A Potter Finds Her Voice in Maine's Messy, Beautiful Landscape

Hanako Nakazato grew up in Karatsu, a southern Japanese town where pottery has been made for hundreds of years. Her family were renowned potters. She wanted nothing to do with it.

At 16, she left Japan for the United States, determined to do something different. But distance has a way of clarifying what matters. After years away, she started noticing things she'd taken for granted: the way a meal in Japan isn't just food, but a conversation between ingredients, ceramics, and the person eating. A white bowl next to a wooden spoon next to a metal chopstick rest. Texture against texture. Nothing matching, everything balanced.

"European style, everything is unified and clean," she explains. "But in a Japanese restaurant, repetition is often avoided. You might see something white and clean, but then next might be something in wood or bamboo or metal or glass."

She realized she wanted to make pottery that served this philosophy—vessels that didn't announce their purpose, that could hold soup or flowers or just sit on a shelf and look right.

Finding Place in Maine

In 2010, Hanako settled in rural Midcoast Maine, splitting her time between there and Japan. Maine, she says, taught her something she'd been trying to express all along. The state's landscape—ocean and forest and blueberry fields, the particular way light hits the coast—is exactly what she loved about Japanese dining. Varied. Messy even. But coherent. Alive.

"Maine has the beauty and inspires people to create something beautiful," she says. "To be independent and to create your own beautiful life because of the beautiful nature."

Her work changed. She started making pieces in blues and greens and colors she'd never used before, pulled directly from what she saw outside her studio window. Her shapes began echoing natural forms—curves that felt less designed than discovered.

Her process is meditative and physical. She'll throw 50 cups in a day, sometimes hundreds. She listens to house music, lets her hands work while her mind quiets. "That's when the true beauty comes out," she says. "You can't really think too hard. Pottery is very responsive to touch and movement. You have to work with intuition, use your senses."

She named her studio Mono Hanako. "Mono" means "thing" in Japanese—deliberately vague. A mug limits itself to coffee or tea. A thing can hold soup, ice cream, flowers, or nothing at all. It's a small act of refusal, rooted in Zen philosophy: the belief that imperfection and multiplicity are where meaning lives.

"Nature is not trying to be perfect," Hanako says. "It just—it's there."

That acceptance—of clay's responsiveness, of Maine's rough beauty, of a bowl's many lives—is what moved her from running from her family's legacy to inhabiting it completely. Not by copying it, but by listening to it. Letting it shape her, the way her hands shape clay.