Craft knowledge between Japan and Brazil: cosmopolitanism, hybridity, and the politics of value

This paper looks at the transnational diffusion and reappraisal of craft knowledge as a result of the migration of artists and craftspeople from Japan to Brazil. We present the case of Cunha, a rural town in the São Paulo state, where a group of countercultural practitioners from Japan established a collective studio with a wood-firing kiln in 1975, giving birth to a tradition of Japan-influenced high-temperature ceramics in the region, which culminated in the town being awarded the title of National Capital of High-Temperature Ceramics by the Brazilian Senate in 2022. We discuss the transmission of craft knowledge from Japan to Cunha, where the low-fired ceramics of indigenous and African heritage had almost disappeared by the 1970s with the arrival of mass-consumer products and a broader dismissal of craft as low-skilled labor, tied to Portuguese colonization and the transplantation of modern Western hierarchies of art to Brazil (Mosquera, 1997). We argue that the diffusion of Japanese knowledge and regimes of value, through the individual and civic activities of Japanese migrants in the town, has led to a revaluation of craft in Cunha. Yet, the success of Japan-influenced ceramics cannot be dissociated from the cosmopolitan aspirations of the Brazilian elite (Rocha, 2006). Finally, we will show how the transmission of craft knowledge and its value from Japan to Brazil has encouraged the reappraisal and revival of local ceramic craft traditions, which were hybridized with Japanese ones, making Cunha and its ceramics yet another testament to Brazilian culture’s anthropophagic tendencies (Andrade, 1928).