Tropical Papayas on a Lacquer Surface: In These Hybrid Objects, Another Taiwan Comes Into View｜TOKOWAKA
- Apr 13
- 7 min read
Updated: May 2
Photo credit: Group photograph of Mr. Yamanaka Isao (front row, center) in front of the gate of the Taichung School of Craft Studies (1920) ｜ Photo / National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute
In the restrained world of traditional Japanese lacquerware, where black and red long set the terms, something brighter began to appear in Taiwan: bananas, papayas, even water buffalo.
The connection between Taiwanese and Japanese craft is not a recent lifestyle trend, nor a matter of surface influence. It has a clear historical shape. After 1895 came new institutions, formal craft education, different tools, and, later, aesthetic ideas that endured well beyond the colonial period. Much of what now feels natural in Taiwan’s everyday material culture is tied, in one way or another, to that history.
For much of Taiwan’s earlier craft tradition, knowledge moved through apprenticeship. Skill was built through repetition, and transmitted orally within workshops. Under Japanese rule, however, craft was gradually folded into a modern system of education and industry. One important turning point came with the establishment of the Taichung Municipal Craft Training Institute in 1928. With the Japanese lacquer artist Yamanaka Isao brought in to lead the program, drawing, materials, coating methods, and standardized procedures were introduced into the classroom in a systematic way. Craft was no longer passed down only from master to apprentice. It was being formalized, taught, and reorganized. That shift changed not just how craft was taught, but the technical foundation of Taiwanese craft itself.
From the workshop to the institution
Before that transition, Taiwanese craft had largely been rooted in local workshops and personal lineages. How a skill was learned, how a material was handled—these were things absorbed over time, through practice and instruction that remained close to the shop floor. That method had its own flexibility, and a strong local character. But as Taiwan entered a more modern industrial system, a different model of craft education began to take hold, one that valued standards, procedures, and division of labor.
The Taichung Municipal Craft Training Institute stands as a symbol of that turning point. Craft was no longer understood only as manual skill. It also came to include technical drawing, material knowledge, coating procedures, and production standards. Techniques were organized, classified, and made teachable. The way craft was transmitted changed with them, moving beyond the workshop and into an institutional framework.
Change the tools, and the body changes with them
That transformation appeared early in the tools themselves—and in the bodies that used them.
Take woodworking. Traditional Han-style carpentry in Taiwan relied largely on push tools, with force directed forward and downward. Japanese woodworking, by contrast, made greater use of pull tools, including double-edged saws and Japanese hand planes. Because pull-cutting keeps the blade under tension, the steel can be made thinner. That reduces waste and allows for more precise cuts.
On the surface, the difference seems simple: pushing versus pulling. In practice, it changes how a craftsperson controls the material, and with it the finer points of an entire woodworking system. A tool is never just a tool. It reshapes bodily habit, affects precision, and leaves its mark on the rhythm of the work itself.
New kilns, new industries
Ceramics followed a similar path. Early kilns in Taiwan, such as the baozi kiln and the snake kiln, were well suited to local conditions. But when it came to improving consistency and increasing output, they had limits. The Japanese climbing kiln, or noborigama, offered something different. Built along a slope and divided into a series of connected chambers, it allowed heat to rise and be reused, making firings more efficient and high temperatures easier to sustain.
As a result, ceramic production in places like Beitou, Miaoli, and Shuili gradually moved toward more stable high-temperature firing and more standardized production. A change in kiln design meant more than a technical upgrade. It linked what had once been relatively local forms of making to a broader industrial logic.
Photo credit: Climbing kiln (noborigama) ｜ Authorized by: Miaoli County Government Culture and Tourism Bureau. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Taiwan and later versions (CC BY-NC 3.0 TW+).
When Japanese techniques met Taiwan’s climate and landscape
Once techniques moved, something more interesting began to happen. Local climate, materials, and imagery entered into imported methods, producing new forms of craft.
One of the clearest examples is Penglai ware, which developed in Taichung. The Japanese lacquer artist Yamanaka Isao introduced Japanese lacquer techniques to Taiwan, but local motifs soon began to enter the work: Indigenous patterns, tropical plants, bananas, papayas, coconut trees, water buffalo, and scenes drawn from Taiwan’s agricultural life. The techniques—maki-e, chinkin, and others—remained Japanese in origin. But the visual language on the surface of the objects had changed.
Photo credit: Kuo Shuang-fu Collection: Penglai lacquer square dish with clipped corners, carved and painted with Taiwanese landscape motifs ｜ Photo / Authorized by: Taichung City Cultural Affairs Bureau. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Taiwan and later versions (CC BY-NC 3.0 TW+).
This was not simply a reproduction of Japanese lacquerware, nor a collage of local imagery laid on top of an imported form. It was a hybrid that emerged under very specific historical conditions. The techniques came from elsewhere. The imagery and agricultural world came from the island itself. Layered together, they produced objects that looked like neither one nor the other.
How everyday goods became local industry
The same pattern appeared in sedge weaving and bamboo craft. In Dajia and Yuanli, sedge weaving had long existed as household sideline work and as a source of everyday goods. Bamboo weaving in Guanmiao followed a similar path. But with the arrival of inspection systems, standardized production, and export channels, these objects were gradually absorbed into a wider commercial system and became local industries with real economic scale.
Here, craft was not only a cultural technique. It was also a form of industrial organization. These objects emerged from ordinary life, and then became part of local economies. That history reminds us that craft never belonged only to exhibition spaces. It has always been bound up with production, circulation, and the life of a community.
Seeing everyday objects differently
But the story of Taiwanese-Japanese craft exchange is still incomplete if it is told only through production and export. Just as important was a change in how everyday objects were seen.
In 1943, Yanagi Soetsu came to Taiwan to survey local craft. What mattered in the mingei perspective was its insistence on returning attention to ordinary objects made for use. Vessels such as the Kongming bowl and the Jinhehe jar—things long embedded in everyday life—came to be seen anew. They carried no artist’s signature and did not depend on elaborate decoration. Yet in their proportion, function, and feel in the hand, they revealed a highly resolved beauty.
That understanding of the beauty of use later influenced important figures in Taiwanese craft, including Yen Shui-long, and became one of the intellectual foundations for postwar craft revival. Beauty did not need to be removed from life in order to be taken seriously. Many of the things that endure most quietly were shaped, over time, by use itself.
From technical exchange to contemporary aesthetics
That line of influence continues into the present, though what remains now is less the import of technique than a deeper aesthetic affinity.
When Japanese-era buildings are restored in Taiwan, traditional wood joinery methods such as shiguchi and tsugite still matter. These are not simply repair techniques. They embody a way of understanding material, structure, and time. And they have not remained confined to preservation work. They have also found their way into contemporary landscape projects and woodcraft practices, suggesting that traditional craft has not been frozen in the past. It still has room to be transformed.
The same is true in ceramics. In recent years, Taiwanese wood-fired pottery has often shown the influence of wabi-sabi. But imitation is not the most interesting part of the story. When makers fire with local woods such as acacia, the kiln conditions, ash glaze effects, and flame marks on the surface begin to take on textures specific to Taiwan. Japan may provide a path of understanding. What takes shape in the end, however, is still a local response.
The recent interest in kintsugi works much the same way. What draws people to it is not only the repair technique itself, but the attitude toward damage that it represents. A crack is not concealed. It is kept, and made part of the object’s life. That way of thinking has found a natural echo in Taiwan as a deeper ethic of care, repair, and cherishing things has begun to take hold.
Photo credit: Kintsugi restoration ｜ Photo / Authorized by: National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Taiwan and later versions (CC BY-NC 3.0 TW+).
What remains in these objects is more than history
Looking back, what Taiwanese-Japanese craft exchange left behind was not only a handful of identifiable techniques. It was an entire set of practices and ways of seeing that continue to shape daily life in Taiwan. Tools, kilns, education systems, ideas about beauty, even attitudes toward repair—this history has already been absorbed into the everyday. It is not always conspicuous. But it is there.
The next time you pick up a wood-fired tea cup, or notice a crack preserved through kintsugi, it may be worth pausing for a moment. What you are holding is not only an object. It also contains a long movement of techniques, a particular understanding of materials, and a century of accumulated craft knowledge.
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