Yosegi Zaiku: Hakone's Marquetry, and the Puzzle Boxes

The first thing to understand about yosegi zaiku is that every colour in the pattern is a different species of wood. Nothing is stained or dyed.

Pale cream is spindle tree, near-black is katsura or walnut, warm brown is camphor, red-brown is Japanese cherry, green comes from a particular aged wood. The craftsman builds the palette out of the forest.

The method is what makes the geometry possible. Thin sticks of these woods are glued into a bundle so that the cross-section forms a pattern, the bundle is planed into a block, and then paper-thin sheets — *zuku* — are shaved off the end. Every sheet carries the identical pattern, and those sheets are what get applied to boxes, trays and coasters.

It is closer to how you would make a stick of seaside rock than to how you would make a painting, and once you have seen it done the objects stop looking machine-made.

The famous Hakone object is the himitsu-bako, the secret or puzzle box. It looks like a plain inlaid box and it has no visible lid. Opening it requires sliding hidden panels in a fixed sequence.

Boxes are graded by the number of moves — commonly 4, 7, 10, 12, 21, and upward into the dozens for collector pieces. A 4-step box is a souvenir a child can solve. A 21-step is a genuinely difficult object.

They were made here from the late nineteenth century, sold to travellers on the Tokaido road, and they are the reason Hakone marquetry is known outside Japan at all. If you buy one, buy it from a maker's shop in Hakone rather than an airport, and note the step count on the box before you leave the shop. People forget.

Several workshops around Hatajuku, the traditional centre of the craft between Hakone-Yumoto and the pass, run sessions where you assemble a small inlaid piece — a coaster, a small tray, a box lid — from pre-cut yosegi components.

You are not going to cut and glue a bundle from scratch in an afternoon; that is years of training. What you do is select the woods, lay out the geometry, and finish the piece, which is enough to understand why the material behaves the way it does.

It takes a couple of hours, you leave with the object, and it is one of the better wet-weather options in a region that gets a lot of rain. For a place whose other attractions are all outdoors and all weather-dependent, having a genuine indoor craft to fall back on is more useful than it sounds.

Hakone sits on the old Tokaido, the highway between Edo and Kyoto, and had a checkpoint at the pass that every traveller had to clear. That meant a steady flow of people with time to spare and money to spend on something small enough to carry.

It also sits in mixed mountain forest with an unusually wide range of tree species in a small area — exactly what a craft built on natural wood colour requires. The material and the market were in the same place.

That combination is why the craft is Hakone's and not somewhere else's, and it is designated a traditional craft of Kanagawa. Buying one here rather than in a Tokyo department store is the difference between a souvenir and a thing with a provenance.