Soetsu Yanagi, the founder of the mingei movement, created the category of “mingei” (meaning “popular crafts”) referring to daily handicrafts rooted in the local area, as an antithesis to arts and crafts that please the eyes of the wealthy and privileged. For a long time, the overwhelmingly voluminous world of handicraft (mainly the production of tableware), which lies between these two categories, has not been given a name of its own.
In this century, the term “new standard crafts” has been coined for this nameless category, and in recent years it has become increasingly linked to the idea of ethical consumption and has come to have a presence in daily life.

These “new standard crafts” can be further subdivided into various fields, but what is noteworthy is the recent increase in the number of highly skilled makers in the field of woodwork.
If you think about it, as our eating habits change, we now use wooden plates to put bread on and wooden bowls to serve salads – and these scenes are becoming more and more common in our daily lives. In the past, when we say “wooden tableware,” it was almost synonymous with “lacquerware,” which had a strong arts and crafts connotation, but perhaps now is the time when natural tableware with the texture of wood at the forefront is in demand.

While wooden vessels are thus gaining status as a standard on the table, a change is taking place.
In the world of woodwork, only the beautiful parts of wood have been selected for processing, but now an increasing number of craftspeople are making use of knots, scratches, insect holes and rot as part of the tree’s own personality.
In the world of furniture and musical instrument making, the idea of “naturalism” has been around for a long time, and it can be said that this perspective is now being applied to the production of tableware as well.

For example, the round dish is made from a maple wood called “spalted maple”. It is an expressive wood with a black stripe pattern called shin-kin-moku (decay created during the drying process of the wood).
Normally, the black streaks, the rotten parts, tend to be more brittle than the rest of the wood, but this round dish is coated with liquid glass to ensure sufficient strength for everyday use.
The future of tableware production may require a methodology in which the maker’s knowledge, skills and sensibility are not devoted to arts and crafts decoration, but rather to utilising nature’s work as a landscape.
This kind of naturalistic approach to artistry is a process of crossover between the workings of nature and those of human beings. It may give us some hints as to the direction in which “new standard crafts” should go in the future.

(Spalted maple round dish, Φ185 mm, by Tomoya Kounosu)