In 1948, Yagi and his colleagues Osamu Suzuki, Hikaru Yamada, Yoshisuke Matsui, and Tetsuo Kano from the Seinen Sakutōka Shudan established the Sōdeisha ("Crawling through Mud Association"), an avant-garde ceramic arts group. Their manifesto drew from Surrealist language to declare its radical goals for ceramics, proclaiming: "We are united not to provide a 'warm bed of dreams', but to come to terms with our existence in broad daylight."Louise Allison Cort, "Japanese Encounters with Clay," in Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics: A Close Embrace of the Earth, eds. Louise Allison Cort and Bert Winther-Tamaki (Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution: Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 157. As a group, they vowed to stop referencing older models of pottery, and to stop submitting their works to the NItten and other salon exhibitions. Rather, they launched their own independent annual group exhibitions. Unlike juried salons, Sōdeisha exhibitions did not distinguish between fine art and pottery, blurring the boundary as reflected in their works.Winther-Tamaki, "Yagi Kazuo: The Admission of the Nonfunctional Object into the Japanese Pottery World", 129. Sōdeisha continued to be active past Yagi’s death in 1979, and eventually disbanded in 1998.編集京都国立近代美術館『京都の工芸, 1945-2000』京都国立近代美術館、2001、p. 14
