Three Japanese Road Trips Through a Craft Lens

Created in partnership with Banana Republic—whose fall collection was inspired by and shot in Japan.

When I moved to Tokyo from the UK in early 2019, I quickly became obsessed with Japan’s craft traditions. From ceramic makers in Kyoto’s suburbs to indigo dyers in the mountains of Gifu, each time I entered a workshop I felt as though I was stepping into another world entirely.

What I learnt quickly was that many of these practices are at risk of fading away. What happens when the last swordsmith in a village puts down his hammer, or a rural woodcarver passes on with no apprentice to take his place?

Over more than six years, I’ve travelled extensively across Japan with my camera, seeking out these hard-to-access workshops, meeting the artisans and learning their personal stories (and trying my hand at various crafts, with varying degrees of success). That obsession eventually became Shokunin, my latest book, which takes readers on a journey from Kyushu’s porcelain towns to the bamboo workshops of Kanazawa, and matcha whisk makers in Nara to indigo artisans in the Japanese Alps.

Japan is welcoming record numbers of visitors this year, and the overwhelming majority will move through the same handful of cities. There’s good reason Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka draw people in, but Japan’s regional crafts rarely make it onto a first itinerary, even though many are a short drive from the places everyone already visits.

These three road trips move off that path. Each one is built around workshops open to visitors (advanced booking required), the museums and shops that give them proper context, and places to stay that share the same handmade spirit. You’ll need a car, a bit of forward planning and the willingness to drive a little further than the typical itineraries would take you. 

Road Trip 1: Kanazawa to Kaga Onsen

On Honshu’s western coast, this route leaves Kanazawa’s craft-filled backstreets for the wooded hot spring hills of Kaga, where lacquerware and Kutani ceramics are still made and fired by hand. 

Rich with history, Ishikawa Prefecture’s capital has a story to tell around every corner, and few Japanese cities wear their craft heritage as visibly as Kanazawa. It carries UNESCO recognition as a City of Crafts, with more than twenty traditional art forms still practiced here by hand. Begin in the Higashi Chaya geisha district, where wooden teahouses with lattice facades line the streets, many still functioning as galleries and craft shops behind their original fronts. A short walk from there, the Nagamachi samurai district preserves the mud-walled lanes and residences of the city’s former ruling class, largely unchanged since the Maeda clan governed the region.

For an introduction to the city’s design lineage, spend an hour at the DT Suzuki Museum, a contemplative space built around a still water garden and dedicated to the Zen philosopher who first carried Japanese Buddhism to the West. Kenrokuen Garden, considered one of Japan’s three great gardens, is close by, its ponds, stone bridges and pruned pines shifting in character with each season.

Kanazawa’s craft culture is best experienced hands-on. Book a kintsugi session with a studio using traditional, all-natural lacquer, learning the technique of repairing broken ceramics with gold dust, highlighting the object’s beautiful imperfections rather than hiding the damage. At To-an, a small ceramics workshop, you can form and glaze your own matcha bowl in the style of Kutani ware, the region’s signature porcelain. For shopping, Kanazawa Crafts Hirosaka, beside the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, gathers Kaga Yuzen dyeing, Kutani ceramics and mizuhiki string craft under one roof, while Hakuza‘s flagship gold leaf store shows the material worked into everything from lacquerware to sake cups. Kanazawa produces nearly all of Japan’s gold leaf, and it shows.

Stay at Maki no Oto, a four-room ryokan tucked into the Higashi Chaya district that mixes tatami and Western-style rooms with a kaiseki restaurant served kappo-style at the counter. For food, Omicho Market is the place for a rice bowl piled with the morning’s catch at Kaisendon Yutaka, and Kataori serves the freshest snow crab and seafood at a minimalist fine dining counter.

Stop off in Yamanaka Onsen

Leaving Kanazawa, the road climbs into the hills toward Yamanaka Onsen, a hot spring town built around four centuries of lacquerware tradition. At the entrance to town, Urushi-za works as a museum, gallery and shop in one, introducing Yamanaka lacquerware through its fine hand-turned wooden bowls and everyday tableware. The town’s real draw, though, is the Kakusenkei Gorge, a short forested walk that crosses the wooden Korogi Bridge at one end and the S-shaped Ayatori Bridge, designed by ikebana artist Hiroshi Teshigahara, at the other. Afterwards, the Kikunoyu public bathhouse offers a soak in the same mineral waters the poet Basho once called some of the finest in Japan.

Onwards to Kaga Onsen

From Yamanaka, it’s a short drive to Kaga Onsen and its neighbouring town of Yamashiro, where Kutani ware was revived after nearly a century of decline. The Kutani-yaki Kiln Museum preserves the remains of a working Edo-period climbing kiln, with hands-on pottery painting for anyone who wants to try the technique themselves. Kosoyu, a faithful recreation of the town’s Meiji-era public bathhouse, is decorated floor to ceiling in Kutani tiles and stained glass, and a short walk away, Iroha Soan, once home to the ceramicist Kitaoji Rosanjin, remains open as a small museum of his work. 

Stay at Beniya Mukayu, a sixteen-room ryokan on the wooded slopes of Yakushiyama designed by architect Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama, where every room opens onto its own private hot spring bath and forest garden.

Road Trip 2: Fukuoka to Saga

On Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost main island, this route begins on Fukuoka’s northern coast, then moves inland through misted tea hills and rice fields before reaching the porcelain towns near Saga’s coastal flatlands. 

Fukuoka rarely gets billed as a craft destination, but the city’s design lineage runs deep, and it shows most clearly at the Ritz-Carlton Fukuoka. The hotel’s interiors take their cue from Hakata-ori, the city’s centuries-old yarn-dyed silk weaving tradition, with woven textiles, lacquerware and koishiwara ceramics by local artisans built into the design throughout, right down to the folding screens behind each bed. Staying here is as much an introduction to Fukuoka’s craft heritage as any workshop visit.

For shopping, start at Tokineri, a general store inside Hakata Riverain Mall that pairs traditional Japanese tools and tableware. From there, head into the Kawabata Arcade, Hakata’s oldest shopping street, running four hundred metres and lined with more than a hundred shops that have traded here for well over a century. Masaki is worth seeking out among them for traditional crafts, tucked between noodle counters and doll shops that have barely changed in decades.

Before leaving the city, join the queue at one of the yatai food stalls that line the streets after dark for a bowl of tonkotsu ramen, Fukuoka’s contribution to Japan’s noodle canon and best eaten standing, shoulder to shoulder with locals, at a counter barely wide enough for the bowl.

Indigo Craftsman Detour

From Fukuoka, the road leads south into Yame, a region known equally for indigo textiles and some of Japan’s finest green tea. At Shimogawa Textile, Kyozo Shimogawa, the third generation of his family to run the business, weaves Kurume Kasuri on belt-driven looms that have been running since the company was founded in 1948, the last orimoto weaver left in Yame. His factory visits double as a lesson in the craft’s ikat patterns and indigo dye process, made all the more interesting by his collaborations with designers as far afield as Finland and the Netherlands.

Before continuing south, take the backroads through Yame’s tea plantations, where terraced rows produce some of the gyokuro that regularly wins Japan’s national tea competitions. Morning mists roll through the valley here, shading the leaves and giving the tea its particular sweetness, a detail worth understanding before your next cup.

Yanagawa Canals Detour

A short drive from Yame, Yanagawa is built around a network of waterways that once irrigated the surrounding rice fields and now serve a slower purpose. Board one of the flat-bottomed boats poled by local boatmen for a cruise through the canals, passing under low stone bridges and beneath the eaves of merchant houses that have stood since the Edo period.

The route leads naturally to Tachibana Ohana, the four-hundred-year-old former residence of the Tachibana clan, feudal lords of the Yanagawa domain. The estate’s Shoto-en garden, with its black pines and koi pond, remains one of Japan’s finest examples of Meiji-era landscape design, and the grounds now function as both a museum of Tachibana family history and, for those who want to stay, the only nationally designated place of scenic beauty in Japan where overnight guests are permitted.

Saga Porcelain Journey

Saga Prefecture is the birthplace of Japanese porcelain, and Arita remains its most concentrated expression. At Genemon Kiln, you can watch potters at work using techniques passed down since the kiln’s founding in 1753, before browsing the adjoining museum, home to historically significant Arita-yaki pieces dating back to the Meiji period.

Two shrines nearby put the region’s craft on full display. At Tozan Shrine, the torii gate, guardian statues and balustrades are all made from Arita porcelain rather than the usual stone, a tribute to the god of ceramics enshrined here. Yutoku Inari, one of Japan’s three great Inari shrines, carries the same detail into its vermilion tower gate, where the two guardian deities are cast in Arita porcelain.

For the night, stay at Onyado Fukuchiyo, Japan’s first sake brewery auberge, housed in a 230-year-old merchant residence in the preserved brewing town of Hizen Hamashuku. The inn takes only one group nightly, with dinner built around the brewery’s own Nabeshima sake and a private tour of the workshop the next morning, usually closed to the public.

Road Trip 3: Kyoto to Shigaraki

In central Honshu, this route leaves the temples and basin streets of Kyoto for the wooded hills of Shiga Prefecture, where Shigaraki’s potters have worked the region’s iron-rich clay for close to eight centuries. 

Kyoto rarely needs an introduction, but its craft world truly benefits travellers willing to look past the typical temple routes. Stay at The Shinmonzen, Tadao Ando’s nine-suite ryokan beside Gion’s Shirakawa River, where tatami rooms sit alongside contemporary art. On the ground floor, boutique craft store, Ogata occupies the entrance, its Isahaya stone counter and wood shelving displaying handcrafted teaware, confectionery and fragrance alongside a rotating programme of craft exhibitions.

For ceramics, start at Kyo-Amahare, a craft gallery and tea room set inside a restored century-old townhouse, its shelves stocked with Kyoto-made pottery and objects from artisans across Japan. Gallery Nichinichi, tucked into a Kamigyo machiya, pairs a similar sensibility with an intimate tea room seating just five, serving tea alongside handmade ceramics and lacquerware from its own curated roster of makers. For a deeper look at Kyoto’s ceramic lineage, Kawai Kanjiro’s House preserves the potter’s residence and workshop exactly as he left it, climbing kiln included, in the Gojozaka district where Kyo-yaki and Kiyomizu-yaki pottery has been fired for four centuries.

Beyond ceramics, Kyoto’s craft world extends into footwear and fashion. Hakimono Sekizuka, a family workshop with more than seventy years of history, makes zori sandals to order from leather, bamboo and woven tatami, each pair built by hand in the backstreets. For something to wear home, the monthly Heian Shrine Antique Market fills Okazaki Park with more than a hundred vendors selling ceramics, kimono and vintage tools, best visited early before the good pieces disappear.

Further west, Adashino Nenbutsuji offers a quieter, more contemplative side of the city. Around eight thousand stone Buddhist statues, gathered here from across the Sagano area over a century ago, sit shoulder to shoulder on a hillside once used for open-air burial, a striking, sobering counterpoint to Kyoto’s more polished attractions.

Shigaraki’s Rural Pottery Town

Ninety minutes from Kyoto, Shigaraki has been a pottery town for close to eight hundred years, its iron-rich clay giving Shigaraki ware its distinctive reddish glow. Check in to Ogawatei Ryokan, a small traditional inn well placed for the town’s ceramic quarter, or at Kochu-an, the tearoom and retreat of the Honiwa Rakunyu family, potters who have worked Shigaraki clay across three generations and whose name was given by the abbot of Kyoto’s Daitoku-ji temple.

At Rakusai Gama, a working kiln and gallery, pieces are thrown, fired and sold on site, giving far more context than a standalone shop ever could. For lunch, Mutsumi-an serves clay pot rice grown by the owners themselves, cooked in Shigaraki-fired donabe pots and served in tableware you choose yourself before it arrives at the table. Afterwards, the Noborigama Café at Shigaraki Togei-mura serves tea and coffee inside a preserved eleven-chamber climbing kiln built in 1934, one of the more unusual settings in Japan for an afternoon coffee.

Just outside town, the Asamiya tea fields have been cultivated since the ninth century, their rolling rows producing some of the region’s finest green tea alongside its ceramics. Back in Shigaraki, Maruni Toryo supplies the raw materials, tools and glazes that keep the town’s potters working, while Shigaraki Ichinomiya Shingu Shrine carries the craft into its architecture, with lion statues and a torii gate cast entirely from pottery.