Five lacquer plates shaped as open folding fans, each with a vermilion rim edged in gold and a gold leaf field scattered with irregular flakes of coloured foil in silver, blue, green and rust. They come in the woven pattern box printed Kanazawa haku kogei, with the Japanese lacquerware booklet and the English card from Hakuichi of Kanazawa headed History of Gold Leaf.
Kanazawa makes about ninety nine percent of Japan\'s gold leaf and has done for four centuries, and the reason is weather. Beating gold into leaf requires humidity, because dry air lets the sheets tear and lifts them off the paper, and Kanazawa sits in one of the wettest regions of the country. The leaf is hammered down to roughly one ten thousandth of a millimetre, thin enough that light passes through it green, and thin enough that a single gram covers most of a table. Applying it is the part that cannot be mechanised, because the leaf will fly toward a warm hand and tear on a fingernail, so it is moved with bamboo tools and static and breath control. The fan shape is deliberate. Five fans laid out across a table open into each other like a folding screen.
All five plates are present and unused in appearance, with no chips, lifting or flaking found to the lacquer or the leaf, and the vermilion rims are unrubbed. The box is sound with light shelf wear and both printed inserts are intact.
These were made to be looked at under candlelight or low lamps, where the foil flakes catch and the gold ground goes warm. Under a flat overhead they simply look like nice plates, which is how most people photograph them and precisely why they are undervalued.
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