Akahadayama Motogama Medium Kiln

What the Akahadayama Motogama Medium Kiln Is

The Akahadayama Motogama Medium Kiln (赤膚山元窯中型窯, Akahadayama Motogama Chūgata-gama) is a brick multi-chamber climbing kiln at Akahadayama Motogama, an Akahada ware pottery in Akahadacho, Nara City, Nara Prefecture; it was built around 1951 and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on July 31, 2007.

According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the Akahadayama Motogama Medium Kiln runs almost parallel to the large kiln. A single firebox (domagi-ma) feeds a line of 5 firing chambers, and the kiln is 9.7 meters deep, 3.3 meters wide, and 4.4 meters high, built of brick and finished with clay plaster.

Measured from the database coordinates, the Akahadayama Motogama Medium Kiln lies about 9 meters west of the large kiln. Looking up the slope from the exhibition room and former workshop, it is the kiln to the left of its larger neighbor.

Why the Medium Kiln Was Registered: An Early Modern Method in a Postwar Kiln

The Akahadayama Motogama Medium Kiln is registration number 29-0117, listed as a structure that contributes to the historic landscape of the country, and it was registered on the same day as the large kiln and the exhibition room and former workshop.

The point the national description stresses is that, although it is smaller, the medium kiln was built with the same method as the large kiln of the early modern period. When the pottery added a new kiln in the middle of the Showa era, it kept to the way kilns had been built here since the Edo period.

A Nara City lecture handout calls it rare in Japan for three climbing kilns to survive side by side, as they do at Akahadayama Motogama, and says the row shows clearly how climbing kilns grew smaller over time. The Akahadayama Motogama Medium Kiln is the middle step in that sequence.

Highlights of the Medium Kiln: Reading It Against the Large Kiln

The best way to look at the Akahadayama Motogama Medium Kiln is beside the large kiln. It has 5 firing chambers to the large kiln's 8 and a depth of 9.7 meters against 18 meters, roughly half the length. It is 3.3 meters wide against 5.4 meters and 4.4 meters high against 6 meters, so it is visibly lower and slimmer.

Material the pottery presented at the same lecture series notes that old bricks were reused to build the Akahadayama Motogama Medium Kiln. Bricks taken out during the repair of the large kiln have likewise been set aside for reuse, which suggests that this pottery has long built and mended its kilns by recycling brick. Differences in the color and shape of the bricks in the walls are where to look for that history.

Seeing the Akahadayama Motogama Medium Kiln

The Akahadayama Motogama Medium Kiln stands on the slope north of the exhibition room and former workshop, just west of the large kiln. The 2015 visitor guide from the Kansai Bureau of Economy, Trade and Industry includes the climbing kilns in a pottery visit, but it does not say whether the inside of the medium kiln is open.

The same guide bans photography only inside the exhibition room and workshop and says nothing about the kilns. If you want to take photos or look inside, ask at reception first. Opening hours and directions are on the Akahadayama Motogama page.