Maison Homura

A daruma is sold blind. Both eye sockets are left blank white, and the doll waits.

This is the local one. Hakata is the old merchant half of Fukuoka, ten minutes from where these objects are kept, and it has been pasting paper over moulds for as long as anyone has kept count.

A red ox of papier-mache, its head hung on a thread so that it nods for a long time after you touch it.

A white papier-mache puppy, given when a child is born and carried to the shrine at the first visit.

Kutani is Shigaraki's opposite temperament, and standing them together is the point.

The clay is dug from the bed of a lake that dried up long ago. It is coarse and full of feldspar, and in the heat the grains burst white through the surface like grit through bread.

Bizen is the kiln that refuses glaze. The pot goes into the fire bare and comes out dressed, and nothing you can see on it was painted, dipped or poured. It was burned on.

Until the early 1600s this country made stoneware. Porcelain — white, thin, translucent, ringing when struck — came in from China and Korea and was expensive. Then a Korean potter brought to Kyushu after Hideyoshi's invasions, known here as Ri Sanpei, found a mountain of porcelain stone at Izumiyama on the edge of Arita, and Japan began making its own.

Mashiko began in 1853 making things nobody was meant to admire: water jars, mortars, teapots, cheap and thick and sent down to feed Edo. For seventy years that is all it was.

Tokoname sits on the Chita peninsula in Aichi, on clay so full of iron that everything made from it comes out red. It is the oldest and by far the largest of the Six Ancient Kilns: by the late Heian period there were some three thousand kilns scattered over these hills, firing great storage jars that went out along the coast by boat.

There is a ranking that every Japanese tea drinker knows: ichi Raku, ni Hagi, san Karatsu. First Raku, second Hagi, third Karatsu. Hagi has held second place for four hundred years, and it holds it for a reason that has nothing to do with decoration — there is almost none.

A dorei is a bell of unglazed fired clay with a clay pellet loose inside. It is moulded by hand, painted by hand, and it does not ring so much as rattle — a dry, small, unmusical sound.

On the last night of the year, on the Oga peninsula in Akita, young men put on these masks and capes of rice straw and go from house to house through the snow. They stamp, they shout — "Are there any crying children? Any idlers?" — and the children of the house are genuinely frightened.

At New Year and at festivals the lion comes down the street with two men inside it — one holding the head, one bent under the cloth behind — and it stops in front of people and bites them on the head. Children are pushed forward into it, screaming, by parents who are laughing. The bite is the blessing: the lion eats your misfortune. It is also said to make a child clever, and to cure a headache, and both of those are said with a straight face.

In 1924 Tokugawa Yoshichika came back from Europe with a carved wooden bear he had bought in Berne, and showed it to the farmers on his estate at Yakumo. Winters there were long and there was no field work; he suggested they carve.

Kanazawa was the seat of the Maeda, who held the largest domain in Japan after the Tokugawa themselves. A house with that much rice behind it did not need its craftsmen to be quick, and Kanazawa still shows it: gold leaf, Kutani porcelain, Kaga yūzen, and these dolls.

A kokeshi is turned on a lathe by woodturners who also made bowls and trays. They began selling them to people staying at the hot springs of the north, and the doll became the memento of a bath town.

Ittōbori means carving with a single blade. The figure is cut in bold flat planes and the facets are left exactly as the knife left them — no rounding, no sanding, no attempt to hide the making.

A kimono has no pockets. Anything a man carried — tobacco, his seal, medicine in a stacked lacquer inrō — hung from a cord that was passed up behind his sash, and the netsuke sat on TOP of the sash as the toggle that stopped the whole thing sliding back down. It is the anchor, not the pendant: the carving rides at the waist, in view, and the pouch hangs below it.

A ranma is the pierced panel above the sliding doors, in the gap between the lintel and the ceiling. It is there so that light and air can pass between two rooms that are otherwise shut off from one another.

This is the one thing in this room that is not carved. It is assembled — from strips of wood cut, planed square, and glued edge to edge until the pattern exists in the block itself, all the way through, like a stick of seaside rock.

In 1609 the second lord of Kaga decided his new castle town ought to make something. He brought seven casters to Takaoka and gave them land to settle on. Four hundred years later the town is still pouring metal, and most Japanese art bronze of the last century came out of those workshops.

A warrior in full lamellar armour on a rearing horse, cast in the same Takaoka foundries as the Buddhist figures and finished with gilt on the helmet crest, the armour lacing and the stirrups.

On the fifth of May a house with a son puts out armour. Most houses have no room for a full suit, so they put out the helmet alone — the kabuto — on a black lacquer stand, and take it in again when the month is over.

The twelve animals came to Japan from China, and eleven of them made the crossing unchanged. The twelfth did not. Where China has a domestic pig, Japan kept the wild boar — lean, tusked, and famously incapable of turning once it has decided.

Ebisu, Daikokuten, Bishamonten, Benzaiten, Fukurokuju, Jurōjin, Hotei. They arrive together, by boat, on the night the year turns.

Everything else in this room is bronze poured at Takaoka. This is iron, and it is from the other end of the country: Morioka, in the far north, where the Nambu lords brought in a kettle-maker from Kyoto in 1659 and told him to stay.

In 1235 a Hakata merchant named Mitsuda Yasozaemon sailed to Song China with the monk Enni Ben’en. He came back six years later with a way of weaving, and his family spent the next two centuries making it denser.

Around 1800 a girl in Kurume named Inoue Den unpicked an old indigo garment and noticed that where it had worn, the thread showed white in flecks. She reasoned backwards: if you could put those white flecks into the thread on purpose, before weaving, the pattern would appear as the cloth came off the loom.

In the 1730s a carpenter at the Kamo shrine in Kyoto carved a small figure out of leftover willow wood, cut grooves in it, and tucked scraps of the shrine’s brocade into the grooves. No stitching, no visible edge. The dolls were called Kamo dolls, and the technique travelled to Edo.

Until the late seventeenth century you could dye silk, but you could not paint on it: wet colour spreads along the fibre and every edge turns to mud. Then a Kyoto fan painter called Miyazaki Yūzensai found the answer, and it was rice paste.

In Edo-period Tsugaru the domain forbade farmers to wear cotton. Hemp was permitted, and hemp in the far north is a cold, open cloth. Cotton thread, however, was not the same thing as cotton cloth, and it could be got.

At a Muromachi bathhouse you spread your cloth on the floor, stood on it to undress, and knotted your clothes inside it while you bathed. Furo, bath; shiki, to spread. The name has outlived the practice by five hundred years.