Kanazawa Haku

Thinner than you can imagine

Gold leaf from Kanazawa is just 1/10,000 to 2/10,000 mm thick. That lets it cover even the most complex shapes without losing any of gold's shine. It gilds shrines, temples and butsudan, becomes gold and silver thread for textiles, decorates maki-e and chinkin lacquer and ceramics, and covers screens, fusuma and signs. Kanazawa supplies nearly all of Japan's gold leaf. It is made in Kanazawa and Komatsu in Ishikawa, and in Toyama and Oyabe in Toyama.

From ingot to leaf

• Gold is alloyed with a little silver and rolled out to 1/100 mm.
• It is beaten between special papers to 1/1000 mm, a stage called uwazumi.
• The uwazumi is beaten again between leaf-beating paper until it becomes leaf.
• The beating paper itself takes about four months to prepare, and soft water is essential.

An order from the battlefield

Kanazawa's leaf history goes back to the late Sengoku period, when Maeda Toshiie, lord of Kaga, sent a letter from the camp of the Korean campaign ordering leaf to be made at home. The Edo shogunate later controlled leaf production across Japan; after the Meiji Restoration lifted that control, Kanazawa leaf grew greatly in skill and volume.