Singapore's master potter still won't call himself an artist

He chose the title that can be taken away from you.

A hundred cups a day.

Same shape. Same weight. Same motion, over and over.

Four weeks of it. His teacher stamped one.

Not one a day. One.

The man at the wheel was a Singaporean schoolteacher. Maths and science.

Thirty-two years old. On a government scholarship. In a town called Tajimi, in Gifu prefecture.

He had not gone to Japan to make art.

He had come to study engineering.

Iskandar Jalil grew up in Kampong Chantek. Off Bukit Timah. Eldest of five. His job as a boy was fetching wood for the cooking fire.

His father, Abdul Jalil, had trained to be a doctor. Then his own parents died and he walked out of it. He became a teacher instead.

The son taught too. Maths and science.

Then a headmaster noticed he could draw.

Here's what I didn't know until recently:

The scholarship that sent him to Japan wasn't for art either. Ceramic engineering. Bodies, glazes, kilns. The science of things that have to hold.

Up at half past five. Train to Tajimi. Then half an hour walking. Japanese grammar in the morning, technical Japanese after lunch, tea ceremony at night.

Underneath it all, the cups.

"A hundred cups a day. For one week, two weeks, four weeks. I had to make these cups, till the day the sensei finally placed his stamp on one. At first, I did not understand. Why did he stamp his seal on a cup that I made?"

No praise. No corrections. No explanation.

Just the wheel. The same object. Thousands of times.

Then a seal on one of them.

He came home a potter. Nobody had sent him to become one.

He started the pottery department at Baharuddin Vocational Institute. He taught the way he had been taught.

Latecomers found the door locked. Work that wasn't good enough went out of the fifth-floor window.

His students called him the Flying Missile.

And then he spent fifty years refusing to be called an artist.

"If a teapot cannot pour water properly, or if a ceramic tile warps, what is its use? An artist may create works without function, but for a craftsman, function must come first."

He calls it the ethical pot. Function first. Everything else after.

A pot on a sideboard is a pot that failed.

What's the one word you'd actually want to be called?