When the war ended and Hanasennin began a new life in Fujisawa, Japan was still a country where simply staying alive took everything a person had.

His house in Tokyo was gone, and with it nearly every oil painting he had made. Fujishima Takeji, the teacher who had shaped him, had already died. Standing up again as a painter was one problem; making a living was another.

He married Hanako, settled in Fujisawa, and in time they had two daughters. Under the raised floor of the house they kept chickens to help make ends meet. Fed on acacia leaves from the garden, the hens laid eggs so fine they sold for twice the going rate.

Hanako taught flower arrangement to bring in money. Even in those lean years, the family went out to the fields together to look at flowers.

It was not yet ten years since the surrender. Out on the streets, people were still consumed with eating and surviving. Stopping to look at a flower was a luxury few could afford.

Watching them, Hanasennin asked himself a question.

Was there something he could do with flowers?

The house in Fujisawa had a large garden. He planted dahlias there and set about multiplying the tubers.

He raised them for a year, kept back only what the next season required, and sent the rest out along the national railway lines to stations across the Kanto region. The idea was that the empty ground beside each platform could be planted, and dahlias would bloom there.

There was no organisation behind him.

Nobody had asked him to do it.

He multiplied tubers in his garden, sent them to stations across the region, then multiplied more and sent those. A one-man volunteer effort he called the Dahlia Campaign.

He was not a man who tried a thing once and let it go.

He kept at the same work for years, and in time dahlias were blooming in the spare ground of stations all over Kanto. If a flower at a station could soften, even slightly, the hearts of people who had lost the leisure to look at one — that was the whole purpose.

The campaign was picked up by the Japanese edition of Reader's Digest, then read around the world, and ran as a full-page article.

Years later, Ota Yukio, who was shown the article by Hanasennin himself, remembered it as an act of unpaid generosity that few people could have managed.

The article evidently meant something to Hanasennin, too.

He cut the page out and kept it, for the rest of his life, beside his pillow.

Not displayed, not boasted about — just tucked away within reach of where he slept. There is something quietly endearing in that: the man who filled the region's stations with flowers, keeping the single page that proved it next to his bed.

The dahlias in his garden he also painted.

He multiplied them, gave them away, made them bloom at stations, and then painted them. The dahlia was not simply raw material for a campaign. It was a subject he met while learning to live again after the war.

But Hanasennin always took things too far.

Tubers have to be divided one by one before they can be sent. He would crouch down, rise onto one knee, and use that knee to split them, over and over.

Not for one season. For years — multiplying and splitting, multiplying and splitting.

In the end it was not the dahlias that gave out. It was his knee.

The joint was damaged, and the Dahlia Campaign came to an end.

A project begun to lift people's spirits closed only when the man running it could no longer physically continue. It was an entirely characteristic way to finish.

And it was around then that his wife made a suggestion.

"Why not try ceramics?"

What she suggested was ceramics. Choosing raku out of all of it was his own doing. He visited the home of a man who made it, later took proper instruction from Yoshida Kozo, a classmate from the Tokyo Fine Arts School, and built a wood-fired kiln in his own garden.

The garden where he had been multiplying dahlia tubers now held a kiln for firing tea bowls.

From growing flowers to shaping earth.

The hands that had brought dahlias to the region's stations began making bowls small enough to be cupped in two hands.

Hanasennin was not a man who articulated a principle and then acted on it. If he saw people who had lost heart, he started multiplying tubers in his garden. Once he started, he supplied the entire Kanto region single-handedly. And he kept going until his knee gave way.

That awkward, headlong drive — and the wish to give people something — did not end with the dahlias.

It carried on into everything that followed, changing form from flowers into bowls.

Hanasennin loved water from an early age.

As a student he once floated home down the Tama River on his way back from school. During a summer break at art school he cycled all the way to Hiketa in Shikoku, stayed a long while, and gave himself over to messing about in boats.

At Enoshima he carved a small yacht out of scrap wood with a pocket knife. He rigged a sail and launched it from the eastern beach, and it disappeared between the waves and did not come back. Just as he was giving it up for lost, the yacht — its centreboard gone — drifted back to his hand. He must have been delighted: he hung it on the lintel at home and looked at it for years.

After the war, living in Fujisawa, he watched the sun set behind the Izu Peninsula from Enoshima and decided it was the finest in Japan. His teacher Fujishima Takeji had spent a lifetime painting the rising sun; he would spend his painting this setting one. That became his subject as a painter, for good.

But after the war, however much he set out to paint, he could not finish a painting.

Even so, every day was a negotiation with the sunset.

In the late afternoon he would look west from the house in Fujisawa, hold up two fingers in the scissors sign, and count back from the horizon to work out how long he had. If it looked like a good one, he grabbed a canvas and his paintbox and jumped on the Enoden. When he could not afford canvas, he took a wooden board instead.

Once he reached the rocks at Enoshima, the sunset gave no quarter. It shifted from moment to moment, the colour running away as he watched. He painted at speed, driven along by it.

After years of this he worked out the conditions that produced the sunset he wanted. A clear winter day. Cloud in the sky, low temperature, low humidity, and a strong wind in the evening. Less a painter than a meteorologist with a single specialism.

And then the day came.

Cloud overhead, hard wind, deep winter. The sunset he had been waiting years for — the best he had ever seen. There was colour film in the camera, or so he believed. Shutter at a sixtieth, aperture at 16 and 22: he had settled his exposures long before, and he shot and shot.

Then the prints came back.

The film was black and white.

The exposure had been perfect. He had simply loaded the wrong film.

He had the black-and-white photograph blown up large, and prepared a canvas roughly 1.2 metres high and 3 metres wide. But he could not bring himself to start.

"If only that film had been colour, I could have painted it straight away."

So he waited, disappointed, for the same sunset to appear again. For as long as Ota Yukio was coming and going from the house, it never did.

None of which means he was a slow painter.

An acquaintance once commissioned a picture of the sea — calm, gently rolling. Hanasennin struggled with it for a long time, grumbling that a rough sea would have been the easy job, and went out to Enoshima again and again.

Then one afternoon he turned to Ota Yukio without warning.

"Ota, watch me. One hour."

They took the Enoden, walked out to the rocks at Enoshima, and he opened his paintbox.

Quick strokes, one after another.

The painting was finished in exactly an hour, as promised. He carried it away still wet and went straight to the buyer's house on the way home.

"It's still wet — be careful with it."

He handed over the painting, took the money, went home, and passed it to Hanako with a word: here you are. That evening they held a quiet celebration at home.

A man who could paint the sea in an hour never put a brush to the one subject he had chosen for life.

What he lacked was not skill or speed. Every evening he held his hand up to the western sky, counted back the time, took up his paintbox and jumped on the Enoden. He repeated that sequence for decades.

The tools were there, the place was there, the resolve was there. What was not there, only he knew.

Around 1957, Hanasennin turned forty.

He had built a household in Fujisawa, and had settled on the sun setting behind the Izu Peninsula, seen from Enoshima, as his subject for life.

But sunsets do not appear on a painter's schedule.

The one he wanted came only on winter evenings, when the air was dry and the cloud and wind agreed. The rest of the year he had more ability than he could use, and by all accounts he turned restless and difficult.

Watching this, his wife Hanako set a trap.

"Why not try ceramics?"

To everyone's surprise, he took the suggestion without argument. And out of all the kinds of pottery there were, he chose raku.

He had once sat in on lectures about ceramics at the Tokyo Fine Arts School, but he knew nothing about raku in practice. So he first got himself invited to stay at the home of a man who made it, and watched the whole process through once, from wedging the clay to drawing the finished bowl from the fire.

Proper instruction came afterwards, from Yoshida Kozo — a classmate at the Tokyo Fine Arts School who had happened to serve in the same unit during the war.

Back home, he built a kiln in the garden.

A proper wood-fired kiln: a double course of brick, with a shed over it to keep the rain off. It held exactly one bowl at a time. Any part he could not buy, he designed and made himself.

After using it a while, he rebuilt it so that Hanako could fire it alone, changing the structure so bowls could be loaded and drawn from the side. From then on he threw and glazed; she ran the fire.

To make raku, you first need clay.

The book said blue clay. He found something that looked right at Yugyo-ji, and then more at Tengaku-in — but you cannot dig up a temple's ground as you please.

So the two of them walked the surrounding district looking for it.

At a small pass just over the boundary from Fujisawa into Kamakura, he looked up at the cut face of a terraced field and read the seam of black earth in a single glance. It was the same blue clay he had seen at the temples.

They took a box of sweets to the farmhouse behind the field and asked permission to dig. What they carried home, they most likely brought by handcart.

This Kamakura blue clay was plastic and forgiving, and suited both red and black raku. It became the clay he used for the rest of his life.

At Chogo he found a different clay in a stream. Bisque-fired it turned a dull white; glazed it gave a white raku unlike anything else.

Not long after, the site was developed, and it could never be collected again.

You cannot always go back for a thing later. The moment you meet it is the moment that counts. His work began with these chance encounters with earth.

Sometimes he fired a bowl in the household brazier — one that had the characters for "imperial visit" written on it, for reasons nobody knew.

He cut a hole in the middle of the brazier large enough to take a bowl, pushed the bowl in, packed glowing charcoal inside it as well, and heaped more charcoal on top. Then:

"Goodnight."

Left overnight, the bowl would be fired by morning — and barely distinguishable from one fired in the kiln.

Walking the rocks at Enoshima once, he noticed a small deposit of earth in a place that was otherwise all stone. Looking up, he saw a single tree on the cliff above.

"It must have come down from there."

He took a little home, threw one bowl from it, and fired it. It came out the orange-red of a ripe persimmon.

You cannot know clay until you fire it. To find out about a single bowl, he would put almost anything in the kiln.

When he started, he assembled every tool the book listed, including a potter's wheel. He tried the standard methods — coiling, slab building, the techniques of the Raku family.

None of it produced anything like a Koetsu bowl.

So he stopped repeating what he had been taught.

The wheel went into the corner of the room. In its place: a board, a piece of cloth, a strip of binding, and a doughnut-shaped support he made himself.

Conventional raku is built thick and large on a board, then carved down once it is leather-hard. What he worked out was the opposite.

He wedged the clay thoroughly to drive out the air, flattened it on the board into a disc, then set the disc on his left hand and used the hand itself as the wheel.

And the bowl was upside down.

He put his right thumb inside it and tightened the outside with his other fingers, opening it outward from within. Partway through he inserted the doughnut support to hold the shape, and raised the wall using nothing but the physics of the thing.

Once the form was there, he lifted it on his left hand to eye level and turned it slowly. Anything that bothered him, he tapped back into place with his right hand.

The size of the foot ring was not set with a ruler.

It was set by the width of the maker's scissors sign.

A different hand meant a different foot. And the mood a person was in that day, he said, found its way into the bowl whether they intended it or not.

Which is why he also said this:

"Have a drink first. It loosens you up."

The last step in throwing was to bind a strip of cloth around the drinking rim. Skip it and the bowl cracked by the next morning, without exception. For a bowl as much as for a person, the band around the head was how you steadied yourself for what came next.

He would write characters on a bowl, but painting a picture on one was out of the question.

He was a painter by trade, and he would not decorate his own bowls with pictures. On the other hand, when he needed a break from throwing, he made crabs, or a pipe shaped like a whale that he then smoked himself.

"You can always fire it again!"

Such things came out of the kiln in between the serious work.

His carving tool was not made to order either.

Out walking one day he passed a scrap-metal dealer and saw a single blade stuck upright in an iron container. He bought it for about a hundred yen, took it home, and found it cut and pared astonishingly well.

It turned out to be a genuine kozuka — the small knife carried in the scabbard of a sword.

"This is the one," he said, and used it for the rest of his life, both for carving bowls and for signing them.

For hollowing the inside, he used a spoon.

He would pinch the bowl repeatedly in his right hand to check the wall thickness, mime drinking from it to judge the weight, and rock it the way you would test a boat's righting moment. Then he would mime drinking once more to settle the balance.

Carve it all at once and the bowl breaks.

So: carve, dry, carve again, over about three days. But he never pared everything down evenly.

"This part is natural."

Wherever he felt that, he left it alone. That was the bowl's landscape.

His bowls were thin and light, even the large ones.

"A heavy bowl gives you a stiff shoulder."

When an acquaintance told him they were too thin, he did not change them. He had held them, mimed drinking from them, and decided the weight with his body.

When thirty or forty had accumulated, he bisque-fired them together. The best day for the glaze firing was a cold, dry one just after New Year; the next best was the crisp weather of the May holidays.

On firing days, Hanako lit the kiln at dawn.

Once it was going she could not leave it for a moment. She prepared rice balls, kept the wood coming, and brought the temperature up slowly, never rushing it.

Hanasennin spent the morning glazing every bowl due to be fired. The glaze materials came from Isekyu in Nagoya; the recipe and the proportions were his own business. He never applied a thick coat at once — always thin layers, one over another, dried in the sun between.

Once the kiln settled, the firing began, one bowl at a time.

He judged the melt of the glaze through the spyhole and drew the bowl out after ten or twenty minutes. Sometimes it went into water to cool fast; sometimes it cooled slowly on brick.

Each time a bowl came out he lowered the fire, sealed the mouth of the kiln with brick to hold the heat, and started the next one.

He threw, carved and glazed. She kept the fire all day.

Between his fortieth and sixtieth year — twenty years — the two of them made a thousand raku bowls.

In his later years he used the thin-walled carving he had spent decades refining to make a series of enormous bowls, which he named Enterprise.

What began as his wife's suggestion ended with the wheel abandoned and a method that ran opposite to everything he had been taught.

But what carried that work was not a set of remarkable tools.

A drink. A hundred-yen blade. A kitchen spoon. The width of two fingers. A mimed sip. And Hanako, sitting in front of the kiln from dawn with a parcel of rice balls.

These bowls did not come out of one artist's head.

Two people walked out to look for clay, carried it home, and then one of them threw a bowl and the other fired it.

Waiting for a beauty that only ever arrives by chance, they kept the same fire going in the same garden, year after year.