The wood cabinet
Wood keeps what the hand did to it. A cut in the wrong place cannot be glued back, so a carver reads the grain before the first stroke, and the grain decides more than you would think.
The box that will not open
Hakone, in the hills west of Tokyo, makes boxes with no lid you can see. Panels slide a few millimetres, in a set order, and only then does the drawer come free. Some take four moves. Some take dozens.
Their skin is yosegi, a mosaic made without paint. Sticks of pale and dark woods are glued into a block, and the pattern is shaved off the end in sheets as thin as paper. The colours are the colours of the trees.
A winter job
In 1922 Tokugawa Yoshichika, who ran a farm at Yakumo in Hokkaido, was in Bern and saw carved bears that Swiss farmers made in the winter and sold. He brought some home and asked the farmers who worked his land to try. The first of their bears were shown in 1924.
The bear with a salmon in its jaws became the one everyone knows. Its fur is cut stroke by stroke with a chisel, in the months when there was nothing to do in the fields.
Turned in the hot-spring towns
Kokeshi come from the hot-spring towns of north-eastern Japan. Woodturners who made bowls and trays for the inns began turning plain dolls, for children and for the people who came to bathe.
Each town kept its own shape and its own painted face, and a practised eye can name the town from across a room. In Naruko the head is fitted so tightly that it squeaks when you turn it.
Wood
One block. No joins. Misjudge the grain and the day is over.
Ask us to look
Tell us what you are after. We live in the country where these things are, and we will go and look for it.
- You describe itWhat you are after, roughly what you want to spend, and whether there is a date it matters by. Vague is fine — “a clay bell for the year my daughter was born” is enough to start.
- We go and lookMorning markets, dealers we know, auction houses, and families clearing an old house. Sometimes the thing turns up the same week. Sometimes it takes months. Sometimes it never turns up at all.
- You decidePhotographs in daylight, measurements, condition described plainly including the chips, and what it would cost delivered to your door. If it is not right, you say so and that is the end of it.
On the shelf now:Namahage mask · 2Tengu mask · 1
Next cabinet
Metal
One town has poured metal since 1611. The colour on its bronze is not paint. And the inside of an iron kettle should never be scrubbed.
Open the cabinet →