The lovely jar featured on the cover of this issue of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies is an example of Satsuma 薩摩 ware, a style of Japanese ceramics. This piece dates from the late nineteenth century. Satsuma ware originated in the province of the same name on the southern island of Kyushu around the beginning of the seventeenth century, when seventy-some Koreans captured by invading Japanese troops during the Imjin War 壬辰戦争 (1592–1598) established kilns in Naeshirogawa 苗代川 and several other locations. The original Satsuma ware was rustic and unadorned, but during the eighteenth century some kilns began to produce fine white porcelain, to which they later adapted innovative techniques from Kyoto, particularly the application of brocade painting (nishikide 錦手), as seen on the piece on the cover.

White Satsuma ware won acclaim at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867 and enjoyed tremendous popularity on the export market for decades thereafter.¹ As a result, workshops in Kyoto, Yokohama, and elsewhere began to produce work in the Satsuma style in quantities that swamped the output of the Kyushu kilns. Over time, the market was flooded with garish, mass-produced, faux Satsuma pieces, much to the detriment of the style’s reputation. The British diplomat Ernest Satow wrote in 1878 that “it would perhaps not be too much to say that nothing worthy of the collector’s attention has been produced since 1868.”² He was surely too quick to judge, however. Satsuma ware continued to win awards at world expositions in Vienna (1875), Paris (1878), and Chicago (1893), and artisans in Naeshirogawa never stopped producing the high-quality wares that had first captured the Western world’s attention in Paris. Satsuma ware is by no means the only style of ceramics with roots in communities of artisans forcibly brought to Japan. Indeed, renowned kilns throughout western Japan—at Arita 有田, Karatsu 唐津, Hagi 萩, and elsewhere—were founded by Koreans.³ Satsuma ware is particularly noteworthy, however, because the Satsuma domain followed a policy of generally isolating Naeshirogawa’s community from outsiders and doing all it could to have them maintain Korean dress, language, and customs.

Korean potters brought to Japan during the Imjin War are often labeled “prisoners,” but they were not combatants and hence not prisoners of war in the conventional sense. Let us call them instead what they were: enslaved people, trafficked to Japan along with tens of thousands of their compatriots during a bloody, cruel, and pointless invasion. Potters were targeted in particular because their skills were prized: warriors throughout Japan avidly collected Korean tea bowls and other ceramics. They were the human equivalent of looted artworks.

To be sure, after the initial trauma of their resettlement in Japan, the people of Naeshirogawa were not treated as slaves.⁴ They did not labor under the direction of putative “owners.” They were not trafficked within Japan or sold abroad. They did not live in the fear that their children or spouses would be taken from them. The village’s population grew steadily until leveling off at about fourteen hundred in the late eighteenth century. Most of these supported themselves through agriculture, supplemented perhaps by part-time work at a kiln.

Even if they were not enslaved, neither were they free agents, even by the modest standards of Tokugawa Japan. They did not enjoy freedom of residence—Satsuma authorities occasionally moved entire communities of Koreans within the domain and even beyond, to Ryukyu—and although outsiders could marry into the community, the domain prohibited exogamy. Still, their commoner neighbors complained that the domain favored them with special treatment, including grants of land, exemption from land taxes, and occasional material support. Moreover, Naeshirogawa’s leading families were accorded the status of rural samurai (gōshi 郷士)—not a rare privilege in Satsuma, but nonetheless a sign of their secure place within domain society— even as other community members were legally registered as Naeshirogawa-mono 苗代川者, a marginal status category distinct from ordinary commoners (hyakushō 百姓).

Naeshirogawa served three purposes for the Satsuma domain. First, it was a trophy. Having a community of Korean subjects enhanced Satsuma’s standing vis-à-vis other daimyo domains and the shogunate itself, just as its dominion over the Ryukyu Kingdom, conquered in 1609, did. Beginning in 1676, the Satsuma lords regularly stopped at Naeshirogawa when traveling to and from Edo to attend on the shogun.⁵ Villagers dressed in Korean clothing performed Korean dances and songs and offered the daimyo nominally Korean-style food, such as skewered chicken and venison. In 1691, the daimyo Shimazu Tsunataka 島津綱貴 had three Naeshirogawa boys “costumed in the Korean manner” join his retinue as pages for the journey to Edo.⁶ The domain made similar use of Ryukyuan princes.

Naeshirogawa’s second purpose was as a center of ceramic production, but the domain offered inconsistent support for the kilns. It presented Satsuma ware as gifts to the shogun and other dignitaries but did not intervene during a period in the eighteenth century when ceramic production declined to the verge of extinction. Like other warlords during the invasion of Korea, Shimazu Yoshihiro 島津義弘 enslaved Korean potters because the wares they produced were coveted by Japanese practitioners of the tea ceremony. Yet tea bowls from Naeshirogawa never enjoyed much favor. Rather, connoisseurs continued to value imports from Korea over domestically produced ware, notwithstanding the putative Korean identity of Naeshirogawa’s potters.⁷

Finally, Naeshirogawa supplied Korean-language interpreters to the domain throughout the Tokugawa period. Records are spotty, but between 1698 and 1822, the domain summoned interpreters from the village at least nineteen times to communicate with Korean shipwreck victims. After the first two or three generations, few members of the community could speak Korean fluently, if at all. As a result, interpretation became the ken of four specialist families. The rest of the people learned song lyrics and ritual phrases by rote and internalized a few other words into their local Japanese dialect, farting in Korean (panggu 방구), for instance, without realizing it.⁸

Visitors emphasized the residents’ alterity—“seeing these unfamiliar people (みなれぬ人) makes me feel I have traveled to an unknown country (しらぬ国ゆくここち),” as the nativist scholar Shirao Kunihashira 白尾国柱 put it in 1795—even as they admitted that they were nearly indistinguishable from their commoner neighbors except for the differences of clothing and hairstyle mandated by the domain.⁹ If anything, Meiji-period observers were even keener to imagine Naeshirogawa as a foreign enclave. In 1898, an educator named Hontomi Yasushirō 本富安四郎 declared that “everyone in the village is Korean. For ages they have had no contact or intermarriage with others and have thereby preserved their pure Korean bloodline.”¹⁰

In fact, however, the villagers began to shed the visible markers of their Korean identity as soon as they were freed from the Satsuma domain’s control.¹¹ Satow, who visited Naeshirogawa in 1877, remarked, “There is nothing distinctive in the appearance of the people or in the architecture of their houses to attract the notice of a passing traveller; they all speak Japanese as their native tongue, and wear Japanese dress; [Naeshirogawa] is in fact just like any other village.”¹² Residents resorted to legal tricks to acquire Japanese-style surnames and hide their origins when seeking opportunities beyond the community. Some attained prominence in twentieth-century society, none more so than Tōgō Shigenori 東郷茂徳 (1883–1950), who served as the Japanese foreign minister during World War II. During the postwar period, locals successfully lobbied to erase the toponym Naeshirogawa from the map. Nowadays, few people recall that the deity originally enshrined at the local Tamayama 玉山 shrine was Tan’gun 檀君, the mythical founder of Korea. The alacrity with which many members of the community forsook their heritage reflects both the stigma that had long attached to their Korean identities and the extent to which those identities had been reduced to a performative obligation to domain officials and gawking tourists.

Let us return at last to the jar pictured on the cover. It bears the stamp of the Taizan 帯山 kiln on its base, which marks it as a work of Kyō-Satsuma 京薩摩 ware, most likely produced sometime between 1878 and 1884 at the Kyoto workshop of Taizan Yohei IX 帯山与兵 衛 (1856–1922), an important figure in the production of high-quality wares for export. Its genealogy begins with the enslavement of Korean artisans, whose descendants two centuries later adapted techniques from Kyoto into their work. Nearly another century later, their wares attracted such favorable attention in a newly emergent global market that ceramicists in Kyoto and elsewhere produced imitations designed with the tastes of American and European collectors in mind. Thus, potters enslaved to sate Shimazu Yoshihiro’s appetite for tea bowls founded a lineage of artistry that, through multiple mutations, found its way into a collection of “paintings, articles of bric-a-brac and Indian, Chinese and Japanese jewellery, curios, carvings, and other curiosities” bequeathed to Harvard in 1891 by Elizabeth Fogg in honor of her late husband, William, who had made his fortune as the president of a company involved in trade with China and Japan.¹³

The articles in this special issue of HJAS all focus on the history of slavery in East, Inner, and Southeast Asia during the early modern era. Each of our authors has tried to bring to light the stories of enslaved people and the social, political, and economic structures that sustained their enslavement. Like the vessel pictured here, whose connection to the history of slavery in East Asia has been obscured by time, the institution of slavery itself has too often been overlooked, ignored, or euphemized away in narratives of the early modern era. HJAS thanks the Harvard Art Museums for their kind permission to reproduce the image.

1 Gisela Jähn, Meiji Ceramics: The Art of Japanese Export Porcelain and Satsuma Ware, 1868–1912, trans. Michael Foster (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche, 2004).

2 Ernest Satow, “The Korean Potters in Satsuma,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1st ser., 6.2 (1878): 195.

3 An online exhibition curated by Rebekah Clements and Seung Yeun Sang, Stories of Clay: Discovering Chosŏn Korean Potters in Tokugawa Japan, accessed March 4, 2022, https:// aftermath.uab.cat/stories-of-clay/, provides an excellent and richly illustrated overview of the origins and influence of Korean potters brought to Japan after the Imjin War.

4 This discussion of Naeshirogawa during the Tokugawa period is drawn from Kurushima Hiroshi 久留島浩, “Kinsei no Naeshirogawa” 近世の苗代川, in Satsuma Chōsen tōkōmura no yonhyakunen 薩摩朝鮮陶工村の四百年, ed. Kurushima Hiroshi, Suda Tsutomu 須田努, and Chō Keitatsu 趙景達 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2014), pp. 3–57.

5 Rebekah Clements, “Daimyo Processions and Satsuma’s Korean Village: A Note on the Reliability of Local History Materials,” Japan Review 35 (2021): 219–30.

6 Kurushima Hiroshi, “Kinsei no Naeshirogawa,” pp. 18–19.

7 Nam-lin Hur, “Korean Tea Bowls (Kōrai chawan) and Japanese Wabicha: A Story of Acculturation in Premodern Northeast Asia,” Korean Studies 39 (2015): 1–22.

8 Chō Keitatsu, “Naeshirogawa no kindaishi” 苗代川の近代史, in Kurushima Hiroshi et al., Chōsen tōkōmura no yonhyakunen, p. 81.

9 Shirao Kunihashira, Geihan meishōkō 麑藩名勝考 (1795), quoted in Kurushima Hiroshi, “Kinsei no Naeshirogawa,” p. 42.

10 Hontomi Yasushirō, Satsuma kenbunki 薩摩見聞記 (Tokyo: Tōyōdō shoten, 1902 [1898]), p. 51, quoted in Chō Keitatsu, “Naeshirogawa no kindaishi,” p. 66.

11 For a survey of Naeshirogawa since the Meiji Restoration, see Chō Keitatsu, “Naeshirogawa no kindaishi,” pp. 59–93.

12 Satow, “The Korean Potters in Satsuma,” p. 196.

13 Fogg bequest, cited in Kimberley A. Orcutt, “Personal Collecting Meets Institutional Vision: The Origins of Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum,” Journal of the History of Collections 18.2 (2006): 276.