Kagami Crystal カガミクリスタル

Who is Kagami Crystal?

Kagami Crystal is a Japanese crystal glass house founded in 1934 by Kozo Kagami, who built the first factory in Japan made only for crystal. He studied crystal-glass techniques in Germany starting in 1927, then came home and put what he learned to use. In 1930 he opened a small research studio in Takinogawa, Tokyo; four years later came the factory in Kamata. The company left Tokyo in 1990. Today the head office and the plant share one address in Ryugasaki, Ibaraki, where the glass is both formed and cut in the same building. It is a small operation for a name this old, around 92 people.

What are they known for?

Crystal, and specifically Edo Kiriko cut on crystal they make themselves. Their pieces took honours at the Paris exposition in 1937 and again in New York in 1939. Brussels gave them a grand prize in 1958, and Kozo Kagami himself took the Japan Art Academy Prize in 1960.

The other half of their reputation is official work. From 1952 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began fitting out Japan's overseas missions with Kagami crystal. In 1968 they supplied the state-banquet tableware and the chandeliers for the new hall at the Imperial Palace. Six years later came the guest tableware for the Akasaka Palace state guest house, and in 1975 a new fine-stem line for state diplomatic dinners. All of that comes from their own company chronology, dated entry by entry. That's why I'm comfortable repeating it.

What does a Kagami piece look like in the hand?

Weight is the first thing you notice. A Kagami rock glass sits lower in the hand than its size suggests, and it stays put on a counter instead of sliding around. Run a thumb across the cutting and you feel edges. A fingernail catches at the top of each cut and drops cleanly into the groove. The colour is a thin skin over clear crystal, so where the wheel has gone through, the line reads clear and bright against the colour instead of as a pale band.

Hold one up to a window and the base does most of the work. It is usually left uncut, so light comes up through the bottom and gets thrown sideways by every facet above it. And the pattern is not perfectly regular. Repeats drift by a hair across the body of the glass because somebody set the layout out by eye before any cutting started. That is the part I like most about them.

Which techniques do they use?

Edo Kiriko cutting, done on blanks the same factory forms. Edo Kiriko is the cut-glass craft that started in Edo, traced to Kagaya Kyubei, a glassware merchant in Odenmacho, around 1834. Tokyo designated it a traditional craft on 15 July 1985 and the national designation followed on 30 January 2002. Blanks are either crystal or soda-lime glass, and the cutting runs through six named stages, from marking out the layout to a final buff with cerium oxide. Kagami also does gravure engraving, the copper-wheel technique associated with Kozo Kagami.

Their own page describes what they do as building new Edo Kiriko out of the old patterns rather than only repeating them. They keep certified traditional craftsmen on the floor, Ibaraki-designated, in the cutting shop and in the forming shop; they publish work under individual cutters' names. That is why some of the glasses I carry are signed by a specific person. Forming matters here too: their own factory-tour page describes glass at over 1000°C being pulled into a wine-glass stem in the same building where the cutting wheels run.

How we came to carry them

I have been in the Japanese-goods trade since 2013, and I go to Japan several times a year to pick things myself. I import directly, and I buy Kagami the way I buy everything else: there's no exclusive arrangement and no special deal behind it. They are one of the houses whose work I kept coming back to, so I kept buying it.

The workshop photos on this page are mine, shot in October 2022 on one of those trips. I have not yet confirmed which workshop they were taken in, so I am not going to claim they show Kagami's factory. What they show is hot glass being worked by hand, which is the part of this trade most people never see. You can browse the collection if you want to see what is here now.