Satsuma Kiriko 薩摩切子

What is Satsuma Kiriko?

Satsuma Kiriko is Japanese cut glass from Kagoshima, made by fusing a thick skin of coloured glass over clear crystal and then grinding a pattern back through it. The maker in Kagoshima lays that colour on at 1 to 5mm, and that number is the whole craft. Cut into glass that thick and the colour does not stop dead at the edge of the cut. It thins out and fades away into the clear underneath. The fade has a name, bokashi, and once you have seen it you can pick a Satsuma piece out across a room.

It is crystal rather than soda glass, so it is heavier in the hand than it looks. The nineteenth-century glass was about 45% lead oxide. The revived version runs under 25%, inside the leaching limits set by Japan's food hygiene law.

Why did it disappear, and why did it come back?

It disappeared because the lord paying for it died, and it came back a century later because his family went looking for it. Glassmaking in Satsuma started before the cutting did. Shimazu Narioki brought glassmakers down from Edo and worked from foreign books coming in through Nagasaki. His son Nariakira became lord in 1851 and folded glass into the Shuseikan, the Western-style industrial works he set up at Iso in 1852. Sengan-en, where those works stood, dates the start of Satsuma Kiriko production to 1851.

Nariakira died in 1858. The Shuseikan was cut back to save money, the Anglo-Satsuma war and the collapse of the old order finished the decline, and the workshops were destroyed during the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877. The whole run lasted less than thirty years. Only a hundred-odd antique pieces are known to still exist, and most of those sit in museums rather than in private hands.

Then nothing for a hundred years. In 1985 the Shimazu family's own company began researching how the old glass had actually been made, and built a workshop the following year. On 31 March 1989 the result was designated a traditional craft of Kagoshima Prefecture. It is still not on the national list, and the maker's own answer for that is the long gap in the middle.

What is bokashi, and why is the colour layer so thick?

Bokashi is the gradation you get when you cut through colour glass thick enough to have a middle. A thin overlay only has two states, coloured or gone. A thick one has everything in between, so the depth of the cut decides how much colour is left standing, and one facet can run from full colour at the top to clear at the bottom.

That is why the facets on a Satsuma piece are shallow-angled instead of steep. A steep cut punches straight through to clear and the fade is gone. The workshop's own account of the job is that 0.1mm of extra depth changes the colour, and that a cutter sometimes holds their breath at the point where the colour is about to break. I believe it. You cannot put glass back on.

Thickness also sets the colour range. The Kagoshima maker works in six colours: beni red, indigo, green, yellow, gold red and Shimazu purple. Red and yellow are the difficult ones, and gold red and the purple use real gold, which is why the same shape costs different money in different colours.

How is Satsuma Kiriko different from Edo Kiriko?

The difference is the thickness of the colour, and everything else follows from that. Tokyo's own traditional crafts listing describes Edo Kiriko as fine cutting into a colour layer a shade under 1mm, which is where its sharp, clean brilliance comes from. Cut through a layer that thin and you get a hard boundary: bright clear line, solid colour beside it, strong contrast. Satsuma's 1 to 5mm gives you the fade instead. The Kagoshima maker puts it the same way. Satsuma is thick colour and gradation; Edo is thin colour, crisp cuts, and a clean split between colour and clear.

The histories are separate too. Edo Kiriko traces back to 1834 and a glassware merchant in Edo named Kagaya Kyubei, and it grew up as a town trade. It was designated a Tokyo traditional craft on 15 July 1985 and a national traditional craft on 30 January 2002. Satsuma Kiriko was a clan project from the first day, ran for under thirty years, and had to be worked out again from surviving pieces before anyone could make it a second time.

The patterns behave differently as well. Edo Kiriko works through a set of about twenty traditional motifs. Satsuma likes to nest them, so a single piece can carry a hexagonal basket weave with hemp leaf and fish roe alternating inside it.

Hold one of each up to a window and you need none of this. One has edges. The other has fades.

What I saw in the workshop

I have been in the Japanese-goods trade since 2013 and I go over several times a year to buy. On a visit in October 2022 I spent an afternoon in a glass workshop and shot most of a card. I can date the photos exactly because the camera did it for me. I cannot yet name the place, so I am not going to guess at it here: in .

What the frames show, in order. A man leaning over a metal bench under a hard work lamp, shaping a piece of glass that is still orange. Hands closing a pair of metal shears on a glowing amber blob carried on the end of a rod. The same rod over a scarred yellow bench, a different tool, the glass a deeper amber by then. Then a hand wrapping newspaper around a red-hot ball, and in the next frame that newspaper is smoking and throwing sparks with the shape still moving inside it. I did not ask why the newspaper, so I am not going to explain it. I am only telling you what was in front of me.

Further in, a person at a blue grinding machine, masked, green fabric screens hung around the bay and one caged bulb overhead. Cold work, and much quieter than the hot end. Near the end of the day, hands holding a pink piece up against the lights so the cut pattern read through it from the inside. That was the first time that afternoon I properly understood what the depth was doing.

The last frame is four small cut goblets lined up on a black counter, yellow, purple, red and teal, with a mountain and trees out the window behind them.

How should you look after it?

Treat it as crystal, not as a tumbler. It is not heat-resistant, so no boiling water and no packing it out with ice; lukewarm is the limit. It does not go in a dishwasher, a drying cabinet or a microwave. Wash it by hand with a well-lathered sponge or a soft cloth, run a soft brush over the cut faces now and then, rinse in lukewarm water, and dry it with a big cloth before it dries by itself, because water marks are what dull the cuts over time. If it has already gone cloudy from scale, a few hours soaking in water with a little bleach in it usually brings it back. When you put it away, keep glass off glass with paper or cloth in between. And when you toast with it, lift it rather than clink it. The rim is the thinnest part of the piece.

Everything we carry is bought in Japan by me. Browse the collection if you want to see what is in stock.