Amber Listserv / Japanese Amber

[JOHN FUDALA]

FYI\

By Wieslaw Gierlowski

Thanks to the help of Russian amber jewellers from Leningrad, who worked
periodically in Japan , I have long been receiving samples of a fossil resin
extracted from the slopes of Mt Kuji, near the town of the same name. The
town is located in the northern part of Honshu, Japan 's largest island, on
the coast of the Pacific Ocean.

This resin, now called Japanese amber, has features somewhat similar to
succinite (Baltic amber) in terms of workability, although it requires much
greater care in all the operations, especially when it's being polished
because of its tendency to "stretch."

Only a small portion of the samples was as beautiful as the valuable
varieties of transparent and golden Baltic amber. The majority were of an
opaque dark orange variety and many of them were brown nuggets with
distinctive small spots.

At the time, I did not have the opportunity to see products made of this
resin or gain information about the scale of its occurrence, nor to learn
about the traditions of its use in its native country. It was only an
exhibition presented by the Japanese in the summer of 2006 at the
Kaliningrad Amber Museum and its accompanying catalogue that made me
appreciate the importance of Japanese amber in business and culture.

This amber occurs in many places on all the main islands of Japan , from
Hokkaido in the north to Kyusyu in the south over a distance of over 2,800
km . The mine in Kuji has long been the main source of extraction and
remains the only such source today. Extraction there dates back to as early
as the 6 th century and at times was performed on a quite impressive scale.
For instance, in 1703 as much as 1,296 kg of amber from Kuji was sent to
Kyoto alone, while nearby Edo (today, the capital, Tokyo ) received even
greater deliveries.
Thirteen tonnes of amber were extracted in Kuji both in 1937 and in 1938.
Two very large nuggets survive from the interbellum period:

- a nugget belonging to a private collection weighing 19.875 kg and
measuring 40 x 40 x 25 cm; extracted in 1927;
- a nugget belonging to the National Science Museum in Tokyo weighing 16 kg
and measuring 40 x 23 x 23 cm , which was extracted in 1941, right before
the outbreak of war with the USA;

There are records of enormous nuggets weighing 45 kg and 60 kg extracted in
1905. The nuggets themselves, however, are lost.

The colour range of Japanese amber, which matches the description of the
samples I gave in the introduction to this article, also includes numerous
specimens with colours from green to black. There are also striped varieties
similar to agate.

KAZUHISA SASAKI, the author of an article on the origin and properties of
Japanese amber in the Kaliningrad exhibition catalogue, claims that Japanese
amber's mother tree must have had very distinct properties. The fossilised
resin contains camphor bubbles which burst when heated to 330 o C, giving
off a very strong smell.

Amber from Kuji is deposited on the mountain's slopes at a depth of about
600 metres , in rock of various ages. Most of it belongs to the Cretaceous
period (80 million years BP), while the rest to the Oligocene (30 million
years BP). The amber is extracted from sandstone and quartz. Most of the
nuggets are cracked because of seismic tremors and the high pressure at
considerable depths. The cracks often contain quartz crystals formed from
the fluid which would flow into the cracks and crystallise in them, forming
characteristic three-dimentional structures. By containing quartz, Kuji
amber of course has a much greater density than Baltic amber, although
purely resinous nuggets are within the same range in terms of density.

Japanese amber has been used to make clothing accessories and ornaments for
the body, as well as religious objects for centuries. The exhibition in
Kaliningrad showed a contemporary copy of a horseshoe-shaped small cushion
from a ducal grave, dated at the 6 th century CE. Just like the original,
which is kept in the Tokyo collection, the copy was made of greenish Kuji
amber. The remaining exhibits by contemporary Japanese artists shown at the
exhibition in Kaliningrad *were made of Baltic amber. *

Teruhisa Takaba and Takajuki Makita from the management of the BEOLUNA TOKYO
Joint-Stock Company, who estimate their company's dominant share in Japanese
amber processing and trade at 90% of the market, have this to say about the
post-World War II supplanting of domestic amber by Baltic amber: "The mine
on the slopes of Mt Kuji and the factory at its base suffered war damages.
Japan 's disastrous economic situation in the first post-war decades turned
the public's notice away from luxury items and caused the reactivation of
earlier amber traditions to be neglected."

The incentive to revive these traditions came with the Washington Convention
on the ban on using hawksbill sea turtle shells in tortoiseshell products,
which the Nagasaki Bekko company, BEOLUNA'S legal predecessor, specialised
in. The techniques and traditions of the intricate tortoiseshell design were
transplanted to amber.

At the time, around 1980, the Japanese market already knew Baltic amber
products imported from Poland , East Germany and the USSR . The Japanese
realised succinite's excellent quality, both in terms of the beauty of the
material and its technological superiority over the domestic variety. This
was combined with an economic factor: low price and the abundant and regular
deliveries from the Kaliningrad Amber Factory. And so Kuji amber did not
make a comeback (except for experimental work); instead traditional
tortoiseshell ornamentation was transplanted to Baltic amber. However, until
1980 certain techniques were kept a closely guarded secret, including
the *maki-e
* technique, where the product's surface is shallowly engraved and pictures
are formed with *urushi * lacquer.

Mostly, however the amber working techniques are the same as those used by
Poles and Russians, who in fact worked for several years in Japan as
instructors.

The design, however, is much different and specific to Japan . Although it
is adapted not only for traditional kimono ornaments but also for European
dress, its ornamentation and symbolic meaning is completely original.
Decorative and religious objects, for instance symbolic pagoda replicas,
play an important role in the production.
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