Oodate-magewappa for Oodate Kougeisya
The Oodate-magewappa is a wooden box, usually circular or oval in shape and made from bending cedar or cypress. It is an exquisite traditional craft developed as a side job for samurai in the 17th century, and is particularly prominent in North Eastern Japan. As splendid a craft as it is, however, magewappa tend to look so perfectly made that the highly sophisticated handcraftsmanship that goes into them often goes unnoticed. Therefore, with this particular item, the container has deliberately not been made into a complete cylinder as it would ordinarily be. Rather, it has been left in a disjointed spiral shape, in order to accentuate the edges of the material, as well as the fact that this tableware is indeed made from bending flat planks of natural wood. A magewappa that does not have some form of enclosed cylindrical shape is unprecedented, and this idea gave rise to a new technique of wrapping wood around various moulds. Depending on its size, it can be used as a chopstick holder, a toothpick holder, or a chopstick rest.
