Okuyama House

Okuyama House is a pottery and a home in Mameo, a hamlet deep in the mountains of Higashiyoshino, Nara. Two of us live and work here, in a three-hundred-year-old house we are slowly restoring by hand: we make vessels, fire a soda kiln of our own design, prepare our own clay from Japanese earth, teach a class in the village, and keep the garden, the bath and the forest behind the house.

Tea, the garden, the old house, the craftspeople around us — these are not the setting for our life here; they are the reason we came.

We keep things small and slow. Getting here is hard, and we say so plainly: read Getting here before you plan a visit.