Takaoka: The Casting Town Behind Japan's Bronze — and Its Tin

In the middle of Takaoka, a city of some 160,000 people near the Toyama coast, a bronze Buddha sits on a lotus in the open air. The figure alone is about seven and a half metres tall; with its base, nearly sixteen. It was finished in 1933, after the wooden Buddha that stood there before it had burned more than once, and it was cast entirely by local craftsmen — which is the point. A town that needs a new Great Buddha and simply makes one itself is a particular kind of town.

Takaoka is Japan’s bronze foundry. Temple bells, Buddhist altar fittings, public statues, vases, incense burners: if it is cast in copper alloy in Japan, there is a good chance it was poured here. For decades the town has been credited with around nine-tenths of the country’s copperware, and the trade still quotes the figure. Very little of that work was ever meant for the dinner table. That changed only recently, and it changed because of tin.

Seven casters and a tax exemption

The town was founded on purpose. In 1609 Maeda Toshinaga — the retired second lord of the Kaga domain, one of the richest in Japan — chose the site for a castle and laid out a town around it. Castle towns need goods, and in 1611 he invited seven imoji, metal casters, from the casting village of Nishibu-Kanaya in nearby Tonami, granted them land in a quarter that came to be called Kanaya-machi, and exempted them from the usual levies.

What they made at first was not bronze. It was iron: cooking pots, kettles, ploughs and hoes, the hardware a farming region runs on. Copper alloy came later. From the eighteenth century the foundries were also turning out vases, tea-ceremony wares and fittings for Buddhist altars, and by the Meiji era Takaoka bronzes were being shown at the world’s fairs in Europe — the moment the craft became known abroad.

The national government recognised Takaoka dōki, Takaoka copperware, as a Traditional Craft of Japan on 17 February 1975, in the very first round of designations under the scheme.

The street where it started

Kanaya-machi is still there, and still casting. It is a single stone-paved street of wooden townhouses fronted with samanoko, a fine vertical lattice, and behind each frontage the plot runs back long and narrow: house at the front, then a courtyard, then a storehouse and the workshop at the very back. The layout is a fire plan. A foundry is a furnace, and putting a courtyard and a storehouse between the furnace and the family was how a casters’ street survived its own trade.

In December 2012 the district was selected as a nationally protected historic townscape — classified, unusually, not as a merchant town or a post town but as an imoji-machi, a casters’ town.

How a Takaoka piece is made

The core of the craft is sand casting. A mould is formed in sand around a pattern, molten copper alloy is poured in at somewhere around 1,150–1,250°C, and the casting is broken out, trimmed and finished. The traditional-crafts register lists thirteen distinct ways of making the mould, from turning a profile in sand to lost-wax casting, in which the original is modelled in wax so that every detail of the form survives into the metal. Engraving on the finished casting is done by hand.

Then comes the part that makes a Takaoka piece look like itself: the colour. Everything you see on a finished piece — the deep brown, the near-black, the blue-green bloom of verdigris, the mottled finishes — is grown chemically on the metal rather than painted on. The two classic routes are by boiling and by burning:

• Niiro (煮色), “boiled colour” — the piece is simmered in a solution of copper compounds until the surface takes on a deep, slightly translucent tone.
• Nukayaki (糠焼), “bran burning” — a paste of rice bran is applied and the piece is heated, so the bran reacts with the copper and leaves its own pattern behind.

Natural lacquer and iron oxide are also used, and inlay of gold, silver and other alloys adds colour through the metals themselves. Colouring is skilled enough to be its own trade: Takaoka has specialist colouring workshops, founded to finish metal that other workshops have cast.

The turn to tin

For four hundred years almost none of this went near food. Takaoka made things for altars, alcoves and town squares — and when the large wholesale orders of the 1980s and early 1990s dried up, a town built on ornamental bronze had a problem.

Part of the answer came from a foundry called Nousaku. Founded in 1916, it spent most of a century casting brass and bronze — Buddhist ritual objects, tea-ceremony utensils, flower vases — the standard Takaoka repertoire. In 2003 it developed tableware cast from 100 percent tin, which the company describes as a world first.

Pure tin is an odd material to choose, and that is its appeal. Most tinware is alloyed with other metals to stiffen it; unalloyed tin is soft enough to bend by hand. Nousaku leaned into the flaw. Its best-known pieces are flat lattices of tin that you push into shape yourself — a bowl, a basket, a fruit tray — and the flexible tableware won a national manufacturing award in 2013.

It was not the only foundry to look at the kitchen. Futagami, a brass caster founded in 1897, launched a line of household goods in 2009 with the designer Masanori Oji — trivets, kitchen-paper holders, chopstick rests — and made a virtue of leaving the rough skin of the sand mould on the brass, unpolished and unplated, so that it darkens with handling.

Neither of these is the tin tradition, strictly speaking. Japan’s designated tin craft is Osaka’s — Osaka Naniwa suzuki, recognised in 1983 — and if you want the long lineage of tin sake vessels, that is where it lives. What Takaoka brings is a casting town’s way of thinking: new metal, same sand.

What to buy from Takaoka

Think of it in two halves.

For the table: tin and brass. Tin sake cups and tumblers are the obvious place to start. Tin is traditionally said to mellow the taste of sake, and it is a good conductor of heat, so it takes on the chill of a cold drink quickly — a tin cup of cold sake or beer is cold all the way to the rim. The surrounding logic of cup shapes and temperatures is in our guide to sake cups. Chopstick rests, small plates and the bendable tin baskets make good first purchases and good presents; a pure tin tea caddy is one of the best seals you can buy for leaf tea, as set out in our guide to the chazutsu. Brass trivets and kitchen pieces are the other half — heavy, unbreakable, and meant to age.

For the room: bronze. Vases, incense burners, bells and ornaments are what Takaoka has always done best, and they are where you see the colouring at its most skilled. They are made to be looked at, not eaten from. Treat a bronze piece as the town does: an object that will outlive you, priced accordingly.

A note on matching the table: tin’s soft grey sits easily beside lacquer, white porcelain and plain wood, and it is a quiet way to add metal to a table without the glitter of silver. If you are setting the whole table, here is the logic.

Keeping it

Pure tin is easy to live with if you know its two weak points: it is soft, and it melts at a low temperature (about 232°C).

1. Hand-wash only. A soft sponge and a mild detergent. No dishwasher, no drying cabinet.
2. No flame, no microwave, no oven. The melting point is low enough that direct heat will damage it.
3. No abrasives. Wire wool, scouring powder and stiff brushes scratch the surface. If the shine dulls, Nousaku suggests ordinary metal polish, toothpaste, or a paste of baking soda.
4. Not for cold storage. The maker advises against keeping tin in the fridge for more than about thirty minutes, and against the freezer entirely.
5. Bend gently, and not in the same place over and over. Pure tin can be reshaped by hand, but repeated bending at one point will eventually crack it through metal fatigue.

Tin does not tarnish the way silver does, but like any material it changes with use — a slightly softer, greyer surface after a few years is the piece settling in, not a fault.

Brass darkens naturally from bright gold toward brown. Leave it, or bring it back with metal polish; it is your call, and it is reversible. Coloured bronze is the opposite: the colour is a thin chemical layer on the surface, and abrasive polish can take it off. Dust it with a soft dry cloth and leave it alone.

Read next: Tsubame-Sanjo, the two towns behind Japan’s tools, or Nambu ironware, the other great Japanese casting tradition. Or browse hand-picked, Japan-shipped tableware on The Table.

Sources & Further Reading

• TAKAOKA Doki (Bronze Casting) — Japan Traditional Crafts Aoyama Square — The national traditional-crafts body: the 17 February 1975 designation, the seven casters invited by the Maeda clan, the thirteen mould-making methods, pouring temperatures, and the boiling and burning colouring methods.
• About Us — Nousaku — The foundry’s own history: founded in 1916 making brass and bronze ritual objects and vases, the 2003 move to 100% pure tin tableware, and its sand-casting process.
• FAQ — Nousaku — The maker’s care rules for pure tin: mild detergent, no dishwasher, no flame or microwave, limited refrigeration, and why repeated bending at one point causes cracks.
• 高岡市金屋町 — Agency for Cultural Affairs (Japanese) — The national record of Kanaya-machi as a protected casters’ town: the December 2012 selection, the seven casters from Nishibu-Kanaya, and the fire-conscious layout of house, courtyard, storehouse and workshop.