Tsugaru crafts

Craft traditions usually get explained by aesthetics. Tsugaru's are better explained by constraint. Every one of the three began with a prohibition or a collapse, and every one of them turned the problem into the product.

Kogin-zashi: the law that made a textile

In the Edo period, peasants in the Tsugaru domain were forbidden to wear cotton or silk. Hemp only — in one of the coldest inhabited regions of Japan. Hemp cloth is thin, it frays, and it does not hold heat.

The women found the gap in the law. Cotton cloth was banned; cotton thread was not. So they embroidered white cotton thread densely into indigo hemp, counting over odd numbers of warp threads, until the fabric thickened, insulated and held together. Three hundred years later, kogin-zashi is one of Japan's most admired textile traditions, and its diamond geometry is a survival hack that outlived the law it evaded.

The base motifs are called modoko, and they carry names as domestic as their origins: neko no ashi, cat's paw. Eastern and western Tsugaru developed different pattern vocabularies, and the neighbouring Nambu domain went its own way with hishi-zashi, worked over even thread counts and using colour more freely.

Cotton cloth was illegal. Cotton thread was not. Three hundred years of beauty came out of that loophole.

Tsugaru-nuri: forty-eight steps, and a nickname

Lacquerware came to Tsugaru under the fourth lord of the Hirosaki domain in the mid-Edo period, when the lacquerers Ikeda Genbei and his son developed the technique regarded as the origin of Tsugaru-nuri. It reached the Vienna World Exposition in 1873, and in 1975 became a nationally designated Traditional Craft — still the only one in Aomori Prefecture.

The method is what earns the reputation: forty-eight steps over roughly two months. Many layers of differently coloured lacquer are built up on a base of local hiba cypress, then ground and polished back down until the pattern emerges out of the layers. The pattern is not painted on. It is excavated.

Locals call it baka-nuri — "fool's lacquer," or more bluntly, idiot lacquering, because only a fool would put that much labour into one bowl. They say it with pride. The justification is that the result survives decades of daily use, which the alternative does not.

Four styles survive, all still made: kara-nuri, the famous mottled marbling; nanako-nuri, "fish-roe lacquer," patterned with rapeseed seeds pressed into wet lacquer and lifted out; monsha-nuri, gloss black on matte black; and nishiki-nuri, the elaborate "brocade" built on a nanako base.

Tsugaru vidro: the glass that used to be a fishing float

This is my favourite of the three, because nothing about it was planned. A glassworks opened in Aomori in 1949 making glass floats for the fishing industry — scallop aquaculture was booming in Mutsu Bay and the fleet needed them by the thousand. By 1973 the company was the largest producer of glass fishing floats in Japan, on a reputation for floats that did not break.

Then plastic arrived and the business died overnight.

What survived was the skill: free-blowing, perfected on millions of floats. The craftsmen turned it on vases and vessels instead, and in 1977 the line was reborn as Tsugaru Vidro — vidro being the Portuguese word for glass, a loanword left behind by sixteenth-century contact. A 1949 float factory in the far north of Japan ended up carrying a four-hundred-year-old Portuguese name.

And the colours were an accident. The glass was originally clear; a craftsman experimented with a handful of sand from a beach on the Sea of Japan coast and it came out an unrepeatable green. Because Aomori was too isolated to buy coloured glass reliably, the works began making and stocking its own — which is why the palette today runs to dozens of proprietary colours nobody else has.