Toyozō Arakawa
Japanese artist (1894–1985)
Toyozo Arakawa (荒川 豊蔵, Arakawa Toyozō; March 21, 1894 - August 11, 1985) was a well-known Japanese ceramic potter.
He lived and worked in Mino, near Nagoya. He was given the title "Living National Treasure" in 1955.
In 1930 he discovered shards at the site of the ruins of an ogama style kiln at Mutabora proving that that Shino and Oribe glazed work of the Momoyama and early Edo period in Japan had been manufactured in Mino rather than in the Seto area. In 1933 he built a kiln reproducing the original Mutabora kiln and rediscovered the techniques for manufacturing Shino glazes.
He died in Tokyo, Japan in 1985.
There is a translation of Arakawa's The Traditions and Techniques of Mino Pottery in Janet Barriskill's Visiting the Mino Kilns Wild Peony Press, Sydney, 1995.
His work is kept in several museums, including the Mills College Art Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the ASU Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Toyozō Arakawa” is japanese artist (1894–1985). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Toyozō, Arakawa and Japanese, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3536086. VIAF identifies the subject as 72716631. The Library of Congress control number is n81079748. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1894, 1985, 1955 and 1930.
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This entry incorporates text from “Toyozō Arakawa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.