TOKYO — The Japanese capital is home to many modern creations: high-tech, animation, youth fashion. But in the small crafts shops crowding the area known as Yanasen, you can watch artisans preserving traditional crafts, or updating them.
Yanesen (a combination of three neighborhood names, Yanaka, Nezu and Sendagi) is in Tokyo’s old downtown. Some of its shops go back generations, while others are new.
On the Yanaka Ginza shopping street, Midori-ya, in business since 1908, sells items handmade from bamboo, include chopsticks and baskets, as well as more modern cellphone charms, earrings and figurines. Farther down the street, a tiny storefront houses the young artists of Ito Manufacturing, who hand-print T-shirts with their own illustrations and make custom hanko. A hanko is a personal seal traditionally used instead of a signature; Ito gives it an up-to-date twist with cute illustrations of animals, including pandas, a French bulldog and a cat drinking beer.
In many of the neighborhood shops you can see the craftspeople at work. At Shibata Shoten, look past the display of paper lanterns and you’ll see lantern painter Keiichi Shibata at his work table. The shop, started by his great grandfather, has been in business for about a hundred years in various locations around the neighborhood. It used to make paper umbrellas, for which there’s little demand nowadays. The lanterns can be painted with a customer’s name and family crest, and while Shoten says the samples on display are his mistakes, you’d never know it to look at them.
