Familiarity with an object or place can dampen the senses. It may not necessarily breed contempt, but it often leads to indifference. We see it all too frequently, as in the simple case of not visiting wonderful places in our own neighborhood, or the attitude folk here in Shizuoka have toward Mount Fuji: "Oh, that mountain." It takes a penetrating and intuitive mind to not merely look at such things each day, but to actually see, to understand, in one's heart, the value of even an unassuming item and the "nourishment" it gives.
One of the greatest men ever to realize this was the founder of the Mingei craft movement, the late Soetsu Yanagi (1889-1961). In his classic book "The Unknown Craftsman," he writes, "To 'see' is to go direct to the core; to know the facts about an object of beauty is to go around the periphery. Intellectual discrimination is less essential to an understanding of beauty than the power of intuition that precedes it."
Yanagi has given the world much to ponder in his writings, and much beauty to see in the collection he assembled at the Mingeikan (Japan Folk Crafts Museum) in Tokyo. The current exhibition at the Mingeikan, showing until March 28, is a fine example of the beauty of the everyday. It is a glorious look at common crockery: English slipware plates.