Japanese potters help recover Cambodian ceramics industry

After the fall of the Khmer empire, techniques disappeared

Pottery artists from Tochigi prefecture in eastern Japan offered decade-long support to Cambodia to help recover the ceramic art techniques that vanished after the fall of the Khmer empire in the 15th century.

In 2005, the Tochigi prefectural government launched a project to send artists from its Mashiko town famous for earthenware called Mashiko-yaki to a village in the central Cambodian province of Kampong Chhnang.

The village, about 90km northwest of the capital Phnom Penh, had been a major production centre for ceramics, but its biscuit-fired products with no glaze coat were easily broken.

Cambodians had Khmer ceramics, believed to be of high quality, during the Khmer empire from the 9th to 15th centuries. But the techniques of the art were lost after the empire’s fall.

During the Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot in the 1970s, knowledge and even related documents of the art were mostly destroyed, according to the Nippon Foundation that took over the Cambodian project from the Tochigi government in 2009.

Under the Japanese project that continued to December 2015, about 15 Japanese pottery artists taught local craftsmen in the Kampong Chhnang village the technique to use a potter’s wheel and fire ceramics, recommending that the surface be glazed.

Japanese artists, together with the local potters, travelled across the province to collect various types of clay and stones and studied the components to find optimal materials.

Shinsuke Iwami, 52, who led the Japanese team, said: “Ceramic glaze can certainly be imported but we wanted to use local materials because that way, the technique should take root in the village.” He has continued with his support to Cambodia after the official end of the project.

The Japanese techniques may not revive exactly the same arts used in ancient Khmer ceramics.

But Yukie Yamazaki, a 44-year-old Japanese woman who lives in Phnom Penh and helped the project, said that it helped create contemporary Khmer potteries for today’s market.

“During the Pol Pot regime, potters were unable to take pride in their country, but apparently their confidence was redeemed with sales of their ceramics growing,” she said.

Ms Yamazaki, who served as an interpreter between Japanese artists and local potters, has sold the products made by Cambodian craftsmen at a local shop since 2009.

She said in 2013 she started taking orders for tableware from local restaurants, and demand currently surpasses their overall production capacity.

Their ceramics have become available also in Japan. A fashion and interior goods shop in Tokyo’s Shibuya district started selling them in May this year.

A 53-year-old Cambodian potter, Ourn Peou, said in a message through Ms Yamazaki: “We expect that if we keep on, we would be able to someday produce ceramic ware like ones Khmer people left us.”