Tsuboya Yachimun Street: Come When the Potter's House Is Open

If you can, walk Yachimun Street on a Friday, a weekend or a holiday afternoon rather than a weekday morning. What draws me to Tsuboya is a family’s own kiln, not a museum piece: a climbing kiln about 23 metres long, roofed in red tiles, beside the house the Arakaki potters lived in. With the pottery museum shut for renovation, that house is where you can see a potter’s home and kiln together, and it opens its gate only on those afternoons.

Many of Shuri Castle’s gates up the hill were rebuilt after the war. Tsuboya, by contrast, came through the Battle of Okinawa with comparatively light damage. Its stone walls, red-tiled roofs and old kilns still carry the look of the town before the war, and the quarter is said to be where Naha’s recovery after the war began.

A town made for pots

Tsuboya began with a royal order. In 1682 the government brought the pottery sites of Chibana, Takaraguchi and Wakuta together south of Makishi, and the area became known as Tsuboya. You will hear pottery called yachimun here, and the street takes its name from the word.

Ask about two kinds of ware when you shop. Joyachi is glazed and fired hot; arayachi is left unglazed, and its kilns turned out jars for water and for liquor.

The town that was spared the worst of the war later lost its wood fires, sadly, to a city rule. Naha banned wood-fired kilns as a pollution measure, and the potters who stayed switched to gas and kerosene, while those who wanted to keep firing with wood moved north to Yomitan.

The potter’s house with the red-tiled kiln

Time your visit around the Arakaki house. A potter’s family worked here until 1974, and by family tradition they arrived from Yomitan around the time the kilns were brought together here. The house was designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan because it is the only one left that shows how a Tsuboya potter’s household was laid out.

Picture the plot from the gate. Stone walls face the two streets. To one side you have a workshop with a chiburu shisa, a shisa that is only a head, fixed on its roof; ahead, past a gentle stone slope, a hedge screen called a hinpun hides the main house from the street. Look behind it, on the east side, for the kiln known as Agari-nu-kama, the east kiln, climbing the slope under a red-tiled roof that covers everything except the smoke outlet at the top.

On the west side stands a stone fūru, a pigsty that doubled as a toilet. I like that it is still there. A house kept only for its beautiful kiln would tell you about pots; one that keeps the pig pen tells you how a potter’s family actually lived around them.

Remember that the owners live on part of the property. Keep out of the parts where they live, which are closed, and keep your camera away from them too. Watch your step on the stone steps, which can be slippery and uneven, and use a toilet before you come, because there is none on site. The house also closes while a storm warning is in force, so in typhoon season check the warnings before you plan the afternoon around it.

Walking the stone street

The street itself is there to walk on any day: about 400 metres of Ryukyu limestone paving between red-tiled old houses. Keep to the side, because it is one-way and residents drive through it.

Each shop keeps its own hours and its own day off. Some close on a Sunday, others midweek, a few on no fixed day, so if there is one pottery you are coming for, look it up before you go rather than trusting the street to be open as a whole.

Step off the main street into the side alleys if you want the older Tsuboya: old stone walls, red-tiled roofs, a well still in use, and the prewar kilns. Besides the east kiln at the Arakaki house, look for Fē, the south kiln, an arch-roofed climbing kiln for unglazed ware and a cultural property of Okinawa Prefecture. No opening hours are published for it, so check before you count on seeing it.

If you want to make something yourself

If you would rather take a shisa home that you made yourself, book ahead. Ikutouen, one of the cooperative’s potteries, runs classes at its workshop in Tsuboya, on a lane too narrow for cars, in shisa-making, wheel throwing and painting, and asks you to phone first even if you hope to join the same day.

There is a catch. A shisa you make is fired after the class and posted to you weeks later, with a shipping charge on top, and the published rates are for addresses in Japan, so ask about overseas delivery when you phone. If you want a souvenir shaped by your own hands, it is worth the wait; if not, the wheel class also has a shaping-only option where nothing is fired or sent.

Before you go

Checked 5 October 2026.

What I would do

I would leave the market after lunch on a Saturday, walk down Ichiba Hondori into the stone street, spend the early afternoon in the potteries, and save the last hours for the Arakaki house, the one stop that opens only in the afternoon, for the family’s red-tiled kiln and the stone pig pen on the far side of the house.