Cost: 800 yen or more per person (depending on purchases)
Good for: Single people, couples, or groups up to about ten people
The Noritake Craft Center is a place filled with ceramics and ceramics related information and history. Since the craft center is located in a garden park of sorts, it has a rather relaxing atmosphere when walking between the buildings. The craft center is made up of two central buildings, a welcome building, two restaurants, and a couple of shops. To explore everything at a leisurely pace took me roughly four to five hours. There is one area where the exhibit actually changes regularly, and it seems to only have a slight relation to the rest of the craft center.
When I went to that place, the exhibition was for flower arranging. There were a lot of really amazing displays, ranging from smaller ones to large, elaborate set ups. I think one of the most fascinating was one that actually used shadows as part of the exhibit. I found it really amazing how they used the placement of the flowers to create the body of a person. Although there were other flower arrangements that, in my opinion, were more in line with what I would imagine as "traditional" flower arranging, I found this display in particular to be interesting because of how different it was. A more usual flower arrangement has about three main "branches" that the plants are grouped in, which are at different elevations and placed in particular directions to try and match the Japanese concept of artistically creating peace and serenity within oneself.
The majority of places in the craft center don't allow pictures to be taken, so keep this in mind when you go. There isn't really much to take pictures of outside of the places that they you can't take pictures, but you might be interested in taking pictures of the garden itself rather than the ceramics displays. There's a fountain that comes on in the afternoon/evening, which is rather picturesque. There's also several trees and outside displays that might be of interest. Since I went about a month before Christmas, there were actually wooden reindeer on display outside in several places. They weren't terribly interesting, but there might be other displays during other parts of the year that are enjoyable to look at.The most interesting place in the Noritake Craft Center was the museum, which was a no-picture zone. Inside, there were several displays of the machinery used in making ceramic dishes and vases, along with textual and visual explanations (some text was translated to English, but not all). There were also people actually doing several of the jobs described within plain sight, which was fun to watch. The most amazing part was definitely when they actually showed some finished works. They had jaw dropping, gorgeous vases and plates on display. Each one was a wonderful work of art in and of itself, and I was really sad that I couldn't take any pictures.
The other main attraction is a sort of science museum-esque building. Inside, there's a bunch of English or Japanese exhibits (the language of which changes depending on which language card you get at the front desk). You go to different parts, called zones, and swipe your card over the indicated locations to get some instructions for how to interact with the display. There's also quite a bit of English explanation written down for various things, which made this the best place to actually learn about ceramics, and it is also the best place to take children due to the interactive nature of everything. To just walk around takes hardly any time (three to ten minutes, tops), but interacting with everything and listening to / watching all of the video explanations can eat up a couple of hours very easily. There's a place to sit in the middle, so there's no need to worry about getting tired from standing around and listening to all of the explanations.
I really liked the Noritake Craft Center. It's a great place to go for a six hour day of seeing different things about ceramics, and there's also a lot of ceramic dishes and such for sale (they are beautiful, but expensive - the lowest priced items were about 8000 yen, and the highest were upward of 100 thousand yen). I would recommend it to anybody to go at least once.
