Gold Leaf and Kutani: The Crafts of Kanazawa

The Maeda lords of Kaga, the richest outside the shogun’s own family, put their wealth into workshops. They brought craftsmen to Kanazawa and protected their trades, and several of those trades are still practised in and around the city. Two are easy for a visitor to see and to understand: gold leaf and Kutani porcelain.

Gold leaf

More than 98 per cent of the gold leaf produced in Japan comes from Kanazawa. The name of the city itself means “marsh of gold”, after a tradition that gold dust was once found in a local stream. The craft has been practised here for about four hundred years. During the Edo period, when the shogunate restricted the working of gold, it continued in Kanazawa out of sight.

The finished leaf is about one ten-thousandth of a millimetre thick. It is so light that it tears, crumples or flies off at a breath, and the damp climate of the Sea of Japan coast helps: humid air reduces static electricity, which is the beater’s enemy.

The traditional method is called entsuke. Small squares of gold alloy are placed between sheets of handmade washi paper, and the pack is beaten for hours by a mechanical hammer. The gold is moved to a fresh pack and beaten again. The paper matters as much as the hammer: it is prepared over months, and the craftsmen say that without it the gold cannot be made so thin. Each finished leaf is trimmed by hand with a bamboo tool and laid on paper slightly larger than itself. The whole process takes about two weeks.

In 2020 entsuke gold leaf was included in a UNESCO inscription on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, as one of the traditional skills needed for the conservation of wooden architecture in Japan. Kanazawa leaf covers the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, the Konjikido hall at Chuson-ji and the Yomeimon gate at Nikko. Only a small number of craftsmen, estimated at around twenty, still work by the traditional method. Most leaf is now made by a faster modern process adopted in the 1960s.

Where to see it

The Kanazawa Yasue Gold Leaf Museum shows the tools and stages of beating and a large collection of objects, from folding screens to lacquer and Buddhist altars. In the Higashi Chaya district, shops sell leaf on lacquer, glass and cosmetics, and several offer short workshops in which visitors apply leaf to a small box or a pair of chopsticks. One shop there has a storehouse covered in gold leaf inside and out. Gold leaf on soft ice cream, a fashion that spread after the shinkansen arrived in 2015, is the least serious use of the material.

Kutani porcelain

Kutani ware began in 1655 in the mountain village of Kutani, now part of the city of Kaga. A branch of the Maeda family, the lords of Daishoji, sent a retainer named Goto Saijiro to Arita in Kyushu to learn how porcelain was made, and set up kilns on his return. The first production, known as Ko-Kutani or Old Kutani, is among the most prized of all Japanese porcelain: large dishes painted in bold designs in green, yellow, purple, dark blue and red. It stopped abruptly around 1730, for reasons that are still debated.

Production resumed in the first years of the nineteenth century. The revived kilns developed distinct styles: pieces covered entirely in green, yellow and purple enamels; fine drawing in red; and kinrande, red and gold. The gilded wares were shown at the Vienna world exposition of 1873 and were exported in quantity to Europe. Kutani was designated a traditional craft of Japan in 1975 and is made today in Nomi, Kaga, Komatsu and Kanazawa.

For travellers

Gold leaf belongs to the city, and an hour in Higashi Chaya with a visit to the museum is enough to understand it. Kutani belongs to the country to the south. The hot-spring towns of Yamashiro and Yamanaka, reached from Kaga Onsen station on the Hokuriku Shinkansen extension, have kilns and galleries, and a night there combines pottery with a bath. For the city itself, start with Kenrokuen and the old districts.