Yamanaka

Yamanaka lacquerware began roughly 400 years ago, in the Azuchi-Momoyama period, when a group of wandering kiji-shi, woodturning craftsmen who traveled from mountain to mountain making wooden vessels, settled near the Yamanaka hot spring in what’s now Kaga, Ishikawa Prefecture. Their earliest products were plain, uncoated wooden bowls and trays sold as souvenirs to hot spring visitors, not lacquerware at all.

The lacquer side of the craft came later. From the Edo period onward, Yamanaka craftspeople adopted lacquering and maki-e decoration techniques from other established centers, including Aizu, Kyoto, and Kanazawa, and layered those skills onto their existing woodturning strength. That woodturning remains Yamanaka’s defining trait today: the region is widely recognized by other lacquerware producers as having the finest woodturning technique in the craft, capable of thinning a wooden base to a fraction of what other regions can manage while keeping it structurally sound.