of Tambayaki will it be for you?