Makers

Roughly four out of every five daruma made in Japan are made here. The trade grew up around Shōrinzan Daruma-ji, a temple on the edge of town, and it has stayed a household industry: the moulds are wooden, the paper is pasted by hand, and in many workshops the faces are still painted by one person who has painted nothing else for forty years.

The town has a dry winter wind coming down off the mountains. Papier-mâché needs exactly that — it has to dry fast and evenly or the layers separate. Almost every folk craft in Japan is somewhere because of weather.

Daruma

Snow country. Aizu is shut in for a third of the year, and the crafts that came out of it are the crafts you can do indoors between November and March — lacquer, painted candles, papier-mâché cattle.

The akabeko is tied to Enzō-ji temple at Yanaizu, where red oxen are said to have hauled the timber up from the river. It survived into the modern era as a charm against smallpox, which is why the black roundels are painted along the flanks.

Akabeko

City work, not village work. Edo papier-mâché was made in the back streets for people who lived in rented rooms and had no space for anything large.

The inu-hariko was bought for a birth. Dogs were thought to have easy deliveries, so the toy was set beside a pregnant woman and then beside the baby. The little bamboo basket tilted on its head is a rebus: the character for bamboo written over the character for dog gives 笑 — to laugh.

Inu-harikoKimekomi hina dolls

One of the Six Ancient Kilns, and the clay is the reason. Shigaraki sits on the bed of a lake that dried up several million years ago, and the clay under the town is coarse, full of feldspar, and stands up to heat that would slump anything finer.

Fired without glaze, that feldspar bursts through the surface as white grit and the wood ash falls and melts into a green-glass run down one side. Two pots from one kiln are never the same, because the ash does not fall the same way twice.

The tanuki is modern by comparison — the standing figure with the hat and the flask took its familiar form in the twentieth century and spread nationwide after the Shōwa emperor visited the town in 1951. It stands outside shops, not inside them.

Shigaraki ware

The kiln opened in 1655 in a mountain village in the Kaga domain, and then — for reasons still argued over — it closed around 1730 and stayed closed for eighty years. Everything from that first run is called Ko-Kutani, old Kutani, and there is not much of it.

The kilns were relit in the early nineteenth century, and what came out was denser and more confident than before: green, yellow, purple, blue and red laid thick over the glaze, and gold on top of the green.

Kutani is not restrained. That is the point of it. Where Kyoto porcelain leaves the white ground breathing, Kutani covers it, and the piece is judged on whether the density holds together.

Kutani ware

A castle town on the Japan Sea coast that the modern railway never really reached, which is part of why it still looks like itself. The kilns were opened around 1604 by Korean brothers brought back after Hideyoshi's invasions, and for the rest of the Edo period the ware belonged to the Mōri domain rather than to the public.

Everything about the way it is made points at one outcome: a soft open body, a glaze stopped short of fusing tight, a fine net of crazing over the whole surface. The bowl is porous when it leaves the kiln and it goes on changing colour for years afterwards. Hagi is the only craft in this house that is sold deliberately unfinished.

Hagi ware

A dorei is not a decoration that happens to rattle. It is a bell — unglazed earthenware, fired with a pellet loose inside, with a sound hole cut at the foot. The note is dry and short, nothing like metal.

They are sold at shrine gates, most of them shaped as the animal of the coming year, and they are bought in the first days of January. The braided red cord is not packaging; you hang the bell by it, at the entrance, and the sound is the part that does the work.

Kyoto is also where netsuke carving began as a school rather than a habit. In the eighteenth century the carvers here — Tomotada above all, whose recumbent oxen are still the thing people picture when they hear the word — set what the object was allowed to be: small enough to close a hand around, smooth on every face, and finished underneath where only its owner would ever look. Osaka and Edo followed Kyoto, not the other way round.

Clay bellsNetsukeYūzen

Imbe is a small town with kiln chimneys standing between the houses and a railway station that smells faintly of woodsmoke in firing season. The clay comes from under the rice paddies around it — heavy, iron-rich, and left to age for years before anyone throws it.

The whole town is organised around a thing it cannot control. A firing takes ten to fourteen days of red pine fed by hand, and where a pot stood in the kiln decides what it looks like when it comes out. There is no glaze to correct with. The potter loads the kiln, and then the fire is the one making decisions.

Bizen ware

A narrow valley in Saga with a white hill at one end of it. The hill is Izumiyama, the porcelain stone found around 1616, and everything else in the town follows from it: the kilns, the painting studios, the tunnel walls built out of broken saggars, the shrine with torii made of porcelain.

The work here has always been divided. One workshop throws, another paints the cobalt under the glaze, another does the overglaze enamels, another fires. It is not a craft of one person finishing one object — it is a valley that makes porcelain, and has done for four hundred years.

Arita ware

A peninsula town built on iron-red clay, and the oldest of the Six Ancient Kilns. At its height in the twelfth century there were some three thousand kilns on these hills turning out storage jars, and the jars went everywhere the coastal boats went — Tokoname pots have been dug up the length of Japan.

The modern trade is two things at opposite ends of the scale. One is the kyūsu, the small unglazed red teapot, which a Chinese potter taught the town in the Meiji period and which it has made ever since. The other is ceramic drainage pipe, by the mile. There is a lane there whose walls are built out of the pipes, and it is worth the trip.

Tokoname ware

Two hours north of Tokyo, and for its first seventy years that was the whole business model: coarse local clay, four glazes, and cheap useful pots sent down to the capital. Nobody came to look.

Hamada Shōji arrived in 1924 and stayed for the rest of his life, and the town he chose for having no reputation became the address of the mingei movement. It kept the character anyway. Mashiko ware is still heavy, still thick-walled, still made to be picked up with wet hands, and the pottery fair still takes over the main road twice a year.

Mashiko ware

The house is in Fukuoka, and Hakata is the older merchant half of it — the side of the river with the markets, the shrines and the workshops. Of everything in these rooms, this is the only craft made within walking distance.

Hakata hariko is papier-mâché: paper pasted in layers over a carved wooden mould, split off it, rejoined, dried and then painted in flat poster colour. The tiger is the emblem — orange, black-striped, its head mounted loose so it nods for a long time after you touch it.

The town makes more than one thing. Hakata ningyō are unglazed painted clay figures, fired low and left matte, the face drawn last in two fine ink lines with no outline. Hakata-ori is a stiff ribbed silk woven into obi since the thirteenth century. Further out in the prefecture, Koishiwara stoneware is cut on the wheel with a springing blade that leaves a ring of chatter marks. But the paper tiger is what a Hakata child was given.

Hakata HarikoHakata-ori

A peninsula that pushes out into the Sea of Japan, with a mountain in the middle and villages around the rim. On the last night of the year the young men of each village climb into straw capes and carved masks and go from door to door through the snow, and the children scream.

What they are doing is older than the fright suggests. The Namahage are raihōshin, visiting gods who come down at the turn of the year; the household head receives them, pours sake, and gives a formal account of who worked and who idled. They hear it, warn the family once, and move on. The blessing is left behind and the straw that falls off the capes is picked up and kept.

Every village carves its own faces and none of them agree — red, blue-black, horned, hornless, some cut from wood and some built up over a mould from paper. The name is said to come from namomi, the heat blisters you get from sitting too long by the fire: the god comes to peel them off the idle.

Namahage mask

The most precisely dated craft in this house. In 1924 Tokugawa Yoshichika, whose family held the farm settlement at Yakumo, came back from Europe with a carved wooden bear he had bought in Switzerland, and gave it to the farmers as something to make and sell through the winter when there was no field work.

It caught. Within a generation the carved bear had become the thing every visitor carried home from Hokkaidō, and the good ones are unmistakable — the whole coat worked in short repeated gouge cuts, no sanding, so the surface stays sharp and reads as fur from across a room.

A hundred years in, the bear is a Hokkaidō emblem that arrived from Bern. Traditions are usually younger and more foreign than they look.

Carved bear

A hot-spring town in the mountains of Miyagi. The woodturners there made bowls and trays for the bathhouses, and the doll started as the thing they turned from the offcuts for the children of guests.

Naruko is one of about eleven recognised traditional kokeshi lineages, and it is the one you can identify with your hands: the head is fitted into the body so that it turns, and when it turns it squeaks. Nothing else does that.

The shoulders are cut with a slight step, the body is straight, and the pattern is chrysanthemums. A maker signs the base and works within the lineage — the form is inherited, not invented.

Kokeshi

Ittōbori means one-knife carving, and the name is a promise about what you will be able to see. The facets left by the blade are not smoothed away — they are the finish. A figure is cut in a few decisive planes and then stopped.

The craft grew out of the decorative figures made for the Kasuga Wakamiya On-Matsuri, and the subjects stayed with it: Noh dancers, court figures, deer, the twelve animals.

Over the raw facets goes gofun — ground shell white — then mineral pigment in flat unmodulated colour, then gold leaf. The result is bold at a distance and severe up close, which is the opposite of how most carving works.

Nara ittōbori

A few streets in the east of Tokyo, near the Kanda river, given over almost entirely to one trade. Wholesalers of festival dolls sit shoulder to shoulder: the March dolls for girls, then eight weeks later the May armour for boys, and then the shutters come down and it starts again.

The oldest house on those streets, Yoshitoku, dates its founding to 1711. It is a district rather than a workshop — the pieces are assembled by specialists who each do one thing, and the lacing of a helmet is a separate trade from the making of its bowl.

Nothing here is made in Asakusabashi any more in the way Takaoka still casts in Takaoka. What survives is the market, the knowledge of what a correct piece looks like, and the calendar.

Kabuto-kazari

The far north, and the only place in this house that works in iron. In 1659 the Nambu lords brought a kettle-maker up from Kyoto and kept him; the domain had the iron sand, the charcoal and the clay for moulds within a day's walk, which is the whole reason the trade took here and not somewhere warmer.

The work is sand casting, and the labour that decides the price happens before any metal is poured: the arare hobnails are punched one at a time into the inside face of the mould, by hand, hundreds to a kettle. Everything after that is finishing — the inside is oxidised black over a charcoal fire so it will not rust, and the outside is coloured with lacquer and iron-tannin while still hot.

Nambu ironware

A single street of workshops, all of them open to the pavement, all of them carving. The reason is a fire: in 1763 the main hall of Zuisen-ji burned, carver-carpenters came from the Higashi Hongan-ji in Kyoto to rebuild it, and they taught the local carpenters while the work went on. Then they went home. Inami did not stop.

The house trade is ranma — the pierced panel above the sliding doors, which two rooms share and which therefore has to be carved from both faces. Around two hundred chisels to a carver, and no machine on the finishing cuts. You can hear the street before you reach it.

RanmaLion head

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.

What it is actually built on is botany. These mountains hold an unusual number of tree species in a small area, and the whole method depends on that: nothing is dyed, so the palette is whatever grows nearby. White dogwood, green-grey magnolia, yellow mulberry, red sappanwood, walnut, and zelkova that has lain buried long enough to turn almost black. Take the mountain away and the craft has no colours.

Hakone marquetry

In 1609 Maeda Toshinaga built a castle at Takaoka and settled seven casting families in a quarter beside it, the district still called Kanayamachi — the metal-workers' town. (Where exactly the seven came from is given differently in different accounts.) The castle was abandoned within six years. The foundry quarter was not, and it is still there.

For most of four centuries Takaoka cast what temples needed — bells, incense burners, altar fittings, Buddhist figures — and it still supplies the large majority of that work in Japan. The lost-wax and sand-mould methods are unchanged in principle.

What separates one Takaoka piece from another is almost never the casting. It is the colouring — chakushoku, a separate trade, where the raw bronze is heated and treated to bring up a brown, a green, a near-black, and gold is applied where the light needs to catch. Two identical castings finished by two colourists are two different objects.

Takaoka bronzeMounted warriorThe boarThe Seven Lucky Gods

Forty kilometres up the river from this house, on the Chikugo plain. Cotton grew here, indigo was grown and fermented here, and the two together made a cloth the whole of Kyushu wore.

Kurume-gasuri is ikat: the pattern is tied into the thread and dyed before a single pick is woven, so it goes right through the cloth instead of sitting on the surface. The method was worked out around 1800 by Inoue Den, a girl of twelve, who unpicked a worn indigo garment, saw the white flecks where it had rubbed, and reasoned her way backwards to how you would do that on purpose.

The soft blur where the tied threads fail to meet exactly is called kasure, and it is the reason the cloth is collected. A machine can weave a hard-edged copy; nobody wants it.

Kurume-gasuri

The far north of Honshū, where the winter comes off the Sea of Japan and stays. In the Edo period the domain forbade farmers to wear cotton. Hemp was permitted, and hemp in that climate is a cold, open cloth.

Cotton thread, though, was not cotton cloth, and it could be got. So the women filled the hemp with it — counting over odd numbers of warp threads, one, three, five, seven — until the weave closed and the garment held heat. The patterns are built from small named units called modoko, and they were passed on by watching, never by drawing.

It is a decorative tradition that exists because of a sumptuary law and a hard winter. Nobody was trying to make something beautiful. That it is beautiful is a by-product, which is usually how it happens.

Kogin-zashi