Kunashir Island
— — an island the fog keeps for the bears.
Not only on a wall.
“The southernmost of the Kuril Islands, four hours by sea from Sakhalin and visible on a clear day from Hokkaido. Volcanic, foggy, half-empty. Tyatya cone in the north, hot springs along the coast, brown bears in the Kurilsky reserve. From the studio, we see a long green ridge between two oceans, claimed by two countries, walked mostly by the rangers who count its salmon.
Kunashir Island, 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.
Kunashir is the southernmost of the Kuril Islands, about 1,490 square kilometres in area, separated from Hokkaido by the narrow Notsuke and Nemuro straits. It is administered by the Russian Federation as part of Sakhalin Oblast and also claimed by Japan as Kunashiri, one of the four Northern Territories disputed since 1945. The volcanic spine carries four active stratovolcanoes; Tyatya, in the north, rises to about 1,819 metres. The administrative centre is Yuzhno-Kurilsk on the south coast; the island's resident population is in the low thousands.
Most of Kunashir is uninhabited. The Kurilsky Nature Reserve, established in 1984, covers about 65,000 hectares — roughly a third of the island — and protects a population of brown bears, sea eagles, sika deer, and one of the densest pink-salmon runs in the Russian Far East. Coastal fumaroles steam through the moss along the Stolbchaty cape, where weathered columnar basalt steps into the Sea of Okhotsk. Pacific fog holds the coast for much of the summer, and clear days are the exception rather than the rule.
Winter on Kunashir is long and grey, with deep snow and a coast partly closed by drift ice from the Sea of Okhotsk. Spring is late; the larch and birch leaf out in June. July and August carry the pink-salmon run up the island's short rivers, the bears that follow them, and the brief window when the weather and the ferry from Korsakov on Sakhalin combine to allow visitors. Access is controlled by Russian border-zone permits, and the disputed status keeps tourism slow and the island quiet.