Establishing a home and workshop in Motegi, a small agricultural town just outside of Mashiko, in the mid-1980s, Miyajima began producing the wide array of functional forms that still constitute the bulk of his repertoire. At that time working exclusively in gas-fired stoneware, he created tableware with relatively simple surfaces, sometimes adding texture through tobigana (chattering) or hakeme, (applying slip to a wheel-turned pot to create streaky brush strokes). While he occasionally returns to these methods today, his signature work since the mid-1990s has relied on a slip-inlay technique inspired by sanggam pottery of the period, a variety of the Korean slipwares revered by Yanagi, Hamada, and Shimaoka.