It’s early morning in the forests of northern Iwate Prefecture, and the man walking ahead of you has just scored a lacquer tree. The blade goes in shallow, leaving a mark through the bark, and then he stops and waits.
What seeps out is a milky-grey sap, and there is almost none of it. Over an entire season, a single tree gives roughly what fits in a small milk bottle. Then it is felled.
The yield is tiny. Its importance isn’t: this is the lacquer used to restore some of Japan’s greatest temples and historic buildings.
For those willing to look beyond the familiar sights, encounters like this can be found throughout Japan’s 47 remarkably varied prefectures, where craft, landscape and belief remain closely bound to everyday life.
Mornings in the lacquer forests
The Joboji district of Ninohe City, at the northern tip of Iwate, is one of the last places in Japan still producing domestic urushi, the natural lacquer tapped from trees.
For centuries, it has been used to protect and decorate everything from bowls and furniture to Buddhist statues and temple interiors, becoming a byword for Japanese craftsmanship.
The entire process is unhurried and hypnotic, dozens of fine parallel scores opened over months, each giving up a few drops at a time.
Once a tree has given its season’s harvest and been felled, its replacement takes 15 years to mature. Takashi Iwadate is the district’s only traditional craftsman of Joboji lacquer painting, taught by a father who tapped the trees himself, and his son Takumi is now more than a decade into learning the same trade.
Iwadate will tell you lacquer doesn’t dry; it hardens, and it needs humidity to do it, which is why his work is left to harden inside a humid cabinet known as the ‘urushi bath’.
Leave with a souvenir bowl at the end of the day, and you’ll know exactly what you’re holding.
A thousand years of paper
Paper is everywhere. But almost nowhere is it made by handling everything through from raw material cultivation to finished products, using traditional methods.
In the Iwami region of western Shimane, Sekishu washi has been produced by hand for around 1,300 years; the plants used as raw materials (kozo) are grown in the same region, and from their bark (bast fibres), washi paper is produced. It is still made in four small workshops using mainly local materials and mostly handcrafted.
Workshop master craftspeople describe training the next generation as their life’s work. And with only four workshops left, the future of the craft depends on it.
The workshops will put you at the vat yourself, holding a bamboo screen and the handlebars; you scoop up paper material to shape it into a single sheet of paper. Before making paper, you need to carefully remove dust and work to create beautiful paper free of dust and debris.
During the Edo period, Osaka merchants would throw their ledgers into nearby wells to escape the loss of their books when a fire broke out.
It is said that Sekishu washi was highly valued because it required tough paper that could be pulled out of the well and dried without dissolving in water, so the characters could still be read.
Winter with the matagi
In the mountains around Ani in Kita-Akita, the matagi have sustained their communities through winter hunting for centuries. Traditionally, they went into the mountains in parties led by a shikari, who assigned each man his role in the hunt.
Rituals accompanied their entry into the mountains, the respectful use of the bear after the hunt, and their final thanks to the mountain deity. The animal was understood as a gift rather than something simply taken, and its meat was shared equally among the hunters, regardless of rank.
The tradition continues in the Ani district. On guided treks and waterfall walks, active matagi lead visitors through forests that remain bear country, explaining their history, their knowledge of the mountains and their relationship with the animals and plants around them. Bear claw marks and seasonal mountain vegetables may be among the signs encountered along the way.
At Ani’s Matagi Museum, you’ll find clothing, firearms and other hunting equipment used by generations of matagi, alongside taxidermy specimens of the animals they hunted.
Amakusa: an island culture shaped by sea and faith
Fishing and maritime trade have shaped the Amakusa Islands for centuries, sustaining local communities while connecting them with people and ideas from beyond Japan.
Head out from Sakitsu harbour with local fishermen and guides, and you’ll pass a statue of the Madonna facing the water from the tip of the headland.
From the bay, Sakitsu Church can be seen among the tiled rooftops of the village, squeezed between the hills and the shore. The Jesuit Luis de Almeida arrived at Sakitsu in 1569, and most of the village was converted.
However, when Christianity was banned throughout Japan in 1614, many Catholics in this region continued to preserve their faith in secret for approximately 250 years, outwardly presenting themselves as Buddhists or followers of Shinto
Villagers associated the mother-of-pearl markings inside abalone shells with the Virgin Mary and offered prayers to objects that they regarded as representations of Christian figures, and worshipped Daikokuten, mirrors, and coins as Deus, the Christian God.
They publicly affiliated themselves with the Shinto shrine above the harbour, where they secretly recited Latin-derived ‘orasho’ prayers.
The church you can visit today was completed in 1934 and stands on the site where villagers were forced to tread on images of Christ or the Virgin Mary to prove they were not Christians – its altar marking the precise spot where the ceremony took place.
The best way to turn Amakusa into a wider Kyushu journey is by rail. JR Kyushu’s 36+3 combines Kyushu’s ranking as the world’s 36th-largest island with three promised rewards: surprise, impression and happiness.
It runs a different route on each of five days – Thursday to Monday – working its way round the island from Hakata to Kagoshima, across to Miyazaki and up the coast to Beppu. The smaller stops are the most memorable, where local people meet the train with trestle tables of food and crafts made nearby.