1784-1861
male
kikko pottery
He was born as the son of Toda Genbei, a samurai of the Ozu domain in Iyo Province.
His family name was Toda (later Yoshimukai), his given name was Jihei, and his given name was Jusoken or Shogetsu.
He studied under Raku Ryonyu, Kiyomizu Rokubey, Takahashi Dohachi, and Asai Shusai.
He studied pottery in Kyoto and opened his own kiln in 1804 in Juso village in Osaka (now Yodogawa Ward, Osaka City).
Jihei had no heirs, so he called his family’s Kameji to adopt his nephew Yoemon.
In 1819, under the order of Mizuno Tadakuni, the magistrate of temples and shrines, Jihei presented food baskets decorated with cranes and turtles to Tokugawa Ienari, the 11th Shogun, and received the “Kikko” seal, which is said to have given rise to the name “Kikko-yaki”.
In 1818, he was invited to the Ozu Domain in Iyo Province to teach Oniwa-yaki, and in 1834, he was invited to the Iwakuni Domain in Suo Province to engage in pottery production for two years.
In 1836, he visited Iwakuni again and fired a kiln for private business.
In 1839, he accompanied Katagiri Sadanobu, lord of the Yamato Koizumi domain, to Edo (present-day Tokyo) to run Oniwa-yaki in his Edo residence on Mukojima.
From 1845 to 1853, he was invited to the Suzaka domain in Shinano Province, where he mainly produced tea ceremony utensils at the Kosuiken kiln of Hori Naotada, the feudal lord.
He was later invited by Matsudaira Kakudo, lord of the Tsuyama domain in Mimasaka Province, to make pottery for the Mukoujima Shirahige Shrine and at the villa of Matsudaira Duke in Ushigome Kikuicho.
After Jihei’s death in 1861, Kameharu succeeded him, and in 1891, when Shogetsu became the fifth generation, the pottery was divided into “Jusoken Kikko” and “Shogetsuken Kikko”.
His adopted son Ichiro also took over Kikko pottery in Edo, but this kiln was closed around the middle of the Meiji period.
