Mingei

“Mingei” is short for minshūteki kōgei, “crafts of the common people,” a word Yanagi coined with the potters Hamada Shōji and Kawai Kanjirō. In 1926 they and the potter Tomimoto Kenkichi jointly issued a prospectus for a folk craft museum; in 1936 the Japan Folk Crafts Museum opened in Komaba, Tokyo, with Yanagi as its first director. It holds about 17,000 old and new craft objects. The idea spread across Japan: from 1931 Yoshida Shōya, a doctor in Tottori, worked with local craftspeople on “new mingei,” everyday things designed for modern life by mingei's standards of beauty.

Notice each object's shape and what it was made for: the thickness of a bowl's rim, where a handle sits.

If you picked this object up and used it, how do you think it would feel?