Travel4 min read
Kyoto Craft Guide: Tea Caddies, Knives and Canvas Bags
A knife shop that started as a swordsmith in 1560, a tea caddy taking more than 130 steps. Kyoto still makes things the slow way.
Aritsugu started out in 1560 as the workshop of the swordsmith Fujiwara Aritsugu. Today it sells kitchen knives and pots from a narrow shopfront on Nishikikoji-dori, inside Nishiki Market, to customers who range from Kyoto's top chefs to home cooks buying their first gyuto. The staff will sharpen what you bought, and that after-sales care is the part most visitors overlook. In Kyoto a well-made thing is expected to last, and the shop that sold it is expected to keep it working.
A city that kept its trades
Kyoto was Japan's imperial capital for centuries, and its crafts grew up to serve the court, the temples and the tea ceremony. The Kyoto Museum of Crafts and Design counts traditional Kyoto crafts in 74 categories, from pottery, paper and lacquer to dolls, lanterns, prayer beads, confectionery and Buddhist altars.
That number hides a hard decline. Output in Nishijin, the city's historic weaving district, has shrunk dramatically since the 1970s, and demand for traditional crafts in general has fallen sharply. The ones that have survived have usually done it by finding new customers without abandoning the old methods, which is the most useful lens for a visitor. You are not here to see crafts preserved behind glass. You are here to see them still being sold.
HOSOO is the textbook case. The company was founded in Nishijin in 1688, and its ninth-generation head, Tokujiro Hosoo, expanded into kimono in 1923. The family is still in charge. Masataka Hosoo is the 12th-generation master, which puts more than three centuries of one family's weaving behind every bolt of cloth.
Tea caddies at the slow end
If you only see one workshop's work, make it Kaikado. The company has made chazutsu, metal tea caddies, in Kyoto's Shimogyo ward since 1875, and it is widely described as the oldest maker of handmade tea canisters in Japan. It marked its 150th anniversary in 2025. Takahiro Yagi, born in 1974, is the sixth-generation head. He began his apprenticeship under his father in 2000.
The caddies are shaped by hand from copper, brass or tinplate in more than 130 steps, using a method that goes back to the first generation and is still passed from craftsman to craftsman. The real pleasure comes later. Copper darkens and brass mellows with handling, so a caddy bought now will look different in ten years, and better.
Kaikado keeps its main store in Shimogyo near the Kawaramachi Rokujo crossing, and it also runs Kaikado Café in a former streetcar depot on Kawaramachi-dori, a short walk away. Our story on Grand Seiko and Zaratsu polishing covers the same Japanese obsession with hand finishing applied to steel watch cases.
Canvas, incense and a menswear detour
Kyoto craft is not only for the kitchen and the tea room. Ichizawa Shinzaburo Hanpu, a family business founded in 1905, built its name on hand-sewn canvas totes, backpacks and work bags with the stiff, honest weight of something designed to carry tools. Kyukyodo, founded in 1663, made its reputation on incense, stationery and calligraphy supplies. Both are old enough that their histories are part of the city's, and both are worth looking up before you go.
For a contemporary detour, TT opened in December 2021 in an early twentieth-century townhouse just off the main street of Gion, with a boutique for Taiga Takahashi's clothes, modeled on garments a century old, a gallery for his sculpture and a tea room upstairs that took reservations. Takahashi died the following year, so check that it is still trading before you plan around it. At its best it made the case that craft and clothing are the same conversation. If you are building a Japan trip around clothes, pair it with our streetwear guide to Tokyo's Ura-Harajuku and our raw and selvedge denim guide.
How to plan a craft trip
Start at the Kyoto Museum of Crafts and Design in the basement of the Miyako Messe exhibition hall in Okazaki. It shows around 200 newly made objects across the 74 craft categories, the displays change with the seasons, almost everything is for sale and there is a live demonstration every day, from candle making and bamboo work to yuzen dyeing. The official Kyoto tourism guide to the museum has the details. Use it as a map, then go and find the makers.
Book ahead for anything hands-on. Some workshops take visitors and many do not, and arrangements change, so treat nothing on this list as permanent. Check each shop's own website for current details before you go, and be ready for small stores to close one or two days a week.
Bring patience, and treat shop staff as experts rather than salespeople. Ask how a piece is made and how to care for it. That conversation is often the best thing you take home. For more on Japanese design in the home, see our piece on Isamu Noguchi's Akari lamps and coffee table and our look at Tadao Ando's architecture.
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Back at Aritsugu, ask how they would sharpen the knife you are buying and when you should bring it in. A knife from this shop is meant to come back.
