Learn Traditional Yamanaka Woodturning and Craft a Small Vase at the Workshop of a Living National Treasure near Kanazawa

Forest, River, and Hot Springs – Woodturning Traditions of Yamanaka Onsen

Kawakita Kobo is firmly rooted in the Yamanaka Onsen area of Kaga, Ishikawa Prefecture, a region known for its lacquerware and a tradition of exceptional woodturning said to reach back some four and a half centuries. In this experience, enter this family workshop and encounter the craft at its source.

Yamanaka’s woodturning tradition is deeply connected to the landscape and its history. Woodworkers first moved into its mountainous areas from neighboring Fukui in search of better material. Over time, their products made their way downstream to the nearby hot-springs resort town, where visitors began buying them as souvenirs of their visit. Over time, this craft became a cornerstone of Yamanaka lacquerware.

Kawakita Kobo carries this tradition forward through a family line of artisans. The studio achieved legendary status through the work of Ryozo Kawagita, son of its founder Koichi Kawagita.* Ryozo helped to push woodturning beyond production of everyday items into works of artistic expression. For his efforts, Ryozo was recognized in 1994 as a Living National Treasure**. Today, the workshop continues to balance a heritage of skill, design sensibility, and deep respect for the life of wood.

*Note: The readings “Kawagita” and “Kawakita” are, respectively, old-fashioned and modernized readings of the same Japanese characters. The Kawakita family used the former reading up to Ryozo, and uses the latter reading from his son Hirohiko onward.

**The term “Living National Treasure” (“Ningen Kokuho”) is a popular term for referring to those officially listed by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology as Preservers of Important Tangible Cultural Properties (“Jūyō Mukei Bunkazai Hojisha”).

The Work and Philosophy of the Kijishi

The experience begins with an introduction to Kawakita Kobo and the world of the kijishi woodturners. Guests learn how the craft developed in Ishikawa, how Yamanaka woodturning became tied to the region’s lacquerware, and how the wooden structure of any lacquerware vessel is the foundation that has a decisive effect on the finished product. And before touching the lathe, participants first learn to see wood as a kijishi artisan does.

Kijishi do not simply cut wood into a shape. They consider the grain, how it will respond to turning, and what kind of vessel it can become. Kawakita Kobo also places high value on wood which reaches it through what the Japanese call “En” – a concept that might be described as “relationships of destiny.” This is old temple timber, shrine wood, or simply garden trees and other materials with their own special history that end up at the workshop through human relationships and which can here be given a second life that pays respect to those connections.

Kawakita Kobo sums up its guiding philosophy with the Japanese phrase “ki wo ikasu,” a phrase that might be translated as “giving life to wood.” It’s worth noting that the Japanese verb ikasu here makes no distinction between imbuing inanimate matter with life, allowing something already living to continue its life, or reviving something dead – and Kawakita Kobo uses the word in every sense. When a bowl is made, explains Ryozo’s son and third generation kijishi Hirohiko, most of the original wood becomes shavings. It is precisely because it is a process requiring the wood to sacrifice so much that the woodturner must work with gratitude, respect, and a desire for what is left to live on to the fullest.

Watch a Master Artisan at the Lathe with Handmade Tools

Before the hands-on experience, guests observe a woodturning demonstration by a Kawakita Kobo artisan. A cylindrical piece of wood is fixed to the lathe, then gradually shaped with a cutting tool against the rapidly rotating surface. In a master’s hands the work can sometimes look freeflowing and improvised, but it is in fact precise and unforgiving: each change of angle, pressure, and timing affects the shape that emerges – and per Hirohiko, “unlike pottery, we can’t reset and start over no matter what mistakes we make.”

A stunning fact of how the Kawakita Kobo kijishi work is that they don’t just make tools and works of art out of wood. They also forge, set, and maintain their own cutting tools – each to their own specifications to achieve the desired shape and feel and weight in their hands, and the techniques they wish to use them for. At Kawakita Kobo, this toolmaking is an essential part of the craft’s accumulated knowledge.

Watching them work also reveals why long training periods are required. It isn’t enough simply to be able to master the techniques of woodturning. It isn’t even enough to be a master of caring for and maintaining the tools for the job. Each woodturner must also have a proficiency in metalworking as a prerequisite to even being considered a full-fledged kijishi.

Turning Your Own Flower Vase

Move from observation to application as you take up the lathe yourself to create an ichirin-zashi, which is a traditional type of small flower vase. Under close guidance from one of the four generations of the Kawakita family of kijishi, shape the wood on the lathe from a prepared cylindrical form with an opening for the flower, shaping it with your own hands down to a curved figure that expresses your own creativity and technique.

As Hirohiko Kawakita notes, woodturning has a quality that makes it very different from pottery or metalwork. Wood shaved away cannot be put back. A slightly excessive cut, an uneven line, or an imperfect curve all become artifacts of the work that live forever in the object. But rather than treating these as simply mistakes to be avoided, the workshop sees them as serendipity to be incorporated and embraced as part of the memory held in the finished vase.

When the work is complete, guests can take home the vase on the day of the experience, with the natural surface, grain, and touch of the wood left unvarnished. Guests who wish to have their vase’s surface finished may be interested in a related premium plan in which the vase created during the woodturning experience is finished by Kawakita Kobo – including work by Living National Treasure Ryozo Kawagita include fuki-urushi and mokume chinkin lacquer and inlay techniques – before being delivered at a later date.

A Vessel That Carries the Memory of Your Hands

Though the finished vase is small enough to bring home and designed to hold only a small arrangement, it can nonetheless also carry the full scale of the memory of your encounter. The sound of the lathe, the scent of the fresh wood, the texture of the tools in hand, and the moment when your block of wood first began to take shape as a vessel are all apt to come rushing back for years to come every time you touch its natural unvarnished surface.

In craft and in art, beauty lies not only in the finished form. It dwells also in the work, and takes shape in each grain of sawdust that falls away, each curve in the surface of the wood, and each unexpected angle that reveals itself as the creator and the creation discover one another through the spinning lathe and forever leave their marks on each other. At Kawakita Kobo, this simple wooden vase can become a personal connection to a living tradition deeply rooted in the local history of Japan.