Hakusan G-Type Soy Sauce Bottle

The G-type is a small porcelain bottle for soy sauce, kept on the table and tipped over a dish a few drops at a time. It stands about nine centimetres high, the base flaring slightly, the body drawn in at the neck to make a waist for the fingers, then opening again to a wide mouth. A short spout curves out from one side. The lid is a shallow disc with a tall, pierced knob: the finger that steadies it also covers the hole, and lifting the finger lets the sauce run.

It was designed in 1958 by Masahiro Mori, house designer at Hakusan Porcelain in Hasami, a town in Nagasaki prefecture that has made porcelain for some four hundred years. Japanese homes were changing, and, Hakusan says, there was no soy bottle that suited the new table. Mori worked from use: a base that would not tip, a waist easy to hold, a mouth wide enough to refill and clean, and a spout that would not drip.

It was first sold in white and in an iron-brown glaze, and in 1961 the large white bottle was chosen for the new Good Design mark. Mori, who went on to win more than a hundred such marks, left Hakusan in 1978, but the bottle was not redrawn. Yellow, blue, green and a black tenmoku glaze have since joined the first two colours, each left white inside so that the contents show, and a smaller size sits beside the original.

In 2018 the bottle received a Long Life Design Award, its entry noting more than sixty years of manufacture without change of material or form. The jurors singled out, as elegant, the gesture it asks of the hand: thumb and middle finger at the neck, the forefinger resting over the hole in the lid to measure out a single drop.