A friend recently showed me one of the handmade sake cups that he adores. It was a deep midnight blue rounded copper cup sprinkled with gold flecks, like a starry sky. And it was made by Gyokusendo, a family company established in 1816 that specializes in tsuiki, the Japanese term for copperware hammered by hand.
“The cups’ design was actually started during my generation,” said Motoyuki Tamagawa, the company’s president and the seventh family member to lead the business. “The designs and colors are thought up by the artisans themselves.”
And if the sake cup (16,000 yen, or about $110) isn’t the gift you are looking for, the design also is used on an elongated version with curved edge, sold as a beer cup (¥21,000 to ¥23,000).
Gyokusendo is headquartered in Tsubame, a city on the western side of Japan’s main island of Honshu, about two hours by high-speed train from Tokyo.
While the stop is labeled Tsubame-Sanjo, “it actually serves two cities, Tsubame (population 76,694) and Sanjo (population 92,364),” Keizo Sekikawa of the Tsubamesanjo Regional Industries Promotion Center wrote in an email. “Both cities are active in metalworking and manufacturing.”
