At the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo, I kept recognizing things I did not expect to find there. Among rows of pottery, pale jars and loose blue brushwork looked instantly familiar. Out on the balcony, large earthen jars stood in a row like the ones my grandmother used to store her handmade soybean paste and kimchi in her farmhouse yard.

When I see Korean objects in a museum abroad, one question comes to mind: How did this get here? The answer is usually an uncomfortable reality involving colonial collectors, wartime looting or tomb raiding. The objects here, however, were not royal treasures or works created for display. Many were bowls, jars and household objects made to be used until they broke. Yet someone had collected and placed them as art in this museum.

The man behind this collection was Japanese. Soetsu Yanagi had spent decades collecting Korean things while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. I was not sure what to make of him.

Yanagi (1889–1961), the museum’s founder, was a philosopher and one of the founders of Japan’s mingei folk craft movement, which found beauty in useful everyday objects made largely by unknown craftspeople.

Yanagi later wrote in an essay that his path to mingei began with a Korean jar gifted to him by his friend Noritaka Asakawa in 1914. Asakawa is considered an expert in Korean ceramics studies, and the Joseon Dynasty blue and white porcelain jar captivated Yanagi so much that he visited Korea over 20 times and dedicated his life to collecting ceramics and everyday crafts.

In 1922, the Japanese colonial government planned to demolish Gwanghwamun, the main gate of Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul. Yanagi protested publicly in an essay published in Dong-A Ilbo and Kaizo magazine. He asked Japanese readers to imagine the situation reversed: Korea annexing Japan, destroying the imperial palace in Tokyo and putting its own government building there. His writing fueled opposition, and Gwanghwamun was moved instead of demolished.

That was not the only time he spoke out. In 1919, Koreans demonstrated for independence, and Japanese police and troops violently suppressed the movement, killing thousands. Yanagi published essays in Yomiuri Shimbun and a letter to Korean readers in Dong-A Ilbo, arguing that Japan had taken Koreans’ material and spiritual freedoms. Some of his writings were censored, and he later recalled that police followed him whenever he visited Korea.

In 1924, Yanagi and the Asakawa brothers opened the Korean Folk Art Museum inside Gyeongbokgung Palace. Yanagi wanted to preserve Korean works that might otherwise disappear. He and his wife raised money, and Korean independence activists and civic leaders also supported the project. In 1984, South Korea posthumously awarded Yanagi the Bogwan Medal of the Order of Cultural Merit.

Yet Yanagi is also criticized for his idea of a beauty of sorrow in Korean art. He saw sadness in its long, flowing lines and the color white, connecting them to Korea’s long history of invasion and suffering. He extended this interpretation beyond art to Korean people’s character. His ideas became highly influential, shaping how Koreans later wrote about their own art.

Critics in both countries later saw the arrogance of empire in Yanagi’s ideas. Oh Byung-wook, a Korean painter and art professor, called his approach imperial Orientalism. Japanese literary critic Kojin Karatani described Yanagi’s view as nothing more than a dogma born of a colonizer’s pity toward people his own country was in the process of destroying.

“Beauty of sorrow” is a poetic phrase and it is easy to see why people are drawn to it. But looking at the pottery, as a Korean, I read it the opposite way.

The white reminded me more of moonlight, not grief. In Korean culture, white had long carried brightness, purity, cleansing and a connection with heaven and the sacred. Koreans were so attached to white clothing that Joseon rulers repeatedly tried to discourage or ban it. People wore white anyway. During the Joseon era, the plainness of white porcelain could also reflect Neo-Confucian ideals such as restraint and simplicity. To me, a white jar reads as light and emptiness. The emptiness is not absence but a space left open where anything can begin.

White is also one of the traditional five colors, along with black, red, blue and yellow, tied to the five elements and the order of heaven and earth. Koreans used them everywhere from palace beams to household objects. At my own traditional wedding, I wore red and my husband wore blue while both of our outfits carried the five colors. The clothing was like symbolic armor, wrapping us in cosmic balance, protection and blessing.

Korean homes were also traditionally filled with furniture, paintings and objects meant to invite good luck and keep misfortune away. Many of the objects Yanagi collected came from households like that. Standing in front of those white jars, I could not read them as expressions of invasion and suffering.

Yanagi and I were looking at the same objects but reading them through different histories. He had studied Korea for decades and clearly cared about it. But he could not look at Korea from the same historical position as the Koreans he was writing about. He was also a Japanese intellectual at the center of the empire with an elite education, connections and freedom to travel, collect and build museums.

For many Koreans under colonial rule, the reality was different. Large quantities of rice from the peninsula were shipped to Japan, and Koreans who grew that rice relied on barley and millet instead. Rice was an everyday staple for many in Japan but a luxury for many Koreans. For someone struggling to feed a family, keeping an ordinary bowl because it might one day belong in a museum was a very different proposition.

Yet Yanagi’s interpretation changed over time. In his later writings, he gradually moved away from beauty of sorrow toward naturalness and eventually what he called funibi, a beauty of unity.

Yanagi was not the first Japanese to admire Korean ceramics. By the late 1500s, tea masters in Japan such as Sen no Rikyu had turned rustic Korean tea bowls into highly valued objects among Japanese warriors and wealthy merchants. In Korea, many of those were ordinary wares, but Japan saw beauty and value in them long before Yanagi did.

Then came the Imjin War (1592–1598). During Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea, Japanese forces killed civilians, plundered towns and temples and took large numbers of Koreans to Japan as captives. Skilled artisans were deliberately targeted, and many of the feudal lords took potters back to their territories. In ceramic history, the war is also called the “Pottery War.”

The culture that made Korean pottery desirable also made the people who knew how to make it worth abducting. Their skill may have kept them alive, but it was also the reason they were taken from home.

Those potters reshaped Japanese ceramics. Their techniques and kiln technology became central to Karatsu ware in Kyushu, and in the early 1600s, Korean potters in Arita produced Japan’s first porcelain. By the mid-1600s, Dutch traders were shipping Arita porcelain from Nagasaki to Europe.

That does not make Japanese pottery Korean. Over generations, these traditions became part of Japanese culture. But calling it simply cultural exchange would hide how it began. War moved the people first. Once there, they survived and kept working and teaching what they knew to the next generation. Something new grew from a violent beginning, but that does not make the beginning any less violent or painful.

After liberation in 1945, the Korean Folk Art Museum in Seoul closed, and the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea transferred the collection to Korean hands. The holdings went into Korean national collections, and some of those works are in the National Museum of Korea today. The museum Yanagi founded in Tokyo still keeps Korean ceramics and crafts.

I might not read pottery as art the way Yanagi did, but I did see the history and lives behind it. I saw the people who used objects like these every day, the potters abducted during the Imjin War, the Koreans living under colonial rule and Yanagi standing on the powerful side of that unequal relationship.

Yanagi’s position gave him choices most Koreans did not have, but it does not explain the ones he made. Many other Japanese inside the same empire made different choices. Yanagi could misread Korea and still love Korean art sincerely.

What stayed with me is that he wanted Korean things preserved as Korean things. He did not need them to become Japanese or something else before he saw their value. When he planned the Korean Folk Art Museum, he chose Seoul over Tokyo because he believed works born in Korea belonged among Korean people.

About a century ago, Yanagi looked at these bowls and jars and decided they were worth keeping. The people are gone. The empire is gone. The museum in Seoul is gone. But the objects stayed because one man wanted them to last long enough for people in the future to stand in front of them. I was one of those people.

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