Every piece here is turned on a hand lathe, one at a time, in a workshop in Ōta, Tokyo.
Where the techniques come from
Japan has turned wood on the lathe for well over a thousand years. A document of 762 records a lathe being used to turn the base of a temple spire, and the turners who worked the mountain forests — the kijishi — moved from valley to valley after good timber, carrying the craft to the places that later became lacquerware towns. Their own legend traces the trade to a ninth-century prince who withdrew to the hills of Ōmi and taught his retainers to turn bowls; historians read the story as a legend, but the craft it explains is real.
One of those places is Yamanaka, in Ishikawa, where turners settled in the late sixteenth century. It is still called "the Yamanaka of wood bodies" — the town that turns the blanks for Ishikawa's lacquerware. In the early nineteenth century its turners began cutting patterns into the wood itself, and the vocabulary grew to dozens of named grooves. Among the finest of them, kesuji — hair lines — was devised there in the early years of the Meiji era, which began in 1868. Yamanaka is also known for walls turned thin enough for light to pass through.
Murakumo, the gathering-cloud finish, is best known from the same town's lacquerware: one of the kawari-nuri, the unusual finishes, in which soot from a Japanese candle is laid over the coat before it sets. Few in Yamanaka keep it up today.
Ugetsubiki is different in kind. It is not a regional style but a technique that passes from one person to one person. SuuWorx received it from Shigenobu Inoue, a turner born in Kyoto in 1950 who met the Western lathe during ten years in New York, heads the Chūbu Western Woodturning Association, and is known for his turned pagodas.
Turning takes away and cannot give back
A lathe removes material. It cannot put any back. A wall taken one pass too thin is gone, and the piece with it. The thin-walled cups here are made at that edge on purpose — held up to a window, the grain reads through the wall.
Ugetsubiki
The workshop's inherited technique is ugetsubiki. From a single seamless block, a particular handling of the lathe cuts a ring and leaves it turning on the body it came from — never separated, never rejoined. The grain of the ring runs on into the grain of the body without a break. There is no joint to find. It is cut, not assembled.
It is not confined to the pieces that carry the name in the title. The rings stacked on the spire of a pagoda or an ornament turn freely on their shaft, and a ring rides free around the neck of the round incense box. Every one of them was cut where it stands.
It is isshi-sōden: taught to one successor in each generation. More about the workshop.
Kashoku-biki — decorative turning
Look closely at a pagoda or an ornament and the surface is not smooth. It carries rings of hair-fine grooves, cut one at a time with a blade held against the piece while the lathe turns. In Japanese woodturning this is kashoku-biki, decorative turning; among the finest of its patterns is kesuji — hair lines.
The vocabulary comes from Yamanaka in Ishikawa, the lacquerware town where dozens of these patterns were worked out. This workshop is in Tokyo and is not part of that tradition, but it uses the same cut.
The grooves are not only ornament. Oil and urushi settle into them, so the grain reads deeper — and the piece stops being slippery in the hand.
Murakumo — the gathering-cloud finish
Murakumo means "gathering clouds". It is a traditional Japanese decorative finish, best known from the lacquerware of Yamanaka. In the traditional method, the piece is passed over the flame of a Japanese candle while its top coat is still tacky, and the soot settles on the surface. The flame flickers, so the soot lands in drifting bands of black and grey over the lighter ground beneath, like cloud crossing a night sky.
Because the flicker of a flame cannot be repeated, no two pieces come out alike, and the pattern cannot be reproduced on purpose. One cup in the shop carries this finish. Here it is drawn on by hand in the workshop, so no two run the same way.
The tool marks stay
There is no template and no drawing. The block is read first, and the shape follows it. The marks the tools leave along the way are left in place — they record the moment the material changed, and sanding them out would take the moment out with them.
Finishes
The ugetsubiki pieces are finished in walnut (tree nut) oil. Where lacquer is used it is urushi, applied in layers and cured slowly. The murakumo cup takes a urethane and glass coating.
What the forms are
The lidded boxes take the form of kōgō, the small incense containers of the tea ceremony. In the months when the brazier is used, tea people have traditionally chosen wooden or lacquered ones; in 1855 dealers and connoisseurs went so far as to publish a printed ranking of kōgō. Ours hold incense, or a ring, or nothing.
The pagodas follow the five-storeyed towers of Japanese temples. The spire above the roofs, the sōrin, is a stack of named parts, and near its middle sit nine rings, the kurin. On these pieces the free-turning rings sit on that spire. They are made as ornaments, not as religious articles.
Work beyond the shop
The lathe has made more than what is listed here — and it can make something that is not here at all. See what can be commissioned.
No two are the same
Wood is never uniform, and each piece is turned individually. Colour, grain, figure, dimensions and weight differ from piece to piece, and from the photographs. That variation is the material, not a fault.