Roving Japan

Day 75 Photoset

This morning was super relaxing. The Itoh family doesn’t get up very early. Breakfasts is served around 10am, and with plenty of coffee. I love it!

The Itoh clan is pretty big. There is Mr and Mrs Itoh, their son Hirofumi, and daughter Hasumi who has a little baby daughter of her own. Hasumi’s husband is working in Vietnam right now. His company sent him there for a 3 month assignment, which turned into 6 months, and then 10 months. The baby is 11 months old, so he’s barely seen his daughter. Kind of sad. When I asked her if she has considered moving to Vietnam, she told me that her husband doesn’t want them living in such a dirty city. Not good for the health of the new baby I guess. Supposedly he is coming back soon, unless they extend his stay… again.

Finally, there is Mr Itohs father. He’s 93, can’t hear very well, but still has an active life and actually drives himself around. I hope I can still drive when I’m 93! Mr Itoh the elder was quite successful in his younger years. The local economy is centered around pottery manufacturing, and it was Grandpa Itoh who invented the machines that local and international factories use to pump out plates!

The younger Mr Itoh is a successful plate designer. He has a little workshop where he puts together new patterns and designs which he then sells to various companies. He’s not very busy right now, but the big garage in the secondary house is full of boxes of his plates. I guess the busy season starts in October.

Hirofumi used to be a salary man, but he quit his job and moved back home to start his own business. His current passion is a website that he uses to sell hand-made silver jewelry from Peru. I spent a good chunk of the morning with Hiro, helping him out with his site. I figure that if we are going to be here a while, I might as well help out!

After an excellent lunch of Eel, Mr Itoh took Risa and I to one of the bigger manufacturing plants around Sue. This particular plant works with Mr Itoh a lot, and they use the machines that Mr Itoh’s father invented!

Inside the factory there are a ton of things going on. It was like walking through an episode of How It’s Made. I love factory tours in general because I think the machines are neat, but this place was extra special because we basically were allowed to wander around at our leisure.

They make plates in a couple of different ways. Injection molds, and two kinds of spinning machines that use either a positive, or negative mold of the final shape. The machines are mesmerizing. It takes about 5 seconds to spin out the clay, and it’s a never ending process. Also, each machine has several steps, cutting the clay, dropping the clay, spinning the clay, removing extra clay, picking up the wet plate, then drying the plate. It’s really cool. I took a bunch of photos.

The plates we saw being produced are going to be sent out to clients all over the world. One of the big clients is a hotel chain in America, although they didn’t say who. This plant also makes plates for Noritake. Next time you go to the store and see a Noritake plate, there is a good chance it was made here. Same goes for the plates at your next hotel! The only difference between the Noritake plates and the hotel plates are the designs printed on the ceramic. Oh, and Noritake is SUPER picky about which plates they buy. They only use about 30% of the plates they purchase. The rest get tossed.

The tossed plates also made an impression with me. There were thousands of seemingly normal looking plates that were stacked outside. All of them were garbage. Something was wrong, either a bad shape, or a bad glaze, or another defect. They said that about 30% of the plates are garbage. It sure was a sad looking pile. They looked fine to me!

After the big factory, Mr Itoh took us to another factory that his friend owns. This other place was much much smaller. The typical client orders around 1,000 items, were as the other factory deals in 10’s of thousands per order.

Everything in the smaller factory was the same, just… smaller. The machines were basically the same, but it was the end of the day so everything was shut down. The owner was super nice and he let us look around and ask all of our questions, but we didn’t stay too long. I don’t like making people hang around after work!

When we were finished at the smaller factory we went back home and caught the final Sumo matches of the day. Kotooshu is still doing well, I hope he wins!

Later, Mr. Itoh surprised us by offering to give us our choice of really really nice tea cups and saucers. He gave us the choice between 5 different designs, but I think we are leaning towards the black and gold pattern. What do you think?

At 8:15 we were off to the Onsen again. This time I lasted a couple of minutes longer in the Sauna. I am going to try to improve my time by 2 minutes each day. I am at 7 minutes now. Some of those guys sit in there for like 20 minutes. Crazy.