Odate Bentwood Lunch Boxes
Odate Bentwood Lunch Boxes
—A beautiful technique and lifestyle inherited in the “land of wood” Japan—
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This is my fourth year of preparing lunch boxes, so I am still very much a novice in this field. My desire is to make tasty lunch boxes, and in particular to preserve the fluffiness of the rice even when it cools. Accordingly, my admiration for magewappa (bentwood lunch boxes) kept on growing day by day, and then I happened to come across the plain magewappa made by Shibata Yoshinobu Shoten in the city of Odate in Akita Prefecture. These bentwood lunch boxes are characterized by the fine grain patterns of the plain wood and their lightness. I immediately fell in love with this simple beauty. Since the grain patterns and color differ slightly, no bentwood lunch box is the same as the others. I wanted my own lunch box, the only one of its kind in the world!
So for this article I visited Odate in Akita Prefecture, the hometown of this cherished bentwood craft. From the airplane the forests of Akita Prefecture appeared like a tapestry of coniferous Japanese cedar trees and broad-leaved trees, such as wild cherry trees (yamazakura). Apparently, over many, many years, these trees have survived severe natural conditions and grown into these well-balanced and beautiful forests. Forests account for around 70% of Japan’s total land area, and the bentwood craft born from the artisans’ love of nature and their skills in creating tools from wood is a gemlike gift of the forests.
Mr. Yoshimasa Shibata, the president of Shibata Yoshinobu Shoten in Odate, kindly answered my questions.
Mr. and Ms. Yoshimasa Shibata
A work by Yoshimasa Shibata called BON (tray)
