Kurabi: Keepers of the Old Kura
The Storehouses of Takayama
In the narrow backstreets of Takayama, behind sake breweries three centuries old, sit the kura — timber storehouses raised on cedar beams so dense they outlive the buildings around them. Some have stood since the Edo period, weathering snow loads that would flatten a modern frame twice over. When a kura is finally retired — usually because the brewery beneath it has modernized into steel and concrete — its beams are not thrown away.
They go to the Kurabi.
"Kurabi" is what the neighborhood calls the small workshop of Itsuki Hattori and his two apprentices — half joke, half title, from kura (storehouse) and shokunin (craftsman). For eleven years they have taken retired cedar and bamboo from decommissioned kura and turned it into something a family actually holds every day: chopsticks.
A Workshop Built on Patience
The workshop itself is barely twelve tatami mats wide, wedged between a tofu shop and a shuttered inn. Shelves along every wall hold cedar offcuts sorted by decade — Itsuki can tell you which brewery a beam came from just by the grain spacing, a skill he says took him nine years to trust in himself. His two apprentices, both in their twenties, spend their first year doing nothing but sanding: no cutting, no shaping, just learning what "finished" feels like under bare fingers before they are allowed to touch a blade.
Wood That Remembers
Itsuki insists the wood is never "reused," only "continued." A beam that held up a sake warehouse for a hundred and forty years carries a density and grain that new-growth cedar cannot fake — decades of humidity cycling through a working brewery compress the fibers in a way no kiln can replicate. Cutting into it, he says, is like reading a room that no longer exists: you can find the exact spot where a beam rubbed against a support post for a century, polished smoother than anywhere else on the same plank.
Each pair is hand-planed, never machine-turned. Itsuki starts with a rough-sawn blank, then works it down in four passes with progressively finer blades, checking the balance in his palm between each pass rather than measuring with calipers — "if it needs a ruler," he told us, "it is already wrong." The final shaping is done seated, the blank braced against a leather-wrapped knee, in a posture that has apparently not changed since his own teacher showed it to him.
Finishing Without Hiding
Where most commercial chopsticks are lacquered — sealing the wood under a hard, uniform shell — the Kurabi finish is a single hand-rubbed coat of rice-bran oil, reapplied twice over two weeks as it cures. No lacquer means no shell: the wood keeps aging in your hand the way it aged in the kura, darkening slightly with use, taking on the faint sheen that only comes from repeated contact with skin and oil, not from a factory spray booth.
It also means the four variants age differently. The bamboo pairs lighten slightly and develop a tight, glassy grain within a few months of regular use. The cherry wood deepens toward amber. The ebony, already the densest and darkest of the four, changes the least — Itsuki calls it "the one that waits."
What Gets Left Behind
Not every beam makes it to a chopstick. Roughly a third of what comes into the workshop is set aside — sections too checked, too nail-scarred, or too soft near old water damage to trust. Itsuki keeps this pile visible near the entrance rather than hidden in a back room, saying customers should see what does not get used as much as what does; it is, in his words, "proof we are not just calling old wood special because it is old." The offcuts eventually go to a neighboring workshop that makes drawer pulls and chopstick rests, so even the rejected third rarely leaves the block.
We spent three days in the workshop watching the shaping, sanding, and oiling process from rough blank to finished pair, and left with the entire collection of variants Itsuki currently offers — from the everyday bamboo pairs his own family uses at dinner, up to the ebony pairs he reserves for gifts.