Iga wares are among the most compelling manifestations of the spirit of chanoyu that flourished under Furuta Oribe (1544-1615), the warrior tea master who succeeded Sen no Rikyū (1522-1591) as Japan’s leading arbiter of tea ceremony taste. They are typified by powerfully sculpted forms committed to the transformative power of wood-firing kilns within which fly ash melts and fuses, intense heat splits and ruptures, and shapes sag and distort. Not the introspective quietude of the Chōjiro teabowls favoured by Rikyū, but objects born out of revelry in the creative act and abandon to the forces of nature.

The kilns at which Iga wares were produced operated from the 1570s to the 1640s, after which they went into decline. They enjoyed the patronage first of Tsutsui Sadatsugu (1562-1615) and then, from 1608, of Tōdō Takatora (1556-1630), successive lords of the area in which they were located. The first mention of the term Iga ware occurs in a tea diary entry of 1581. This is followed by a lull until 1608, when it appears in a entry in Oribe’s tea diary. It then appears with increasing regularity, the indication being that the high point of Iga ware production corresponded to the period of patronage of Tōdō Takatora, which is to say from 1608 to 1630.