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We have tracked down the potter Kakiemon the 14th, who claims descent from the technique’s original creators and is today himself a Japanese Living National Treasure. He may indeed be the direct descendant of the very craftsman who decorated Lord Exeter’s menagerie around 400 years ago. He lives and works in Arita, the birthplace of Japanese porcelain, where his family have been potters for centuries:

The Kakiemon family has been making coloured porcelain in the Kakiemon style for nearly 400 years. There is plenty of porcelain stone in and around Arita that has weathered and naturally oxidized over thousands of years. The Kakiemon family has used this natural material since the Edo period. It normally takes around thirty to forty years to master the technique and acquire the skill, and training the next generation is always a big challenge.

The glaze applied to the elephants’ skin is called nigoshide. This technique was particularly developed in Arita, and we have been trying to preserve it. It’s not a pure white but a warm, milky white. I can say that it’s the starting point of the Kakiemon-style porcelain in the Edo period.

I use traditional tools. This is true of many Japanese craftsmen and keeps the traditional techniques alive. Japan has its own aesthetic and strives to maintain it. People may think that I am only following the old path, but I think my work is contemporary with traditional elements incorporated. We consider the British Museum elephants unique. I myself own one small elephant at home.

China is, as we all know, the home of porcelain and had for centuries been exporting it in industrial quantities. By the sixteenth century Europe was in the grip of porcelain mania, with a particular hunger for the famous blue and white (see Chapter 64). The appetite of the European rich was insatiable and Chinese supply struggled to keep up with demand, as a frustrated Italian merchant recorded in 1583:

Now there remain to us nothing but the leavings, for here they deal with porcelain as a hungry man with a plate of figs, who begins with the ripest, and then feels the others with his fingers, and chooses one after another of the least firm until none are left.

But new suppliers were about to enter this burgeoning market. By the fifteenth century, Korea had acquired from the Chinese the skill and the knowledge to make porcelain. It was war that spread those secrets on to Japan. In the late sixteenth century, Japan was united under a single military leader of massive ambition – Toyotomi Hideyoshi – who in the 1590s launched two attacks on Korea which he saw as mere preliminaries to taking over China from the Ming Dynasty. The takeover of China and Korea failed, but in the process Japan picked up valuable potting skills – and some of the potters who practised them – from the Korean peninsula. The Korean scholar Gina Ha-Gorlan describes the long dynamic between the three cultures:

Korea, China and Japan have kept close relationships since pre-historic times. In cultural exchanges, China often developed and advanced skills and techniques first, Korea then adopted them and then introduced them to Japan. Sampan Lee was a Korean potter who was taken from Korea to Japan during the Japanese invasion of the late sixteenth century. It’s interesting to note that this war is often referred to as the ‘potters war’, because so many Korean potters were taken to Japan in an attempt to transfer the white-porcelain manufacturing skills to Japan. So this Kakiemon elephant statue is a combination of Korean manufacturing technique, Chinese decorative skills and Japanese taste.

Around 1600 Japanese ceramics had two great strokes of luck. First there was the great boost, both in manpower and technology, given to the ceramics industry as a result of the Korean wars of the 1590s. Then, in 1644, the Ming Dynasty in China was overthrown, and in the ensuing political chaos Chinese production of porcelain collapsed, leaving the European