The Ceramic Art division of the Japan Kogei Association will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2022. The Japan Kogei Association, the parent body of the Ceramic Art Division, was founded in 1955 by craftspeople who agreed with the idea of preserving and utilizing the "intangible" or "techniques" under the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties enacted in 1950. The previous year, in 1954, the Committee for the Protection of Cultural Properties sponsored the "First Intangible Cultural Property: Japanese Traditional Crafts Exhibition," thus beginning the history of the Japanese Traditional Crafts Exhibition that continues to this day.

This exhibition is an opportunity to look back on the activities of the Ceramic Division of the Japan Kogei Association, which has supported traditional ceramics, and to consider the future of traditional ceramics. The exhibition is divided into three parts, introducing representative works by successive Living National Treasures (ceramic and individual) as well as the latest works by up-and-coming artists.

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The Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum opened on June 1, 1978, in Seto City, Aichi Prefecture, one of the largest ceramic production centers in Japan, as a project commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Aichi Prefectural Government. Since then, the museum has collected various ceramics from Japan, Asia, and other parts of the world, and has grown to become one of Japan's leading museums specializing in ceramics with a collection of approximately 8,300 pieces, including three important cultural properties.
The permanent exhibition features Japanese ceramics from primitive to modern times, as well as ceramics from around the world. The special exhibitions held four times a year focus on ceramics and introduce the diverse values and attractions of ceramics from various perspectives, such as region, period, artist, and lifestyle culture, including ceramics as historical cultural assets, ceramics as works of art, and ceramics in daily life.

Visitors can spend a whole day discovering new things by seeing, making, and feeling pottery in the pottery museum, where they can try their hand at making ceramics, and in the old kiln museum, where they can see kilns excavated on the site from the Heian to Kamakura periods.

The museum will be closed for renovation from June 19, 2023, and is scheduled to reopen in April 2025.

Ceramics of the Past and of the Future: The Timelessness of Traditional Japanese Craft Arts

Opening Hours Information

Traveling exhibition schedule