Wajima, Ishikawa

An invisible god is invited into the home and treated as an honored guest. In the farmhouses of Oku-Noto, the Aenokoto ritual unfolds each December. When the year's harvest is done, the head of each household dresses formally and welcomes the deity of the rice field indoors. The god cannot be seen. Yet the host speaks to it as though a guest were truly present, offering a hot bath, a feast, and rest, before sending it back to the fields in February. Its origins are unknown, and its very simplicity is thought to preserve an ancient form. There are no floats, no crowds, only a single family quietly attending to a presence it cannot see. The 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake wounded this region deeply, yet its people have not let go of the deity they welcome each winter. A UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The January 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake damaged Wajima severely — buildings collapsed, fires spread through the historic merchant district, workshops were destroyed. Wajima nuri, the lacquerware tradition that has made this city famous for centuries, was disrupted at its source. Many craftspeople lost their studios. Some left the city.

Some did not. The workshops that have reopened are continuing to produce Wajima nuri and to offer the chinkin experience — engraving patterns into lacquered surfaces and rubbing gold into the lines — in temporary or repaired facilities. Visiting now is a different kind of experience than visiting before the earthquake. The city is visibly in recovery. The craft is continuing anyway.

Wajima nuri involves more than 124 distinct processes, each layer of lacquer applied and dried before the next. The chinkin technique adds decoration to a finished lacquered surface by cutting lines with a chisel and pressing gold leaf or powder into them. What emerges is a black surface animated by gold — understated, precise, requiring the steadiness that comes only from practice. The experience of making even a small version of this pattern, in Wajima, after the earthquake, is an act of participation in something that has chosen to continue.