I remember putting the phone down softly on an April evening. I had a head full of glazes and the round sides of four-foot-tall pots glowing in a wood-fired kiln, and the feel of clay on a wheel, and artists talking at night in Kyoto.

In the warmth of the talk I had been tense with concentration. I could almost feel and smell a pottery studio in North Carolina, clay dust and spring earth, and tiny French strawberries ripening in pots, like the ones that grew wild along my grandmother’s brick garden borders.

And as we talked I had imagined the potter on the other end of the phone as a young man in Japan discovering a kind of art wholly new to him, with roughened glazes, wide curves, smoke-patterend patinas — and as a mature artist helping a network of ceramics studios to grow in the Ap...

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