Utsunomiya
— — a working city that eats well.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Tochigi Prefecture, about a hundred kilometres north of Tokyo on the Tohoku line, half a million people deep, and famously the place Japan eats more gyoza than anywhere else. Out past the train station, the old Oya stone quarries open into vast underground rooms cut from pale volcanic tuff. A new light-rail line runs east toward the industrial belt. The city sits low under the Nikko mountains; the air comes off them clean. — from the studio
Utsunomiya, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Utsunomiya is the capital of Tochigi Prefecture and the largest city of the northern Kanto plain, roughly 100 kilometres north of Tokyo on the Tohoku Shinkansen line. The city carries about 510,000 residents and sits at 105 metres elevation on the open lowland between the Kinugawa and Tagawa rivers, with the Nikko mountains rising to the northwest. It is the historic seat of the Utsunomiya clan, whose Futaarayama Shrine on the old fortress hill in the city centre dates the settlement back more than a thousand years.
Six kilometres west of the city, the quarries at Oya yield the pale green-grey volcanic tuff known as Oya-ishi, used across Japan as fireproof building stone. Frank Lloyd Wright clad the original Imperial Hotel in Tokyo with Oya stone in 1923. The disused underground galleries beneath the village are now the Oya Stone Museum, a single chamber of about 20,000 square metres, kept at roughly 8 °C year-round. The Heiwa Kannon, a ten-metre figure carved into the cliff face above the quarry in the years after the Pacific War, looks down over the entrance.
Utsunomiya has held the top per-household spending on gyoza dumplings in Japan for most of the last three decades, in friendly rivalry with Hamamatsu. The city hosts an annual Gyoza Matsuri in November in front of the JR station, where dozens of local restaurants set up stalls. The Light-Rail Transit line, opened in August 2023, was the first wholly new tramway built in Japan in seventy-five years and runs roughly fifteen kilometres east from the station through the Honda and Canon factory belt to the city of Haga.