Photo: Kentaro Takahashi.
Kazuo Yamagishi inside his studio in Kanazawa in the Ishikawa Prefecture of Japan. Like many lacquer artisans, he was displaced from his original home in Wajima after the 2024 earthquake.
When my husband was working for a company that did a lot of business with Japan, I was often sent on a search for a nice business gift since his Japanese contacts gave him such beautiful ones. I could never compete with the lacquer trays and picture frames and the way they combined utility and artistry. But those beauties can’t compete with the museum-quality lacquer described in today’s article.
Patricia Leigh Brown writes at the New York Times, “Deep in his heart, Kazuo Yamagishi, a lacquer artist designated a Living National Treasure of Japan, does not reside in a nondescript beige apartment complex in a packed area of Kanazawa, the capital city of Ishikawa Prefecture on the country’s main island.
“His real home, the one before he was displaced, is captured in a lacquer tray with delicately carved red lines inlaid with gold and mother-of-pearl stretching across the horizon of its ebony surface. The work is meant to recall ‘the quality of the sunset in autumn,’ he said — the walks he would take along the shore in Wajima, his once-breathtaking small city, as the early evening light shimmered across the Sea of Japan.
“That was before a massive earthquake on New Year’s Day 2024 washed away his wooden home and studio, as it did those of hundreds of other Wajima artisans in this Holy Land of Lacquerware at the tip of the Noto Peninsula about two hours north of Kanazawa. …
“Wajima holds a singular place in the lacquer firmament, prized for its exceptional durability and honed by craftspeople whose family know-how goes back five generations and more. The strength of Wajima-nuri — designated a ‘Traditional Craft of Japan’ by the government — derives from the sap of the urushi tree, from which lacquer originates, reinforced with fine powdery local clay containing microfossils. …
“Today, many craftspeople remaining in Wajima are working out of 85 emergency prefabricated lacquer studios financed by the Japanese government, at a cost of $8.5 million. More than 3,000 housing units have been built to shelter residents, including artisans. … ‘The temporary studios are quite small, and they can’t go back to doing what they did before the quake,’ Shigeru Sakaguchi, the mayor of Wajima City, said in an interview. ‘But they need to keep producing to survive.’ …
“It is a slow craft in a fast world, learned through years of hands-on apprenticeships. … Each piece, including utilitarian bowls, art objects and more, requires over 100 steps and a retinue of specialists — from shapers of the wooden bases to artisans who apply layers of lacquer to produce a veneer thick enough for artists like Yamagishi to carve or incise.
“He and other surface decorators are masters of challenging techniques like ‘chinkin,’ which involves deftly embedding gold, silver or platinum powder into hand-carved dots and grooves. … Each layer of lacquer, known as urushi, needs high humidity and warm temperatures to harden in a box or room called an urushi miro.
“The sparkle of this natural material is difficult to convey without seeing it in person: Jewel-like motifs appear to float on glossy polished surfaces and then dissolve into the depths of the material. ‘Artists see the depth of surfaces as something only lacquer can achieve, with layers and layers of light,’ [Masami Yamada, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s curator of Japanese art] said. …
“A year and 10 months after the quake, the road to Wajima — which had buckled, complicating rescue efforts — remains a roller-coaster patchwork of construction barricades and earthmovers. But it still boasts panoramic vistas of the Sea of Japan, lush rice terraces and cedar forests. …
“The peninsula’s geographic isolation has protected it from modernization efforts, unlike so many other parts of Japan, said Masanori Aoyagi, director of the Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art and the country’s former commissioner for cultural affairs. ‘It has a preserved quality, sustaining its own ecosystem of nature and kogei’ (pronounced ‘ko-gay’), he said, using a term for Japanese traditional crafts. ‘It’s a fragile and vulnerable land and culture that really deserves care.’ …
“As Wajima rebuilds … the nurturing of young talent is a top concern. Kunie Komori, a Living National Treasure who harvests bamboo from nearby hills and hand-weaves it for his lacquer art, directs the Ishikawa Prefectural Wajima Urushi Art Technical Training Center, which closed for nine months from quake damage. It received government support to house its 34 students, only two of whom are from Wajima.”
More at the Times, here. Wonderful visuals.
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