Blue Glazed Tea Cup

April 17, 2025

I really like this one Japanese hardware store in San Francisco called Soko Hardware. I source a lot of ikebana vases there, and they have a great assortment of dinnerware at pretty reasonable prices.

I selfishly want to get to the wholesale source of all of this rustic-looking yet definitely mass produced Japanese crockery. I guess this is because of the emphasis on moritsuke — an art of plating food for traditional Japanese meals that usually range to 5 or 6 courses. But it leads to a lot of cute and pretty affordable plates, bowls, cups, etc. Sometimes across the country (eg SF and NY) I’ll see the same products, so I know there is a robust wholesale ecosystem around this style of everyday elevated dinnerware.

I’m probably a weeb in denial, since even a lot of these blog posts are about things I either got in Japan, were sourced from Japan, or remind me of Japan (lol). But I have this theory that it’s not so much that I’m a weeb, but that Japanese culture prizes aesthetics at a much more affordable price point — through minimalism, but also every day items like these affordable dishes. I am interested in all aesthetics, but engaging in aesthetics from other cultures is cost prohibitive (ie traditional French or Italian design sensibilities).

I would like to explore Shaker culture more, but I feel like that is a different kind of constraint, contrasted with Japanese minimalism. Shaker aesthetics are self flagellating, but also timeless and elegant in their own Protestant way (and I am nothing if not Calvinist — “salvation through work”). But the idea of something being representative of “American” design sensibilities is interesting to me, much how I love the original Ralph Lauren collections for epitomizing the easy athleticism, optimism, and carefree nature of 20th century post WW2 America.

I got two of these cups from Soko Hardware in spring or summer of 2020 with one of my indie-web meetup friends, Tantek.

I remember feeling mega depresso (who wasn’t), and walking to Japantown with a friend masked up was better than the nothing I had been doing for the prior months. I remember it was one of the few times I went into a store since the lockdown orders in early March of 2020.

There were a version of the same cups with this glaze that were more squat, but Tantek encouraged me to get the taller, more slender ones because he (flatteringly) said they were more “me”. These are great to hold, and while they are smaller than the cups I usually drink tea from, it feels nice to slow down and savor the tea. They also encourage me to drink more Chinese teas/oolongs that are meant to be drunk in small quantities at a time, since I usually default to a grassy sencha or gyokuro tea.

For a long time one of these cups was in my medicine cabinet to hold nail clippers and other random items; I like the versatility of these cups to just be cute containers or items to have around the house.

When I saw these same cups when I was back in SF a few months ago, it felt weirdly heartwarming to associate something at “home” in my other “home”.