The Potteries, By Way of Tokyo: One Woman's Bridge Between Stoke and Japan

Spode Museum tours are pulling Japanese visitors to a corner of England best known for clay and kilns

By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum

Stoke-on-Trent does not top many tourist itineraries. Yuri Kawakami-Shotton is trying to change that, one tour group at a time — and, according to the BBC, she is having real success doing it from Japan.

Kawakami-Shotton has built a following promoting the UK's Potteries region — the historic heartland of English ceramics, home to Spode and the wider pottery trade that once supplied tables across the world — to Japanese audiences. The BBC reports she is being praised specifically for her tours of the Spode Museum, credited with drawing in visitors from Japan who might otherwise never think to detour toward Staffordshire.

It's a modest story, but not a small one. Regional museums live or die on exactly this kind of unglamorous, patient work: someone who understands both a place and an audience abroad, and can translate one to the other. The Potteries built its name on export — bone china carried out across empires and oceans — and there's a certain symmetry in that legacy now pulling visitors back in the other direction, curated by someone who can speak to both sides of the trip.

The BBC's report is brief and doesn't detail attendance figures or the scale of Kawakami-Shotton's operation, so the full size of her impact is hard to verify from what's available. But the core fact stands on its own: a regional British museum, a Japanese guide, and a heritage industry finding an unlikely new audience. Sometimes cultural preservation looks less like a grant application and more like a good tour guide who knows exactly what story to tell, and to whom.

— Compiled from reporting by the BBC.

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