Echoes of the Anvil: A Journey Through Japan's Craft Heritage — Epoche C1
What the journey was looking at: a statutory category, not a mood The crafts I travelled to see are a legal category before they are anything else. Under the Act on the Promotion of Traditional Craft Industries, passed in 1974, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry designates particular products — Mashiko pottery, Wajima lacquer, Seki blades among more than two hundred others — as dentōteki kōgeihin , traditional craft products, and designated goods may carry the certifying seal issued under the scheme. The Act sets conditions, and reading them changes what the romantic notion of a timeless craft can even mean. A designated product must be used in everyday life rather than made purely for display; it must be made principally by hand; the technique must have been in use for a hundred years or more, as must the principal raw materials; and it must be produced in a defined locality by a body of makers, not by one person. Two of those conditions deserve a moment. The hundred-year rule makes "traditional" a datable property with a threshold: a technique introduced in the 1890s qualifies and one introduced in the 1930s does not. The locality condition matters more. Designation attaches to a regional industry and is administered through the local producers' association; the Act does not recognise the solitary master at all. It recognises the network. That is the frame I did not have when I set out, and the journey's substantive finding is that the Act's drafters had the unit of analysis right and the romance has it wrong. The scale of the decline is not in dispute: the ministry's periodic surveys of these designated industries show output and employment down by something in the order of four-fifths from a mid-1980s peak, the workforce falling from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. What is in dispute is the mechanism, and that is what the workshops were for. Mashiko: a tradition younger than the romance about it Mashiko, in the hills of Tochigi, is where I met the elderly potter whose studio once held apprentices and now holds one man. His account of the decline was as reported: hard work, uncertain pay, a long road to competence. But the setting is not what it appears, and I had the history wrong. Mashiko's pottery is a nineteenth-century production industry. It made cheap, heavy kitchenware — pots, mortars, jars — for the Tokyo market, using local clay high in iron and silica, and glazes drawn from local materials: kaki , the persimmon-brown glaze whose colour comes from a high iron content in the stone it is ground from, and nuka , the milky white from rice-husk ash. Whether an iron glaze fires brown, black or a mottled red depends on the kiln atmosphere as much as the recipe, since iron reduced by a smoky, oxygen-starved fire gives quite different colours from iron oxidised in a clean one. That is a production technology, not a spiritual practice. What made Mashiko famous was an intellectual movement. Shōji Hamada settled there in 1924, and with Sōetsu Yanagi and Kanjirō Kawai formulated mingei — the folk-craft theory that located beauty in anonymous, functional, unsigned objects made in quantity by unselfconscious hands. Yanagi's argument, available in English as The Unknown Craftsman (1972, adapted by Bernard Leach, who had worked alongside Hamada and whose A Potter's Book of 1940 carried the same aesthetic into Britain), is that self-conscious artistry corrupts the object and that the humble maker's unawareness is the condition of the beauty. Yuko Kikuchi's study of the movement (2004) shows how thoroughly constructed this was: mingei theory drew on Ruskin and Morris and on the British Arts and Crafts reaction to industry, and it was formulated within a cultural nationalism that needed an authentically Japanese folk aesthetic to exhibit. The apparently ancient thing was assembled, from partly imported parts, within living memory. This matters practically, not merely as debunking. If the aura around Mashiko dates from the 1920s, then the aura is a marketing achievement of a particular generation, and its decay is a marketing problem of a particular kind — the collapse of a story, not the exhaustion of a lineage. It also means the potter's melancholy about vanished apprentices is measuring the shrinkage of a twentieth-century studio-pottery model, which was never how Mashiko's kilns had been staffed before Hamada arrived. Wajima: lacquer is a chemical process with a schedule, and a supply chain The lacquerware maker in Wajima, on the Noto peninsula, works with urushi , the sap of Toxicodendron vernicifluum . Almost everything difficult about the craft follows from one fact about the material, and the essay I first wrote did not contain it: urushi does not dry. It cures. The sap's principal component, urushiol, polymerises through an oxidative reaction catalysed by laccase , a copper-containing enzyme present in the sap itself, and that enzyme requires warmth and, counter-intuitively, high humidity to work. A coated object is therefore placed in a muro , a damp cabinet held at something like room temperature and high relative humidity, and a dry room does not speed the process but stops it. Marianne Webb's handbook on lacquer technology and conservation (2000) sets out the chemistry and the conditions. Once curing is understood as a slow enzymatic reaction rather than evaporation, the structure of the trade explains itself. Each coat must cure before the next, so the work is a queue of waiting periods, and Wajima's process is unusually long even by the standards of the material: the ground layers are built with ji-no-ko , a local siliceous earth, calcined and powdered and mixed into the lacquer, which is what gives Wajima ware its reputation for toughness; cloth is applied over the rims and corners, where a wooden vessel is most likely to split. The whole is commonly said to run to more than a hundred discrete operations, and — this is the point — they are not performed b