Inside Wajima Nuri (Lacquerware)

Recently, a JTE asked me to teach a four-session eikaiwa (conversation class) for parents and employees of Wajima koukou, high school, who may be interested in learning English. It has gone pretty smoothly so far, especially, considering how varied participants' levels are. Some can carry an entire conversation, while others can hardly put together a sentence.

Teaching the class has allowed me to meet several interesting people from the community that I otherwise would not have met. This includes a couple in Wajima's lacquer ware business.

Shioyasu-san and his wife own a factory on the outskirts of Wajima city that has been in his family for 150 years. Last week they invited me to visit for a tour, so yesterday Adam and I went to see how lacquer ware is crafted.

Right: Shioyasu-san demonstrates how artists remove sap from the tree to make the lacquer.

Left: Bowls at various stages of the lacquer process.

Shioyasu-san is the fifth generation to run the factory and has ten employees who craft the lacquer ware.

The process takes more than 100 steps to complete any one lacquer ware item. The item begins as a wooden base. The artists must first make the lacquer paste from sap and charcoal powder (photo above), which is applied as an undercoating for durability and solidity (photo below). Then the item must be polished until the surface is smooth.















The polishing process pictured below.

A black nakanuri lacquer coating is added as an intermediate coating and then the item is polished again to remove surface contaminants. After the last basic coating added, uwanuri, the bowl moves on to different artists who specialize in makie. Makie is the art of applying extra decorations by painting or carving. It has more than a 1,000 year history of development in Japan. This entire process can take anywhere from six months to a few years for completion depending on the size and detail of the object.

Thanks to the very colorful and informative English brochure Shioyasu-san gave us, I could recount the processes we saw at the factory. There are no photos of the makie process because his factory sends the objects to a studio that specializes in the techniques.

Next up, my misogi experience. I got purified.