As a material cultural product with universal and regional features, Japanese pottery condenses a set of meanings, values and ideals later essentialized as “Japanese culture”, exported abroad through a network of transnational contacts. Feeding aestheticized representations of the country dominant in the West since the nineteen century, which have often focused on “romanticized” ideas of craftsmanship and spirituality, Japanese pottery has become a reference for artists, intellectuals and designers worldwide. Since Meiji Restoration, Westerners have looked at the “exotic” East for self-invention and creative stimulus. Some of those have come to the country to search in Japanese pottery culture for something beyond the normative patterns of their societies.

This paper looks at the trajectories of Western artists, potters, and students who crossed national borders to practice ceramics in Japan since the 1960s until today. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth qualitative interviews following the ethnosociological method of life-story (Bertaux, 1997), I look at the role of imagination, myth and cultural narratives in their stories of mobility, which often blend into migration. Marked by lifestyle orientations and cultural aspirations, their trajectories shed light on an often overlooked aspect of transnational migration in the contemporary world. Going beyond the dichotomy between low-skilled and high-skilled migrants, their life-stories highlight the role of a search for self-realization, a sense of adventure and a quest for radically different experiences through the culture of “Other” in migration and mobility today.