Residents of an institute called “Village of Sansai Pottery” make our Trinity vases. Located in Omura, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan, it hosts at any given time about fifty persons who overcome various physical handicaps to produce fine Sansai pottery. On one of our visits there, the late Hiroshi Eguchi, the founder of Sansai Village, told my wife and me about visits of Helen Keller to Amanoya, his former pottery store in Nagasaki City. Mr. Eguchi sat us down on the tatami mat floor of the village oriental style hall and gave the story in Japanese. In 1995 a friend, Kazue Yano Yamamoto, sister of Mr. Eguchi’s daughter-in-law, wrote in English about the same Helen Keller visits Mr. Eguchi related to us. With her permission we use her account:

One of (Eguchi’s) favorite episodes…was his accidental meetings with Helen Keller. As early as 1948, Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan visited Nagasaki, which was still surrounded by the debris and ashes of the atomic bomb disaster. They happened to visit Eguchi’s store between their lectures. Eguchi, biased against U.S.A. citizens then, did not welcome them from his heart. Yet, he showed them around the store. Helen Keller took a particular interest in an old Imari pot. She felt it with her hands and said, “Oh, how lovely!” Eguchi felt indignant with that remark thinking, “How can this old blind American lady understand the beauty and value of this pot!”

Seven years later in 1955, Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan made a second visit to the city of Nagasaki. Again they came to visit his store and Helen Keller asked him to show the old Imari pot she “saw” seven years ago. Eguchi could not remember right then which pot she meant. When he remembered, he also remembered that it had already been sold. As he told her that, he saw in her face disappointment and even sorrow. He felt ashamed for his arrogance, not only as a human being, but also as someone who loves pottery. In one of his speech drafts he wrote about this episode, saying “it is not by our eyes that we appreciate pottery. It is our heart that feels the beauty of pottery.” The indignation he felt against Helen Keller had been completely replaced by respect toward her. (Silence, Memory, Time-Depth: A Story of a Haunted Life, A Thesis by Kazue Yano Yamamoto presented to The Faculty of the Pacific School of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Berkeley, California. December 1, 1995)

After hearing from Mr. Eguchi, we left with the impression that this encounter with Helen Keller was one factor which caused him to sell his pottery store in Nagasaki City so he could establish The Village of Sansai Pottery for bettering the lives of handicapped persons through the art and craft of pottery making. His son, Tsukasa Eguchi, now the president of the institute and a master potter, as a child had osteomylitis which left him with a slight physical handicap. Ms. Yamamoto writes that Mr. Eguchi’s concern about Tsukasa’s future was also in the mix. Pottery could be therapy and perhaps a living. Also, Hiroshi Eguchi aimed to do something meaningful on behalf of his World War II comrades who died while he went on living because the war ended before he would have died as a navigator of a kamikaze warplane. And too, there was his desire to continue to devote himself to ceramic art. He opened the Village of Sansai Pottery as a government approved social welfare institution in 1974.