The introduction was made on the understanding that the visit would be undertaken without an interpreter, that the workshop would not be photographed, and that, in any subsequent printed account, neither the maker nor the street would be named.
The afternoon proceeded, accordingly, in such French and English as the maker and the visitor shared, and in some measure of silence. He showed 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 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.
The older crafts of Japan are conducted at a standard the European trades have, with rare exceptions, ceased to maintain. This is not a criticism of European work, much of which is excellent. It is an observation of the particular standard maintained by a particular maker on a particular street, on an afternoon in March. 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.
— Autumn 2024