About the project
A working reference for a demanding material.
I started learning urushi and found almost nothing to learn from in one place. The knowledge exists, but it is scattered: museum and conservation texts, supplier documentation, individual studio blogs, forum threads, materials-science papers, a handful of books mostly out of print — and, for everything text handles badly, workshop videos in Japanese, Korean and Chinese, languages I don't read.
So I built something to gather it automatically instead. This project pulls those paths into one readable resource: a 38-chapter handbook written from hundreds of published sources, a searchable library of 4,748 videos across 68 channels, and step-by-step methods built from what those workshops actually show. It exists entirely because of the people who published that work, and it is built to send you to them.
How it is made
Sources remain part of the craft.
The handbook is written from published text — studio blogs, supplier documentation, museum and conservation material, forum threads, materials-science papers and books — and every claim in it carries a link to where it came from. Video is the second layer, for the things text handles badly: videos are transcribed in their original language, translated, and — because so much of the best material is demonstrated in near-silence — also watched frame by frame, so that what is shown is recorded alongside what is said. From all of that the methods here are written, not copied. Each step names its source and the second it came from, and each illustration is a frame checked against the step it accompanies.
The transcripts themselves stay private. They belong to the people who made the videos, and this site exists to send you to them, not to replace them. Where the sources genuinely disagree — Wajima, Kiso and Korean ottchil practice do diverge — both readings are recorded rather than averaged into a false consensus. Where they leave something unsettled, that is said plainly instead of filled in with a plausible number.
Explore the guide →