Yamanaka Lacquerware

A Thin Bowl That Refuses to Warp

Hold a Yamanaka tray up to the light and the wall of the wood looks almost translucent at the rim. That thinness is not an accident of sanding, and it is not something a finisher adds at the end. It comes from a decision made before the wood is even round: how the lathe operator in Kaga City, Ishikawa Prefecture, chooses to cut the log in the first place.

Woodturners here work with tategi-dori, cutting the block so the grain runs vertically through the piece rather than across it. On the rokuro, that orientation lets a craftsperson shave a bowl wall down far thinner than most timber would tolerate, without the rim cupping or splitting months later once the humidity in a kitchen or a tea room changes with the season. The same lathe work then does double duty as decoration: a technique called kashokubiki carves fine grooves and ridges directly into the spinning wood, so the ornament and the shaping happen in the same motion, with the same blade, rather than as a separate step added afterward.

The tools are simple to name and hard to master: a rokuro, and a kanna ground and reshaped for this particular carving work, each blade suited to a different width of groove. The wood is tochi (horse chestnut), buna (beech), and keyaki (zelkova), hardwoods chosen for how evenly they take that thin-walled cut without tearing along the grain. Trays, chataku tea-cup coasters, jubako tiered boxes, and tea-ceremony utensils are the pieces that come off these lathes most often, according to the craft's own designation record, and each depends on the same base skill of reading a log before it is ever touched by a blade.

What Was Turned on England's Version of the Same Wheel?

England had a version of this same lathe, and for a long stretch of its history, a version of this same job. Treen ware craftsmen turned bowls, plates, and cups on a foot-powered lathe for households that had no porcelain yet, and, for most people, would not have any for a long time. The purpose was identical to Yamanaka's: take a spinning block of wood and turn it into a vessel wall thin enough to eat from and light enough to carry around a kitchen all day.

The cut, though, ran the other way. English turners worked the wood horizontally against the growth rings, the ordinary approach for lathe-turned tableware in much of the world, including the wood-turned dishware traditions of Southeast Asia, which followed a broadly similar horizontal method. It is a faster cut, and a more forgiving one, but it caps how thin the wall can go before the grain gives out under its own spin. A treen bowl stayed a bowl: plain, functional, sanded smooth, and rarely carved beyond a simple rim.

Yamanaka's vertical cut asked more of both the timber and the turner, and it opened a door the horizontal cut did not. Once the wall could be shaved that thin without warping, the lathe itself became a decorating tool, not just a shaping one, and a craftsperson could spend a career refining pattern work that an English treen turner had little reason to attempt. That single choice about which way to run the grain is, more than any other detail in the record, the line between the two crafts. Neither side borrowed from the other; two lathes, an ocean apart, arrived at different answers to the same problem because the wood in front of each turner was cut a different way.

Why Did the Two Lathes Go Separate Ways?

Kaga City sits in forest country that had no shortage of good tochi and buna, and according to the craft's own account, the wood-base workers who settled there leaned hard into that supply rather than treating it as one resource among several. The town earned a reputation, still used today, as kiji no Yamanaka, the wood-base capital, a place where turning technique itself, not the lacquer applied afterward, became the specialty worth mastering for its own sake, generation after generation of the same families refining the same cut.

England's treen tradition carried no comparable pressure to specialize further. Once ceramics became affordable and widely available, wooden tableware had a direct substitute that resisted stains and held heat differently, and treen ware receded to the everyday and the plain rather than pushing toward anything more refined. There was no equivalent forest advantage pulling English turners toward deeper specialization, and no decorative path comparable to kashokubiki waiting to be discovered once the ceramic alternative arrived. Abundance pushed Yamanaka forward; substitution pushed English treen ware sideways, into the background of ordinary life.

From Azuchi-Momoyama Settlers to a 1975 Designation

The craft's own account places its beginning in the Azuchi-Momoyama period, in the 1580s, when a group of kijishi wood-base craftsmen is said to have settled in Yamanaka Onsen after searching out a supply of quality timber in the surrounding hills. The hot-spring town gave them both wood and a market close at hand: travelers passing through who wanted something to take home from their stay.

That history eventually earned the craft a national designation, recorded as dated 10 May 1975, covering the lacquerware produced around Kaga City in Ishikawa Prefecture. The designation record lists trays, chataku, jubako, and tea-ceremony utensils as its core products, the same pieces still turned on Yamanaka's lathes today, four centuries after the first kijishi are said to have settled there for the wood alone.

What Happens When the Good Trees Run Out?

The wood that makes tategi-dori possible does not come from just any log. Tochi and buna suited to this particular cut need to be sourced carefully, and according to the craft's own account, finding enough of that quality timber has become harder in recent years. A technique built around cutting with the grain in one exact direction has correspondingly narrow requirements for what it can work with, and a log that would suit an ordinary lathe tradition does not necessarily suit this one.

The people who know how to read a log for that cut are also aging, and the craft's own account names this alongside the timber problem rather than treating it as separate from it. Add to both a slower pull toward lacquerware in ordinary households, where trays and jubako once had an obvious place at every meal, and the pressure comes from more than one direction at once, each one narrowing what the next generation of turners will have to work with.

The Yamanaka Lacquerware Federation Cooperative's own figures, as of May 2025, put the current count at 250 businesses, with about 1,200 people working across them. Against workshop counts in other lacquer-producing regions of Japan, that is a sizeable base still standing, not a remnant of one, though the timber and workforce pressures behind it do not show up in that headline count.

The Quiet Skill That Would Go With Them

What is at stake is not the craft's products so much as the specific reading of a log that makes them possible in the first place. If tategi-dori stops being taught, the vertical cut and the thin, warp-resistant wall that comes from it do not transfer easily to another wood-turning tradition. England's treen ware shows what a lathe tradition without that path looks like generations later: plain, useful, and largely unchanged, because it had no reason to push past the horizontal cut.

The other thing at risk is scale itself. A production base of 250 businesses is large enough to keep the full chain intact, from the people who select and season the timber to the ones who carve the kashokubiki pattern into a spinning bowl wall. Lose enough of that chain, and what remains is not a smaller version of the same craft. It is a different, thinner one, in more ways than the wood ever was, and a harder one to rebuild once the log-reading skill at the start of it has gone quiet.