A renewed understanding of folk craft emerged as an aesthetic and cultural response to the era’s upheavals, a reframing that came to be known as “mingei.” It celebrated objects created not for prestige or exhibition but for daily use: bowls that sat on farmhouse tables, jars stored in kitchen alcoves, woven baskets worn smooth by repetitive use. These objects were humble yet dignified, created by artisans whose skill was shaped by the materials and rhythms of their communities. For Yanagi and other intellectuals of the time, these objects embodied an unforced sincerity that opened an aesthetic realm long overshadowed by dominant Western framework of beauty.

Its philosophical breakthrough was inseparable from Yanagi’s encounters with Korean craft during Japan’s colonization of Korea. Traveling in the 1910s and 1920s, Yanagi was deeply moved by the understated elegance of Korean ceramics—particularly the unpretentious beauty of Joseon white porcelain and the everyday ware used in households and temples. He admired the way Korean pots carried a calm simplicity, a sense of inevitability, as if form and purpose had settled naturally into each other.

This admiration became a foundational pillar of Mingei.  In an era when Korean culture was widely looked down upon and treated as inferior within Japanese colonial discourse, he advocated otherwise. Still, Yanagi’s writings were produced within an unequal power dynamic: Japan was controlling and assimilating Korean culture, suppressing crafts, languages, and traditions. His effort to “protect” Korean crafts may have been sincere but also complicated by the paternalistic attitudes common at the time. Even so, his emotional response to Korean objects was genuine. He saw in them a spiritual clarity that he felt had been lost in Japan’s own rush toward modernity.

The quiet sincerity he found in Korean craft prompted him to look again at folk objects at home—the bowls, jars, textiles, and utensils that had shaped everyday life. Yanagi’s reflections pushed him to articulate a more universal idea: that true beauty arises when the maker is not imposing ego, when objects are allowed to embody the wisdom of tradition and the character of materials. These crafts, especially those untouched by courtly refinement or industrial processes, served as a vivid model of this unselfconscious beauty, which he then recognized across world.

In this way, Mingei movement became more than a revival of local traditions. It grew into a wider, cross-cultural awakening—an affirmation of the value of ordinary, utilitarian objects, the quiet artistry embedded in daily life, and a subtle but decisive challenge to the hierarchies of Western art. This broader vision resonated internationally, drawing figures such as the British potter Bernard Leach into the conversation and situating Mingei within a global dialogue about craft, modernity, and the dignity of the handmade.

Today, as mass-production saturates our lives with disposable goods, Mingei feels relevant, again. It reminds us that the humble and the handmade have meaning. That beauty can emerge not from the exceptional but from the unassuming. And that craft is not merely an aesthetic category, but a cultural and ethical one—shaped by histories of life, labor, power, and exchange.