How Japan's Wajima-nuri Artisans Are Bouncing Back After the Earthquake

Yahoo

14-03-2025

Alla Tsyganova/Getty
When Suzanne Ross, an English-born artisan based on Japan's Noto Peninsula, began her 40-year career making traditional Japanese lacquerware, she was told repeatedly that only men could make Wajima-nuri. To create Wajima-nuri, one of the oldest forms of lacquerware in Japan, one must painstakingly apply urushi (lacquer made from tree sap) to the object—say, a bowl or dish—let it dry, then repeat the process dozens of times. This technique, born in the city of Wajima, builds the resilience of the wood and the durability of the finished products. It also depends on the persistence and perseverance of its practitioners, such as Ross. Decades into fine-tuning her craft and growing her business, she never faltered—until a year ago, when the ground in her Wajima studio opened up beneath her feet.
On January 1, 2024, the Noto Peninsula in Japan's Ishikawa Prefecture was hit by a magnitude 7.6 earthquake. More than 400 died and thousands of buildings were destroyed, including the studios and homes of many Wajima-nuri artisans, thus jeopardizing the future of the centuries-old craft. Ross is one of thousands of residents from Noto who have since relocated to Kanazawa, Ishikawa's capital. Kanazawa's appeal among those impacted by the Noto earthquake is not only its proximity to the peninsula, but also its support for evacuees and craftspeople. The city is offering displaced artisans—Wajima-nuri artists, silk painters, kimono makers, and more—who have been forced to relocate to Kanazawa subsidies of up to ¥500,000 (about $3,300) to set up new studios, no repayment necessary. Ross says that her immediate instinct after the earthquake was to leave Japan, but she ultimately concluded, in part thanks to the city-offered subsidy, that she would remain and rebuild her business in Kanazawa.
Kanazawa, Japan is featured in Bright Ideas in Travel 2024, Condé Nast Traveler's list of the players, places, and projects moving the travel industry into the future. For its financial support of Japanese artists affected by the 2024 Noto earthquake, we honored the city of Kanazawa as a destination committed to the values of community and inclusion.
On top of the ¥500,000 subsidy, the city has also waived fees and sales commissions for Noto artisans exhibiting in Ginza no Kanazawa, an art gallery in Tokyo, and listed the names of artisans for free in the city's online craft catalog (artists usually pay a fee for inclusion). The Kanazawa city government has also compiled sample itineraries that include local tourism experiences, from tea ceremonies to silk-dyeing workshops, and it donates a portion of the revenue from bookings to Noto's recovery. The city has also been organizing trade events, including the Support Noto craft fair held in Kanazawa Station in November 2024, where Noto artisans working in Wajima-nuri, Suzu-yaki pottery, and textiles came together to sell their products.
At the helm of the craft fair was Koichi Ofuji, an energetic Wajima-nuri artist who was the first to receive the city's relief subsidy. The money allowed Ofuji to open the Urushi no Sato Ofuji gallery in the northern part of Kanazawa, which also functions as an operational base for reconstruction efforts on the Noto Peninsula. He convinced other displaced artisans to join him, saying, 'We will make a big business in Kanazawa. Just see.' The gallery exhibits products that survived the earthquake, in addition to housing craftspeople who lost their homes and workshops, so that they can continue making and selling. This sense of dignity is important to Ofuji: Department stores around Japan offered to buy his old wares, but he refused, saying that he wants to receive orders for new pieces, rather than pity.
Kanazawa's support of Noto's craft heritage is guided by a long history of cultivating of the arts in times of upheaval. It goes back all the way to the 16th century, when the region's samurai lords transformed a weapons factory into a craft workshop to appease the ruling shogunate and maintain a hard-won peace. In November 2023, a report by the Nikkei, a Japanese news organization, determined that, among major Japanese cities, Kanazawa spends the most per capita on arts and culture projects (¥3,034.50, or roughly $20, per resident: 1.6 times more than Toyonaka, in Osaka Prefecture, the second-ranking city).
Ofuji says that supporting the Wajima-nuri industry is so important because, for the artisans, 'making crafts is their life.' The relationship between craft and artisan is symbiotic: The survival of the craft depends upon the survival of artisans continuing to make it. 'The earthquake has revealed the problems' that Wajima-nuri was already facing, says Ofuji, as many of the region's shrinking group of artisans were already facing economic uncertainty prior to the devastating natural disaster.
To prevent the disappearance of traditional crafts, Kanazawa launched its Ichigo Ichie program in 2013, which supports both the local community and the tourism economy by coordinating collaborations between travel agencies and craftspeople and arranging tourist visits to private studios. It's mutually beneficial: Travelers get a deeper look into the destination's cultural heritage, and artisans receive income that helps them continue to practice their craft.
After a slow start, the Ichigo Ichie program is now reaping benefits for both Kanazawa's tourism scene and its artisans. Hitoshi Maida, a third-generation practitioner of Kaga yūzen, a 500-year-old fabric-dyeing technique from Kanazawa, is just one artisan who has seen the material benefit of tourists' visits to his studio. Over the past two years, he has made several impactful sales to visitors, including a kimono for ¥1 million (about $6,650) and a painting by his late father for ¥770,000 (about $5,100). This economic impact has helped Maida's mission to nurture the future of traditional crafts; last year, he began recruiting teenage apprentices. Yuriko Endo, CMO of the Kanazawa City Tourism Association, says that visitors' requests for the program doubled between 2023 and 2024 and that she is 'most happy when a customer purchases an artist's work.'
Before the earthquake destroyed her studio, gallery, and home, Ross had been imagining a project with a similar ethos to the Ichigo Ichie program that would harness tourism to support Noto's artisan economy by bringing visitors to Wajima to meet craftspeople. The longstanding local model, she says, has been to sell products abroad rather than bring visitors to meet and buy directly from craftspeople. Ross's idea found little traction in Noto, which she puts down to its rural setting: 'It can be a bit of an island,' she says.
But she's hoping that things will be different in Kanazawa. The city has a different mentality, she says, more flexible and international. 'I'm hoping that in Kanazawa it might be easier to get people [from the tourism sector] to come along with me,' she says. Finding her feet in Kanazawa has been a long and difficult process, but she's no stranger to persistence. 'You develop a certain tolerance for the long process,' Ross says of Wajima-nuri and of life as an artisan.
While some artisans are rebuilding their lives in Kanazawa, others are focused on Noto. Takahiro Taya is the 10th-generation owner of Wajima's 200-year-old Taya Shikkiten lacquerware company, whose offices and atelier were destroyed in the earthquake. From his base in Kanazawa, he envisions a 'creative reconstruction' of Wajima, building back better than before. He hopes to achieve this by creating a Wajima-nuri village, a place where craftspeople can gather, work, and temporarily live.
Travel to Noto is currently still limited, and rebuilding is 'just at a starting line,' Taya says, but he still believes that tourism, executed in a similar way to Kanazawa's Ichigo Ichie program, could be a turning point in Noto's recovery—from both the disaster and the economic and depopulation issues it faced before. This vision is part of Taya's longstanding mission to deepen people's understanding of Wajima-nuri; In Kanazawa, he runs Crafeat (a play on craft and eat), a six-seat kaiseki restaurant that promotes the craft by serving each course on Wajima-nuri tableware.
Taya's confidence in the future lies in the enduring strength of the Wajima-nuri community, even while it remains dispersed. No matter how many coats are added, Wajima-nuri lacquerware is only ever as strong as its base, he explains: 'The community is the base of Wajima-nuri.'
To read about more of Condé Nast Traveler's Bright Ideas in Travel honorees like Kanazawa, Japan, see the full list for 2024.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
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