The Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo's Komaba area was founded by Muneyoshi Yanagi (1889-1961) in 1936 and built in the style of a traditional Japanese house. With natural light filtering through shoji screens, its unusual setting enhances the wonderful displays from its collection of folk-craft items from Japan and around the world.
Its current exhibition, "Ceramics of the Joseon Dynasty: Korea and Her Art, a View by Muneyoshi Yanagi," offers an array of skillfully crafted, functional objects from 1393-1910 that complement their surroundings. Focusing on ceramic tableware, calligrapher's tools and ritual utensils that Yanagi himself collected, it showcases 270 pieces.
Yanagi recognized that such everyday objects possess a simple beauty and aesthetic purity. In "The Unknown Craftsmen," his 1972 ode to mingei (handicrafts) and the world of the craftsman, he wrote, "The special quality of beauty in crafts is that it is a beauty of intimacy . . . the articles are to be lived with every day."