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Help Help ID bowl style/type?

Frank Wylie

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1 May 2017
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Hello,
I am new to this forum, and joined in hopes of finding out more about a particular Japanese bowl I have in my possession. At least, I assume it is Japanese. This bowl came to me from an estate sale of a US military family that had been stationed in Japan sometime in the 1950s.

After a fruitless searches I have been unable to identify anything about the bowl. Probably, because I don't even know the terms to use to search for this type of pottery.

Can anyone shed light on what I have?

Many thanks in advance!

Frank
 
It looks like about the size of a rice bowl. There is some "crazing" going on with the glaze. The characters look like 三木作 to me. That's the extent of what I can say about it.
 
It looks like about the size of a rice bowl. There is some "crazing" going on with the glaze. The characters look like 三木作 to me. That's the extent of what I can say about it.
Thank you mdchachi. I should have added the "glaze" on the interior of the bowl is what a appears to be a thin layer of lacquer or bitumen in which the multicolored chips have been embedded and ground-down to expose their interior colors. The chips have physical ridges exposed, so it doesn't appear to have any real food serving function. I think anything liquid or powdery would destroy the interior decoration, so it must have been made strictly for decoration purposes.

Edit: A quick Google translate identifies the characters as Chinese, not Japanese and it is the phrase "Miki for".

Sorry to have wasted your time!

Frank
 
Edit: A quick Google translate identifies the characters as Chinese, not Japanese and it is the phrase "Miki for".
Google translate doesn't know what it's talking about. It sees a string of Kanji (characters of Chinese origin) without any Kana (phonetic characters exclusive to Japanese) and of course it's going to assume Chinese and spit out whatever it likes.

It doesn't help that 2/3rds of the 3 character phrase are a name that can appear in either language.
 
Thank you, SomeCallMeChri.

I tried individually entering the three Kanji characters mdchachi suggested into Linguee | Dictionary for German, French, Spanish, and more and got "three - tree - work" using Japanese to English.

In any event, the bowl looks fairly modern and decorative, so I don't think it will turn out to be anything more than a souvenir-type artifact.

I was just curious. Thanks everyone for the effort.
Frank
 
三木作 = Made by Miki
(Miki being a fairly common surname in Japan).
These characters are found both in Chinese and Japanese. This type of marking on any hand-crafted item is not unusual.
 
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