Joboji lacquer

The Joboji area of Ninohe sits in northern Iwate, a major domestic lacquer region. Lacquer work here reaches back to the Edo period, when the Morioka Domain encouraged production. In 2017, Ninohe had about 135,000 Urushi trees, and one 4-hectare Joboji lacquer forest held about 4,000 trees. Those counts locate the material among managed trees, the named places of Ninohe and Joboji, and the people who tap them.

After Urushi trees are planted, mowing matters. Full mowing is recommended for the first four to five years, timed around May to early June as the trees grow taller and around July to September as their trunks thicken. Trees usually become ready for sap only after fifteen to twenty years, so the first stretch of time for this material is forest care, before a tapping tool ever touches bark.

The tapping season runs from mid-June to October. Artisans use a kanna to make line-shaped hen cuts in the trunk, gather the milky sap with a hera, and prepare bark with a kama. One artisan may tap more than 200 trees in a year, while each tree yields only about 180 to 200 grams, or around 200 cc. From late July to late August, volume and qualities such as color and viscosity reach their strongest point.

Once cured, Joboji Urushi is known for high strength and stable quality, along with differences in transparency, curing time, and viscosity that makers can use. Lacquer artists, nurishi, and restoration workers use it, and it has entered repairs of national treasures and important cultural properties. In that repair setting, a cultural property is wood, lacquer layers, and hands-on work that need a raw lacquer able to harden and endure.

Around Joboji, more than 40 lacquer-tapping artisans work within a local production community that continues skill succession, forest conservation, planting, and quality management. Annual output is about 1,700 kg, with 8,000 to 10,000 trees needed each year. The raw lacquer also appears in Joboji-nuri workshop life, where barrels marked by tapper and year can lead toward bowls, chopsticks, repair, and daily use.