Ceramics were always close.
My grandparents made pottery in Gero. Growing up, the smell of clay, the rhythm of the wheel, the cooling racks — these were just part of the house.
It took years for me to realize what I had been raised inside. Gifu produces more ceramics than any other prefecture in Japan. It has produced more Living National Treasures in the field than I can list. It is, quite simply, the country's ceramic capital.
R_degree is the long form of that recognition.
The most free of all Japanese ceramic traditions.
Most ceramic traditions in Japan are immediately recognizable — a glaze, a shape, a marker that says where it came from. Mino-yaki has none of that. There is no single Mino style.
Instead, there are individual artists pursuing wildly different visions under one name. That refusal of a single identity — that freedom — is what drew me in. It's also what makes Mino so easy to misunderstand, and so worth introducing properly.
Why we carry only ten.
Most ceramic shops want to be comprehensive. We don't. We carry roughly ten artists at any time — the contemporary makers whose work we believe in. Nothing more.
The trade-off is range. The reward is depth: we know each maker, we visit their kilns, we can tell you about the firing they did last week. We can also bring out pieces that never reach the shelves — work made for collectors that lives in the back room until the right person walks in.
Tradition only survives when it gets translated.
Our staff is young. We grew up with skateboards and streetwear and Instagram. We also grew up with grandmothers who used handmade rice bowls every night without thinking about it.
That dual fluency is the whole point. We choose what feels right to us — and then we explain why, in language that meets people where they are. Treating Mino like a museum piece is the surest way to bury it. We'd rather translate it.
Art that wants to be used.
Most art lives behind glass. The work we carry was made to be held, poured into, drunk from, eaten off of. A favorite cup, like a favorite shirt, quietly raises the floor of a day.
You don't need to be a collector to live with handmade ceramics. You just need a coffee in the morning, or a friend over for dinner.
No two pieces are the same.
Everything we carry is made by hand. Glaze pools differently on every cup, weight shifts gram by gram, the rim catches the light in its own way. Choosing a piece, in person, becomes its own quiet ritual.
When something feels right, take it home. That moment doesn't come back.