Smio Satou: Urushi Renaissance

February 26, 2015 by Sykes Wilford in Makers and Artists

While Smio Satou trained in the classical Danish hand made pipe tradition, he has very much charted his own path as a pipe maker over the past couple of decades. He went, with Fukuda, who still makes Tsuge Ikebana pipes, to Denmark on two occasions in the 1970s and worked at Tsuge in the 1970s and 1980s, but in the late 1990s, he started doing something no one else did, or indeed does, with pipes. He combined modern Danish-style pipe making methods with traditional urushi Japanese lacquer-work.

While there are many aspects of Satou's craft that make his pipes distinctive, the most notable of these is his use of traditional Japanese urushi lacquer to finish his pipes. All of Satou's pipes are finished with clear urushi lacquer that has little effect on the color of the wood. In a handful of instances over the past decade, he has made black dress pipes using the traditional black colored lacquer, followed by coats of the clear lacquer to give the finish the sort of visual depth that is so highly prized.

Urushi lacquering, traditionally used to create a beautiful, durable finish for dinnerware and household goods, has been done in Japan since at least the eighth century AD. Partly because achieving the right sort of hard high gloss finish is a painstaking process and partly because, before it dries, the wet urushi can cause serious skin irritation akin to that of poison ivy, its practice is limited to experienced skilled craftsmen, making the work both rare and expensive. Traditionally, for household goods, colored lacquers are used in two or three thin coats, sometimes followed by a clear coat, depending on the look desired.

Satou, however, uses ten coats to achieve his finish. Each coat requires a two day period of curing in a humid cabinet (kept at 70-75% humidity and 25°C, or around 78°F), followed by time at room temperature and lower humidity to settle. Accordingly, from start to finish, it takes Satou about a month to make a pipe. Of course, he works in batches, so he isn't just making a pipe a month, but the amount of time and the number of processes required for each pipe is staggering, and does limit his production to between thirty and fifty pipes per year over the past ten years. Indeed, perhaps only one of those years saw close to fifty pipes.

The Urushi finish requires sanding to a level of fineness that would be simply silly for most pipe finishing. Indeed, prior to Satou showing me, I'd never seen 2,000 grit and 3,000 grit sandpaper, but that is what he uses in between the later layers of urushi. Really, the 3,000 grit is just to make the urushi coat rough enough for the next coat to adhere rather than to remove any scratches: 3,000 grit sandpaper is, at least to my fingers, about as coarse as silk...

The resulting finish is magnificent, however. It will never need to be buffed (indeed, it should never be buffed), and it will gain luster with handling and use. Japanese craftsmen have used urushi for a millennium on household goods because it creates an incredibly durable protective coating around the object. In the hands of Smio Satou, the resulting finish is as beautiful as it is unique.

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Comments

• Dani J on June 18, 2020

  Japanese lacquer really excels in gold inlays comparable to Korean lacquer which masters mother of pearls rather than gold. Interesting. I've seen Dunhill and other artisans do maki-e technique on briars. I hope to see mother-of-pearls or "najeon" as Korean would call it, lacquered onto pipe, if that's possible.

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