Satsuma crafts

Satsuma kiriko: cut glass with a shadow in it

Most Japanese cut glass is a folk craft. This one was state industry. Shimazu Nariakira, the reformist lord who also built reverberatory furnaces to cast cannon, developed Satsuma kiriko from around 1851 as part of the same modernisation programme. Glass for prestige and export, made in the same complex as the artillery.

The defining technique is iro-kise: a layer of coloured glass fused over a clear crystal body — and here, unusually, one to three millimetres thick, far heavier than any other Japanese cut glass. When the cutter works through it, the depth of each cut controls how much colour survives. Shallow cuts read dark; deep cuts read pale.

The result is a gradient bleeding out of every line — bokashi. No other cut glass in Japan does this, because no other has a colour layer thick enough to grade.

Set it beside Edo kiriko from Tokyo and the difference is immediate: Edo has a thin colour layer and sharp angular geometry with hard contrast. Satsuma is heavy, its cuts deeper and rounder, and its edges dissolve rather than snap.

How it died, and how it came back

Nariakira died in 1858. The glass works was damaged in the 1863 British bombardment. The Meiji Restoration then abolished the domain patronage that had funded the whole enterprise. Production ceased entirely, and the technique was lost.

It stayed lost for over a century. Then in 1985 a restoration project began — and this is the part I find remarkable — craftsmen and researchers reverse-engineered the method from surviving nineteenth-century pieces held in the Shōko Shūseikan museum. They measured forms and patterns, read the cut marks to infer the original tools, and tested raw materials, firing temperatures and forming methods until the results matched the specimens. A dead craft was reconstructed from its own museum cabinet.

You can watch it being cut today at the gallery at Sengan-en, in a Western-style building of 1909 run directly by the works. Workshop experiences run around US$70 with advance booking; finished professional pieces routinely pass US$1,000. The signature colour is a deep gold-ruby red, historically the hardest and most expensive to make.

Satsuma ware: a craft that arrived as captives

The other tradition begins with a darker fact, and it should be told plainly. At the close of Hideyoshi's invasions of Korea, around 1598, the Satsuma lord Shimazu Yoshihiro brought roughly eighty Korean potters back with him. They were prisoners of war, resettled in villages and given craftsman status. Kyushu's great ceramic traditions — Satsuma, Arita, Hagi, Karatsu — all begin this way. The campaigns are sometimes called the pottery wars.

What they built split into two families of ware, and the split is the shape of Satsuma society in clay. Shiro-Satsuma, "white Satsuma," is soft ivory crackle glaze minutely painted in enamel and gold, sometimes pierced with openwork — reserved for the daimyo. It stunned Europe at the 1867 Paris Exposition and became the "Satsuma ware" collected in the West. Kuro-Satsuma, "black Satsuma," is dark, iron-glazed, thick and unshowy: the commoners' ware. It is also the material of the kurojoka, the black kettle in which shōchū is warmed.

Four centuries, one family, one surname

The Chin Jukan line descends from Shim Dang-gil, brought to Kagoshima in 1598. The kiln at Miyama was founded that year and the family has worked it ever since — fifteen generations, over four hundred and twenty years. The fourteenth Chin Jukan died in 2019; the fifteenth heads it now, and was the first of the Japanese branch to visit the clan's ancestral shrine in Korea.

They have kept the Korean surname for four centuries in a country that has not always made that easy. Miyama village, roughly thirty to forty minutes west of the city, holds their kiln and a dozen more in one walkable hamlet.