Urushi Archive Search

Where this comes from

Everything this archive is built from.

The handbook is written from published text — studio blogs, supplier documentation, museum and conservation material, forums, academic papers and books. The video corpus supplements it, and is indexed separately. This page lists both, and is generated from the guide's own citations rather than maintained by hand, so it cannot drift from what is actually cited.

  • 411citations in the handbook
  • 62distinct published sources
  • 8books in the bibliography
  • 69video channels indexed

Studios & practitioners

Reference sites

Academic & conservation

Museums & institutions

Suppliers

Forums & communities

Makers

Books

These have no link to extract, so they are transcribed from the annotated bibliography in Chapter 36. Several are out of print and easier to find secondhand.

  • The Book of Urushi: Japanese Lacquerware from a Master Matsuda Gonroku

    Essays by the maki-e master and Living National Treasure. Possibly the same underlying text as The Story of Urushi under a different English title — check the edition before buying both.

    ISBN 978-4866580609
  • The Story of Urushi Matsuda Gonroku

    Essays by the same author.

    ISBN 4-00-335671-3
  • Urushi no Waza Günther Heckmann

    Technical materials-and-technique reference.

    ISBN 3-9805755-0-0
  • Urushi Craftsman in Paris Mitsuyoshi Atsuta

    On Sugawara Seizo, called the father of urushi art in Europe.

    ISBN 978-4-560-09508-9
  • Lacquering Technique Akiyoshi Totoki, Shigeki Kudo & Takaaki Nishikawa

    Photographically documented instructional guide.

    ISBN 978-4-416-71535-2
  • Jyussei Practice: Kawari-nuri Jussei

    The standard technical reference for kawari-nuri.

    ISBN 4-88536-551-1
  • Urushi Elegant Asia Nagatoshi Onishi

    Travelogue on the origins of Asian lacquer culture. World Urushi Culture Council.

  • European Lacquer Monika Kopplin

    Global lacquer history. Companion to La Laque — Art et Techniques by Kopplin, Emmerique, Bousquet & Rey.

    ISBN 978-3-7774-8930-8

Video

69 channels, 4,750 videos and 1,245 hours of workshop practice — indexed, and transcribed where a video carries enough speech to be worth transcribing. This is the layer that shows what text cannot: hand pressure, brush angle, what a coat looks like when it has gone wrong.

Browse the video library ↗ Browse channels ↗ Glossary ↗ The annotated bibliography ↗ How this is assembled ↗

Discussion threads

66 records written from 2 lacquer subreddits. Threads are read through the Reddit API, never scraped, and nothing from them is reproduced here — each record is written from the discussion and links back to the individual comment behind every claim. No commenter is named.

They are filed apart from the methods on purpose. A video is a workshop demonstrating something on camera; a thread is a practitioner reporting their own experience, which is strong evidence about what goes wrong and weaker evidence about how a thing is properly done.

Read what goes wrong ↗