Japan has turned wood on the lathe for well over a thousand years. The turners who worked the mountain forests moved from valley to valley after good timber, and the craft went with them, settling in the towns that later became known for lacquer. In one of them, Yamanaka, the turners began cutting patterns into the wood itself, and the vocabulary grew to dozens of named lines.

Some techniques never became a regional style. They pass from one person to one person, or they stop. Ugetsubiki is one of these. A ring is cut free from the block and left turning on the piece it came from. Nothing is glued. Nothing is fitted. The maker here received it from a single teacher. Learning it took him about a year, and the first piece he was willing to call finished was an ornament.

He is a cook. He came to the lathe because he wanted plates and cups that would carry his cooking, and he still works the way a cook does: the block decides the piece, the way an ingredient decides the dish. Every piece is turned to order, on a lathe in Ōta, Tokyo. The tool marks stay. No two are the same.

We built this store so that work like this would not stay in one neighbourhood of Tokyo. Each piece is packed at the workshop and sent to you directly from Japan. What arrives is not a copy of something old. It is the same craft, still moving, turned for you in Tokyo.