Beauty dwells in time and in painstaking labor.
In Takaoka, a town where tradition and innovation intersect, a young makie-shi (a maker of gold-sprinkled lacquer decoration) carries on a craft handed down since the Edo period. Kazuyuki Yoshikawa entered the world of urushi (Japanese lacquer) with his father's tools in hand. The work proceeds quietly in the depths of night, when no dust stirs. In his pieces, the lustre of urushi falls into beautiful accord with powdered gold and silver and the white of eggshell, and they remain in the memory of those who touch them. As a bearer of a traditional industry, he is closely bound to his region, and gives himself as well to the work of carrying technique and culture to the generation that follows.
In Takaoka, a town where tradition and innovation intersect, a young makie-shi (a maker of gold-sprinkled lacquer decoration) carries on a craft handed down since the Edo period. Kazuyuki Yoshikawa entered the world of urushi (Japanese lacquer) with his father's tools in hand. The work proceeds quietly in the depths of night, when no dust stirs. In his pieces, the lustre of urushi falls into beautiful accord with powdered gold and silver and the white of eggshell, and they remain in the memory of those who touch them. As a bearer of a traditional industry, he is closely bound to his region, and gives himself as well to the work of carrying technique and culture to the generation that follows.
I was born into a family of makie-shi in Takaoka. In my twenties, while I was working at another trade, my father fell ill. He had no intention of having me succeed him, but I knew that unless I did, both his skill and his tools would vanish, and so I entered the family work.
Makie is a technique in which gold and silver powder is sprinkled over a design painted in urushi. Using gold, silver and aogai (the iridescent blue-green shell of the abalone), I bring all manner of images to completion, and for the white that urushi cannot give, I turn to the shell of the quail's egg. The way the expression shifts with the fall of the light and the angle of the eye is where I feel its depth.
I work in the late hours, when no dust and no wind are stirring. When the household has gone to sleep, the mind too grows still. With the tools handed down from my father, I will go on making pieces given time and painstaking labor.
Upon true urushi, gold and silver powder, eggshell, and ao-gai are laid one over another until a single picture is complete.
The wooden core is reinforced with hemp cloth laid over it, and the ground layers, too, are built up in urushi. Urushi serves even as the adhesive; no chemical products enter the work. The gold used in the decoration is likewise genuine — never a substitute.
Urushi holds no white among its colors. And so I have taken up rankaku-nuri, the setting of quail eggshell into the lacquer. It gives not only white, but a delicate texture born of the fine cracks running through the shell.
Because the urushi is laid down dozens of times, once the making has begun there is no returning partway. Togidashi makie — drawing the design, layering urushi over it, then polishing it back, again and again — runs to twenty or thirty stages. This box takes half a year at the least to complete.
In makie, it falls to the makie-shi to decide, by his own sense of things, where upon a vessel the decoration shall fall and how much of it there shall be. Yoshikawa most often works to designs that leave the space at ease.
Should the oils of the hand touch lacquerware, the urushi will not settle as it should. The side of the hand is therefore kept clear of the vessel, and the brush is moved with the little finger — sheathed in a finger cot — serving as its pivot.
A motif such as "bird," or a theme such as "wind," is heard from the customer; when everything thereafter is left to him, the work proceeds more readily. The design is brought as close to the request as can be, in keeping with the setting in which the piece will be used.
Entrusted with body forming, painting, and welding
Begins working as the third-generation makie-shi of Shitsugei Yoshikawa
Appointed the 46th chairman of the Takaoka Traditional Industries Youth Association, in its fiftieth year since founding
Established a team devoted to creating new value in the decorative crafts
