Maedate crest
A single copper sheet, hammered over horn forms and fired with gold. No two crescents from the house share a curve.
Sixty-two plates
The seams are filed until the bowl reads as one curve. Run a thumb across it blind and you will count nothing.
Kachi-iro lacing
Indigo fermented to "the color of victory." It darkens with decades; it does not fade.
Gesshō
Craft record
Notes from the bench
The bowl is raised from sixty-two individual iron plates, each hand-forged, riveted and filed until the seams read as a single curve. House Mizuno lacquers in the old Kaga manner: eight grounds of black urushi, each cured in a cedar chamber for nineteen days before the next is laid.
The maedate crest is not cast. It is a single sheet of copper, hammered over horn forms and fired with gold in the mercury-free kaga-mekki method the house has guarded since the seventeenth century. Under candlelight it does not glitter — it glows.
The silk lacing is dyed with fermented indigo to the depth called kachi-iro, "the color of victory," and will darken, not fade, as it ages.
Provenance
The record of its making
Forged
Sixty-two plates raised by Mizuno Takeharu
March — June 2025Lacquered
Eight grounds laid and cured, Wajima chamber
June 2025 — February 2026Laced
Kachi-iro silk, 340 hours of braiding
February — April 2026Sealed
Entered into the Register as Work IV of XII
April 2026
Entered into the Register · Work IV of XII · 2026