How Japan Turned Packaging Into an Art Form

In the story of Urashima Taro, a Japanese folk tale dating to the eighth century, a young angler is invited to an underwater kingdom as a reward for rescuing a sea turtle from cruel children. At the end of his visit, he’s given a mysterious box with strict instructions never to open it. (He does, of course, and pays the price.) In the early 17th century, wealthy merchants of the Edo period hung lavishly decorated inro — cases made from wood, metal and ivory with nested boxes for medicine or tobacco — from their kimono sashes; as the accessories became more sophisticated, men stopped using them as storage containers and began wearing them as design objects instead. And as recently as the mid-19th century, the most beautiful lacquered tomobako, boxes built to carry precious items such as artworks or ceramic bowls, were reserved for aristocrats or shoguns.

“The Japanese, generally speaking, like to package things,” says Monika Bincsik, a curator of Japanese decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “The idea of protecting objects, documenting them and taking care of them is a very important part of Japanese culture going back as early as the seventh century.” Even bento boxes, disposable or tiered lacquerware containers in which lunches are arranged, have origins in the 12th century and are as much about preserving tradition as food. In an island country with densely populated cities and a history of earthquakes, boxing is both noble and practical, a way to maintain order in tight spaces and to safeguard heirlooms or store cooked rice. At Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, the saisenbako, a wooden coin box with a grated top, collects offerings to the gods or bodhisattvas; sake is often sipped from a masu, a square wooden box originally meant as a sort of measuring cup; and cold soba and udon noodle dishes are usually served not in a bowl but on a box-shaped bamboo plate. The West uses boxes too, but it can feel like almost everything in Japan comes in one.

This past August, while the rest of the country prepared for the arrival of Typhoon Shanshan, Mayumi Kuwada, 62, the owner of a family-run box factory in Fukuyama, about 165 miles southwest of Kyoto, was admiring a new stack of kiribako: plain, typically rectangular containers made from kiri, or paulownia, a fire-resistant hardwood tree with humidity-controlling properties that has been used by regional furniture designers for centuries and is thought to encourage prosperity and happiness. At a workbench, an employee cut and sanded the sides of the boxes by hand before gluing them together and compressing them. Nearby, others were adding an internal rim to each lid to create a precise closure with an almost magnetic seal. (That controlled friction, which is meant to build anticipation, is said to have inspired Apple’s iPhone packaging.) Kuwada pointed to a wall of finished commissions: lightweight boxes of different sizes and proportions, many of them foil pressed, UV printed or laser etched for brands such as BMW and Lanvin.

Since 2023, Ray Suzuki, the 31-year-old founder of Chowa Library, a teahouse and Japanese-design shop in Brooklyn, has been working with Kuwada and her company, Akebono Kougei, to introduce kiribako abroad. But before Kuwada would agree to collaborate with Suzuki, he had to earn her confidence. His first meeting with Kuwada’s partner, Hideshi Shimoe, was “super intense,” he said. “He asked me thousands of questions. And then toward the end of that trip, he basically told me, ‘I don’t know anything about the luxury market in New York, but now I know you. I’ll do whatever you ask.’” But if trust is essential to keeping a custom alive, so is suspicion: During Suzuki’s visit to a local producer of sanadahimo — a type of unyielding cotton ribbon once used to make the ties on samurai armor and swords and that now decorates Kuwada’s boxes — the loom operator proudly recalled refusing to work with a European fashion brand; to remove the craft from its context, he said, was to disrespect it.