Tile Museum

About the Tile Museum

The Origin of the Tile Museum

In 1991, tile researcher Yamamoto Masayuki donated his collection of some 6000 tiles to the City of Tokoname. LIXIL Corporation (INAX at the time) was entrusted with the management, research, and exhibition of this collection, and in 1997 the Tile Museum was constructed.
The Tile Museum publicly exhibits the Yamamoto collection along with our own decorative tiles. With the mission of helping visitors to “see, learn, and discover,” we are one of the few research museums in the world dedicated to tile.

The Yamamoto Collection

Masayuki Yamamoto was born in 1920 to a long-established family in Awaji Island, Hyogo Prefecture, known for Minpei ware pottery. He became familiar with ceramics at an early age: as a child he would play with shards of Minpei ware he found at the river, or look at tile trivets used in the tea ceremony that were kept in the family storehouse.The beauty of the ceramic pieces swaying at the bottom of the ocean when he went for a swim at the nearby beach made a lasting impression in his mind.

In 1938 he joined his uncle’s tile wholesaling business in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, thus beginning his more than 60-year relationship with tile. The firm had started in 1899 as a pottery shop, but shifted its business to tiles in the early Taisho period, eventually becoming a pioneer in the Japanese architectural tile industry. To investigate the roots of tile, Yamamoto travelled to the world’s four cradles of civilization: the Yellow River, the Nile, the Indus and the Ganges, and the Tigris and Euphrates. He went back and forth along the Silk Road many times. His journey to trace the history of tile took him around the world to a total of over 50 countries.

In 1988, Yamamoto became the Chairman of the National Tile Industry Association. In 1990 he was awarded the Fourth Class Order of the Sacred Treasure, and in 1996 the Architectural Institute of Japan recognized him with the Cultural Prize for his “efforts to improve tile construction and finishing technology by developing and propagating new techniques over his long career in the industry.” In addition, the Institute lauded him for his “contributions to researching and elevating the cultural value of tile through exhibition and inquiry.” Yamamoto's key accomplishment was that he taught us how an ordinary piece of tile that once adorned a building can tell stories about the history, culture, and how people lived in a particular time and place. Each and every piece in Yamamoto's collection reveals the technology used in its production, and is full of the wisdom that led to technical evolution. His keen eye, trained from his childhood to evaluate pottery, selected specimens for his collection that were deeply rooted in the places where they were born, showing us how to consider the origin of things. Throughout his life, Yamamoto was devoted to tiles. His lifetime dedication to tile research overlaps with the modern history of how tiles became a part of the Japanese lifestyle. Yamamoto passed away in 2000, leaving us with a treasure as his legacy - the Tile Museum in Tokoname.

The Yamamoto Collection, housed at the Tile Museum, contains approximately 6,000 pieces (3,000 types) of tiles. Included in the collection in addition to tiles are a small number of vessels such as pots and plates, porcelain panel paintings, partition paintings, and fragments of pottery. Yamamoto collected these additional materials for his research into the history, design, and manufacturing methods of tiles. Among these works is a partition painting from the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1574 - 1600). It depicts life in the Chinese imperial court, with a hall decorated with a tiled floor. We can sense Yamamoto's passion for tiles as he acquired this painting as evidence of the value placed on tile in ancient cultures.

The collection from approximately 25 countries around the world including the Middle East, Europe, China, and Japan also allows us to understand the birth and evolution of tiles over the ages. Starting with the ancient Orient, it gives an idea of how tiles were disseminated in the 7th to the 15th century as Islam spread across the world. It illustrates how the cultures of East and West influenced each other during the 16th to 18th centuries through the activities of the East India Company, and how tiles flourished with the development of technology in 19th to 20th century Britain after the industrial revolution.

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