Not one colour in it is a dye. Every shade is a different tree.
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.
And nothing in it is stained or painted. The cream white is mizuki dogwood, the green-grey is hoo magnolia, the yellow is mulberry, the red is sappanwood, the brown is walnut, and the near-black is jindai-keyaki — zelkova that has lain buried in earth for a few hundred years and gone that colour on its own. Hakone has an unusual number of species growing in a small area of mountain, and that, rather than any tradition of design, is why the craft is here and nowhere else.
Woods of different natural colours are cut into long bars. No stain is used.
The bars are glued into a block whose end grain is the pattern.
Blocks are combined into larger units, the pattern repeating.
Shaved off in sheets thinner than paper and laid onto the box.
From the glued block a craftsman shaves sheets with an enormous hand plane — zuku, thin enough to be translucent, which is then wrapped over a box. The alternative, muku, is to cut the block solid, so the pattern goes right through the object rather than over it.
The famous form is the himitsu-bako, the puzzle box, worked out in this village in the Meiji period. Panels slide against one another in a fixed order and there is no keyhole, no catch, nothing to force. The common ones open in four or seven moves. They are made up to fifty-four, and beyond that to numbers that are really a dare.
It began as a souvenir. Hatajuku sits on the old Tōkaidō road just below the Hakone checkpoint, where every traveller between Kyoto and Edo had to stop and wait. A craft that exists because people were standing around with nothing to do is not a lesser craft; it is simply an honest one.
Hatajuku is a single village on the old Tōkaidō, on the climb just below the Hakone checkpoint — the barrier where every traveller between Kyoto and Edo was stopped and made to wait. The craft is a souvenir trade, and it has been since it began in the 1830s.
Pieces are found one at a time, in Japan, and photographed before they are listed. Tell us what you are looking for, and we will write when something arrives that answers it.
We write when there is something to write about — some months twice, some months not at all.
Noted. We will write when something arrives.