Yatsushiro Ware stoneware chatsubo or tea storage jar in a baluster form with a high knobbed lid, glazed in grey-green and slip inlaid with cream-white vertical lines. From the Yatsushiro Hirayama kiln in Kumamoto Prefecture. Mid Edo Period, 18th century. Note: silver lacquer repair to lip of lid on one side, and to minor cracks into rim of jar on one side.

Mingei: Japanese Folk Art From The Brooklyn Museum Collection, page 63, illustrates another Yatsushiro chatsubo, as does Famous Ceramics of Japan: Volume 4: Folk Kilns II, page 22, plate 20, from the collection of the Kurashiki Folkcraft Museum. Both of these jars are missing their lids. A fragment of a lid similar to that of our jar excavated from the Hirayama kiln site, and dated to the 18th century, is illustrated in Nihon Yakimono Shusei, Volume 12, Kyushu Part II, page 47, number 251.

Very few Yatsushiro jars of this presentation type were made, and almost no surviving examples possess a lid.