I was in Kyoto in the third week of March, on an introduction made by a colleague at a foundation in Osaka, to spend an afternoon in the workshop of a maker of small lacquer boxes whose family has conducted the work, on the same street and in the same building, since the early Meiji period. The introduction had been arranged on the understanding that I would come without an interpreter, that I would not photograph the workshop, and that I would not, in any subsequent printed account, name the maker or the street.
The afternoon proceeded, accordingly, in such French and English as the maker and I shared, and in some measure of silence. He showed me the small box he was at present at work upon — the seventeenth, by his own account, in a series commissioned by a single Tokyo collector over the last twelve years — and the tools, of which there were perhaps thirty arranged on the bench, by which the work is conducted. The box was of a shape and a colour that the photographs in the standard works on the subject will not have prepared the visitor for. The photographs cannot, by the nature of the medium, communicate the depth of the lacquer surfaces.
I left the workshop, after some hours, with the conviction — not new to me, but newly confirmed — that the older crafts of Japan are conducted at a standard the European trades have, with rare exceptions, ceased to maintain. I do not say this as a criticism of European work, much of which is excellent. I say it as an observation of the particular standard maintained by a particular maker on a particular street in Kyoto, on an afternoon in March, and in the hope that the observation may be of some interest to the reader who has, perhaps, considered visiting the city in a similar spirit. The introductions, where they can responsibly be made, will be made — privately, slowly, and on the understanding that the maker's preferences are to be honoured.
— Dr. Iskander Alaoui, April 2025