A day at the Satsuma Kiriko factory

Shuseikan, and the sign at the gate

A tall sign at the entrance reads Satsuma Kiriko Glassworks in Japanese and English, so there is no doubt what the building behind it makes. The factory sits on the old Shuseikan grounds, a white two-storey building with a curved roof and a verandah, set against a wooded hillside. A second sign nearby marks the site as historic, naming the former Shuseikan works and the reverberatory furnace ruins that once stood there, the site where Satsuma Kiriko production first started. Sakurajima sits across the bay from the grounds, close enough that a plume of smoke from its peak was visible the whole afternoon.

The furnace and the glassblowers

Inside, two glassblowers in matching black workshop shirts worked their own furnace stations, each holding a rod with a glowing ball of molten glass on the end. The heat carried out a few metres from the furnace mouth, and one craftsman leaned right into it to gather more glass onto his rod. This end of the building is the hot work, shaping glass while it still moves, before anything gets fixed enough to cut.

Shears on the colour overlay

A pair of hands closed metal shears on a glowing amber blob at the end of a rod, working it into the blank that eventually carries the colour. This is the step the technique hub describes from the other side, the clear glass and the colour glass fused together before any cutting starts. Watching it happen, the blank looked less like glass and more like something being kneaded, soft and orange and still moving under the shears.

The wheel, and a piece held to the light

Further into the building, a masked craftsman leaned into a spinning cutting wheel, holding a small piece of glass against it, cold work and much quieter than the furnace end. Later, another pair of hands held a piece up against a caged light, and the colour ran out of it gradually instead of stopping at an edge, fading into the clear underneath. That gradient is called bokashi, and seeing it happen in someone's hands explained the whole idea faster than reading about it ever did.

Polishing, and the shelf

Near the end of the day, a craftsman in an apron and gloves worked a small piece at a window-lit polishing bench, quieter again than the cutting wheel. On the shelf nearby sat the finished pieces, cut-glass cups and goblets in purple, red, yellow and teal, the cut pattern visible in each one. Four small goblets stood in a row with the mountains and trees outside the window behind them, the last frame I shot before I packed the camera away.

What we carry from that day

The Satsuma Kiriko we sell at Kakumei comes out of factories like this one. The flowing-flame whisky glass, the nanako whisky glass, the plum-blossom sake glass and the two-tone star sake glass all carry the same thick colour skin and the same fade at the edge of every cut. If you want the history and the method behind that fade rather than just the day I watched it, the technique hub has both.

What stayed with me

What stayed with me from that afternoon was Sakurajima, still sitting there through the window behind the finished pieces on the shelf, the same volcano I had seen across the bay from the factory gate when I arrived. It is the kind of detail a photograph catches better than a memory does, and it is the one I go back to when I look at the pieces we bring home from these trips.