Japanese Metalwork

Antique and vintage Japanese metalwork encompasses everything from heated and hammered tachi, katanas, and other types of swords to ceremonial and everyday cast-iron teapots. There are bronze vases decorated with inlaid or applied silver and gold before being patinated in tones that appear to glow. Sometimes, Japanese metalwork feels like a menagerie, filled with fish and amphibians, birds and barn animals, whether as three-dimensional figurines or chased designs. And the medium is equally at home making noise, as when it’s cast and hammered into the shapes of bells and gongs, or serenely silent, befitting statues of various figures from Buddhism. Japanese swords are considered by many to be the pinnacle of Japanese metalwork. It’s not just that these swords are heated and hammered as stated above. In fact, high-quality antique Japanese swords are often built out of as many as 100 layers of laminated metal. In the best swords, the center layer will have been manufactured by hand using a technique called the crucible-ingot process, in which layers of solid wrought iron and crumbled cast iron are heated in a crucible until they fuse into an ingot, whose hard properties make it perfectly suiting to holding a cutting edge as the central layer in a sword. Casting, or chukin, techniques are no less rigorous and steeped in tradition. The molds into which molten steel was poured were often made out of clay mixed with sand having a high silica content. To reinforce the molds and make them suitable for receiving molten metal, they would be fired first. As for their shapes, molds for cast iron and bronze were typically made from materials such as wax and plaster, which allowed the molds to be exquisitely detailed. Cast-iron kettles, or tetsubin, meant to heat water for tea are thought to go back at least to the 16th century and were widely used by the 18th. One of the appeals of these metal kettles is that they hold their heat for a long time, which means that when hot water is poured from a tetsubin into a smaller tetsu kyusu designed for brewing, the tea stays hot for a long period of time. Another appealing characteristic of tetsubin is the flavor the iron appears to impart to water, making it sweeter to some palates while leaching trace elements of healthful iron. The outer surfaces of tetsubin are usually decorated in matte finishes, with repeated decorations in relief, or in raised patterns—hobnail dots known as Arare are quite popular. The shapes tend to resemble squat mushrooms, Aladdin-like lamps, bells, and cylinders. Also collected are the trivets, or nabeshiki, used to hold tetsubin recently removed from the stove. These pieces and other tetsubin continue to be made today in the Iwate prefecture of Japan by companies such as Iwachu. Kettles from this area are often labeled as Nambu tekki, which is the name for iron kettles made in the area before it was called Iwate.