Japan House Workshop: Making Tsuiki Copperware With Gyokusend?

Japan House London partners with the London Design Festival to celebrate ordinary working people with extraordinary skills: the heroes of Tsubame-Sanjo’s metalworking factories and workshops who make beautiful, functional objects using metalworking techniques passed down for generations. Throughout September and October over 20 craftspeople from Tsubame-Sanjo will visit London to lead 13 new metal-inspired events and workshops, including make your own metal spoon, how to sharpen your kitchen knives and how to engrave metal. Events and workshops for everyone to enjoy and learn an ancient and exquisite trade.

This workshop gives participants the rare opportunity to try their hand at tsuiki copper hammering, under direct instruction from expert craftspeople from Gyokusend?. Each participant will create and shape their own unique piece of copperware through the hammering and beating of a single sheet of copper. The centuries-old tsuiki copper-hammering technique of the Gyokusend? workshop in Tsubame in Niigata Prefecture has been designated an Intangible Cultural Property by Japan’s Agency of Cultural Affairs.