Wajima-nuri: Inside Japan's 124-Step Lacquerware

There are prettier lacquerwares than Wajima-nuri. There are none more stubbornly built. Made in the small fishing port of Wajima on the northern tip of Ishikawa Prefecture's Noto Peninsula, this is the lacquer that families pass down and restaurants beat to death and still keep using. Its reputation rests not on decoration but on a single quality: it does not break easily, and when it finally does, it can be repaired and re-coated rather than thrown away.

More than 120 hands on one bowl

Wajima-nuri carries two separate seals of recognition, and it is worth getting them straight. In 1975 it was registered as a Traditional Craft (dentō kōgeihin) by Japan's trade ministry — the same workaday designation held by hundreds of regional crafts. The bigger honor came in 1977, when its techniques were designated an Important Intangible Cultural Property (jūyō mukei bunkazai) under the Cultural Properties Protection Act, a far rarer status that protects the method itself, not just the regional brand. Both designations are recent; the craft is centuries older, with its division of labor refined over generations. A finished piece passes through a long chain of distinct steps — the figure most often quoted is 124, though counts vary by who is counting and other sources simply say "over a hundred" — and crucially, no single person performs them all.

The work splits into three broad stages: making the wooden core (kiji), the lacquering (nuri), and the decoration. Within those, specialists go deeper still — there are turners who only shape bowls, others who build square boxes, ground-coat lacquerers, finish-coat lacquerers, and decorators who do nothing but gold work. A bowl that looks like the work of one master is really the relay of a whole town. That structure is the craft. It is why quality stayed high across generations: each specialist did one thing tens of thousands of times.

The secret is in the dirt

What separates Wajima from other Japanese lacquerwares is the undercoat, and the undercoat's secret ingredient is jinoko — a powder of fired diatomaceous earth dug from the hills around Wajima itself. Mixed with raw urushi, jinoko forms a hard, slightly mineral ground layer that is built up over the bare wood. This is the spine of the whole object. It gives Wajima its body and its resistance to chips and dents, and it is local: the geology under Wajima is part of why the craft settled there.

Just as important is the cloth. At the rims, feet and other thin, vulnerable edges — exactly where a bowl cracks when dropped — artisans glue strips of fabric (hemp or cotton) over the wood with lacquer before the ground coats go on. This step, nunokise ("cloth covering"), reinforces the weak points so they take an impact without splitting. Most lacquerware skips it to save time. Wajima treats it as non-negotiable, and that one habit is much of why Wajima-nuri lasts.

On top of the jinoko ground come layer after layer of lacquer — undercoats, middle coats, finish coats — each applied thin, cured in a humidified cabinet, then sanded flat before the next. The result is a surface with real depth and weight in the hand.

Gold cut in, gold sprinkled on

Decoration comes last, and Wajima is known for two techniques. Chinkin carves fine lines and patterns into the cured black surface with a chisel, then rubs gold leaf or gold powder into the grooves, so the design glints up from inside the lacquer like inlay. Maki-e works the other way: gold or silver powder is sprinkled onto wet lacquer to "paint" pictures — pine, waves, cranes, family crests — that sit slightly proud of the surface. A plain black Wajima bowl is an everyday tool; a chinkin or maki-e box can be a piece of fine art, and the same town makes both.

After the earthquake

On New Year's Day 2024, a magnitude-7.6 earthquake struck the Noto Peninsula, and Wajima was among the hardest-hit towns. Workshops, drying cabinets, tools, the stored seasoned wood and jinoko, and the homes of the craftspeople were damaged or destroyed; a fire that followed gutted the historic Wajima morning market, long a shop window for local lacquer. Worse for the craft itself, the long chain of specialists it depends on was scattered as people were displaced. For work built entirely on division of labor, losing even a few links in the relay threatens the whole.

The recovery is real but slow. Japan's government pledged to cover up to three-quarters of the cost of restarting damaged small businesses, the morning market reopened in a temporary form within months, and many artisans are working out of provisional spaces while they rebuild. That fragility is worth understanding before you buy: a genuine Wajima-nuri bowl now stands not only for its many steps and many hands, but for a town working to rebuild the very conditions that make those steps possible.

How to know it is real

Genuine Wajima-nuri is brushed urushi over a jinoko ground on a wooden core, often carrying a maker's or cooperative mark. It is light for its strength, warm to the touch, and the black has depth rather than a plastic shine. If a "lacquer" bowl is suspiciously cheap, perfectly identical to a thousand others, and cold and hard like resin, it is almost certainly sprayed synthetic. Wajima's whole point is the opposite of mass production — it is the lacquer that was built, slowly, to be kept.