Crunchy powerhouses of protein and vitamin E, sunflower seeds are much consumed in the West though their health benefits have never really been appreciated here in Japan. When it comes to pottery, we sometimes see himawari (sunflowers) painted on porcelains, but I've never come across a ceramic one complete with pop-out seeds -- until I saw a recent piece by Yasuyoshi Sugiura. The seeds on Sugiura's sunflower looked so real I almost tossed a few into my mouth!

Now the sun is approaching its strongest and its life-giving rays tug at the stalks of sunflowers. Real himawari will be lifting their heads skyward in a matter of weeks. For those of you who can't wait, however, and would like to see Sugiura's sunflower -- and a whole array of clay blooms -- head over to Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi's sixth-floor gallery for his "Tou no Hakubutsu Shi (Ceramic Natural History Exhibition)," showing till July 15.

Inside Sugiura's himawari are 410 ceramic seeds, painted for the most part in platinum and silver before being fired. They were fired separately from the flower, then placed into its clay encasement, the leaves of which are already wilting. He's playfully left a few seeds in a pile near the himawari, as if to tempt viewers to do a taste test.