On boob toilets and pottery lessons.

Wall sculpture, Seto

In Japan, you meet a lot more people who are the nth generation of something. This guy is the third generation of sumo wrestlers in his family, that guy is the fifth generation of actors. People like tradition, I guess. A few weeks back, I was lucky enough to have pottery lessons with Hiroshige Kato, whose family have been making pottery for twelve generations. That's the same family making pottery for four hundred years, in a town called Seto which has been well-known for its clay for over a thousand years. With all that history under its belt, I think the residents of Seto have the right to lighten up a bit and make ceramics like the boob-toilet pictured above, or any of the other weird scultpures I found on top of one particular wall there.

Some friends and I had heard about Kato's studio, where he often has foreign students come for lessons. Some even come for intensive one-month courses, where they live in the studio. Given that I can barely hold a pencil without breaking it, I think an intensive course would probably be wasted on me, but we thought it would be fun to do a one-hour lesson with the master.

Very professional-looking, if you ignore the previous attempt at the front.

Kato is not only immensely skilled - I'm pretty sure he was born with a ball of clay in his hands - but he's also a great teacher. He told us how he learned to speak English decades ago by listening to records and writing down the lyrics of songs, and at a time where a lot of smaller businesses might have folded, he's taken advantage of Japan's 'cool factor' and expanded his family's business by teaching people from all over the world about the art of Japanese ceramics (I believe he's currently teaching a masterclass in Australia). He was honest when we made mistakes - very honest - but always cheerful and helpful, and when you'd done something well enough for him to compliment your work, it felt earned. Since we were all beginners, he rolled the clay and set up the wheel for us, and effortlessly corrected our inevitable blunders. Using the wheel is very therapeutic - I can definitely see myself taking it up as a hobby sometime in the future.

The almost-final results...

Kato told us that the pottery we made revealed our character, which is why I wanted to keep the cup on the bottom-left of the picture. (There's actually an ancient aesthetic in Japan called 'wabi-sabi' which prizes the beauty of imperfection, so clearly I was totally going for that.) For a small fee we could have as many of our pieces fired and glazed as we liked, and then sent to our homes. Today, a new ramen bowl, two new cups, and a creation we have named "Drippy-Cup" are all nestling in our cupboard, my scratchy initials carved into the bottoms. I feel very proud.

The lessons were great fun, the teacher was amazing and the price was affordable. I'd recommend it to anyone, even if pottery's not usually your thing. The studio's website is here.

On creepy parks.

Look at how bleak this park is.

This is what Newsnight cuts to in a piece about something generically sad. This is the place where a rusty swing squeaks just before the monster appears in a horror film.

These parks are on every other street in Japan and children actually play in them. There's none of that special soft-landing playground asphalt here. If you fall, you are falling properly, and you are falling hard. The only sign on that noticeboard is a warning to beware of conmen, by the way, which simply adds to the atmosphere in my opinion.

I love these parks. They show you don't need grass or fancy equipment or comfort to have fun, you just need imagination. More horrible sketchy parks for England please.