Three Edo Kiriko workshops in Tokyo

The sandwich board outside Rinzen

On 8 April 2022 I found Rinzen by its sandwich board on the street: a red A-frame reading Glass Shop rinzen Tokyo Glass Studio, with a second board next to it advertising cut-glass accessories and gift wrapping. Inside, a craftsman worked at a grinding bench, a wall calendar behind him confirming the month. A cut piece nearby was still mid-process, the pattern ground into the base but the upper facets left frosted and unpolished, gold decoration painted across the finished cuts. It is the part of the trade most people never see: a piece caught halfway between rough and finished, before anyone has decided it is ready to sell.

Finished pieces on Rinzen's shelf

Further in, the shop floor held finished tumblers in blue, red-pink and black standing in a wooden packing crate, and a pair of guinomi labelled with their own pattern names: one cut in nanako, the fish-roe dot pattern, the other in kiku-shippo, the chrysanthemum-and-lattice pattern the technique hub explains in full. Both names matched what I already knew to look for, which made the visit feel less like shopping and more like checking my own notes against the real thing. On a display stand nearby, a fine hexagonal-cut purple piece was held up to the window, greenery outside catching in the facets the same way the technique hub describes a cut catching light through a colour skin.

The sign at Tadano Glass

A short walk on, later the same afternoon, a brushed-steel sign read Edo Kiriko in Japanese, with a small plate underneath naming Tadano Glass, 但野硝子加工所. I shot it twice, once from just inside the doorway and once from the street outside. Tadano is not currently one of the houses we stock, but the visit is the same kind of legwork as the others: standing in front of a workshop before deciding whether to buy from it. I did not get as far inside Tadano's own shop as I did at Rinzen, so this page can only show the sign, not the bench behind it.

Inside the boundary

All three shops sit somewhere in greater Tokyo, but Edo Kiriko itself has a harder edge than that label suggests. The trade association's own conditions require a piece to be glass, to be handmade, to be cut mainly with rotating tools and to be made inside a designated area centred on Koto ward and the wider Kanto region. Haku's own studio is registered in Morishita, inside Koto ward, which puts it inside that boundary on paper as well as in the glass. Whether Rinzen and Tadano's own workshops sit inside the same wards I have not checked; their signs name the shop, not the ward and I am not going to guess at one.

Haku's shelf, two months later

On 26 June 2022 I went to Haku Glass, Yoshihiro Mitamura's own studio in Morishita. A desk in the showroom held stacked wooden boxes and a row of cut-glass cups and small bowls in blue, red and clear. One cup carried a dense, tightly packed facet field close to the nanako style; a goldfish was carved into another, a small paper tag beside it marked as a reserved order. A crate further along held finished guinomi in a bold, asymmetric swirl, the bold, dynamic cutting Haku's own site pairs with its delicate traditional patterns.

The bench at the back

Past the showroom, a craftsman worked at a cutting-wheel bench with a crate of teal tumblers beside him, the wheels and polishing discs visible on the shelf behind. A June wall calendar hung on the wall, the week visible, matching the date on the camera. I do not know which of the pieces on Haku's shelf that day were Mitamura's own cutting rather than another cutter's stock, so I am not claiming that here; what I can say is what I saw and where.

What we carry from these visits

The Homura flame sake cup, the Homura whisky glass in blue and in green, the kiku-kagome whisky glass and the Kaika sake cup all come from Haku, the same wide skin of colour standing around every cut that I saw on his shelf that day. Rinzen supplies pieces of its own too, though not the exact guinomi pictured here; Tadano is not currently on our shelves. If you want the craft itself rather than the shopfronts, the technique hub has the full history and the six-stage cut.

What stayed with me

What stayed with me from these two trips was how differently each workshop presented itself. Rinzen put a sandwich board on the street, inviting anyone in off the footpath and its guinomi wore their pattern names on printed labels like a small classroom lesson. Tadano gave up nothing beyond a sign with its own name on it. Haku had no sign at all that I photographed, just a craftsman at a bench and a shelf of cups that spoke for themselves. Three very different doors into the same six-step process.