As a very young boy, Jeffrey Montgomery was entranced with a Kiyomizu sake bottle from his Norwegian mother and a set of 18th-century white porcelain from his maternal grandmother, and he has been collecting enthusiastically ever since. When he started out, he recalls, he had no idea that the things attracting him were Japanese, or that they belonged to a category called mingei.
"I was merely acquiring things that appealed in a direct way to my soul," he says. And his soul led him to amass a large number of folk-craft treasures from Japan.