Tabako: Japan's Tradition of Tobacco and Fine-Cutting

Tabako is the Japanese word for tobacco, borrowed from the language of the Portuguese who brought the plant to the country. Until cigarettes spread with the Meiji period, the form smoked in pipes throughout Japan was kizami-tabako: tobacco obtained by slicing the leaves hair-thin with a blade and smoked dry in the slender metal pipe called the kiseru. This tradition was born in the same century that tobacco spread across Europe and the Mediterranean, yet it forms a branch all its own within the world history of the pipe.

Tobacco's Arrival on the Islands

Exactly when tobacco reached Japan is unknown. The plant is thought to have entered Kyushu in the second half of the 16th century through the nanban trade carried on Portuguese and Spanish ships; some accounts push this back as far as the 1540s, though documented traces appear only after the 1570s. The first records with a firm date belong to the early 17th century. In 1601, a Franciscan friar arriving at Hirado in Hizen is recorded as having presented tobacco seed to the local lord Matsura Shigenobu, and that same year a cleric named Geronimo de Jesus is recorded as having given seed to Tokugawa Ieyasu; a stone monument on the site of Hirado Castle commemorates the first of these events. The first planting is said to have taken place in Nagasaki in 1605. It is known that in the following decades the authorities tried to restrict both smoking and the area under cultivation, confining tobacco to land unsuited to rice, but that these prohibitions did not hold.

Kizami-tabako and the Fineness of the Cut

Kizami-tabako differs markedly from Western tobacco cuts. The moistened leaf is folded and rolled tightly, then sliced thread-thin with a sharp blade; it is not sauced with sugar syrup or flavoring. The smoker rolls a small pinch in the palm, sets it in the kiseru's tiny bowl, and lights it from a brazier ember. Since a single load holds only a few puffs' worth of tobacco, the habit built around it rested on short repetitions spread across the day rather than the long sessions of the European pipe. The region where it was grown also shaped the character of the product: Mito tobacco earned the name daimyō for its aroma, Mimasaka's mountain-cut sanchu-kizami was favored among women smokers for its reputation of not burning the throat, and Nanbu's strong, easily lit product was the choice of fishermen. Records show that more than seventy distinct varieties of kizami were known.

Material Culture in the Edo Period

In the Edo period, tobacco entered the daily life of both the samurai class and the urban merchants (chōnin). The set carried with it was a mark of taste as much as function: a leather or fabric tobacco pouch (tabako-ire), a case protecting the pipe (kiseruzutsu), and small carved toggles called netsuke that fastened them to the sash. The kiseru's stem was mostly bamboo, while its end pieces were made of gold, silver, copper, or iron and decorated with inlay and gilding. Such sets are counted today among the finest examples of Japanese miniature sculpture and metalwork; a collection of some 38,000 pieces has been assembled at the Tobacco and Salt Museum, founded by Japan Tobacco in 1978 and relocated from Shibuya to Sumida in 2015.

The Cigarette Era and Today

After the Meiji Restoration, the rapid spread of cigarettes turned kizami-tabako and the kiseru into a habit of the countryside and the older generation. Even so, the craft held on for a while: in 1929, some 400 craftsmen across 190 workshops in Japan were making kiseru. Tsubame, a city in Niigata known for its metalwork, was one of the centers of this production; its kiseru tradition goes back at least two centuries. Today, only a single craftsman still makes kiseru by hand in the city. The country's tobacco industry remained a state monopoly until 1985. The briar pipe, meanwhile, entered Japan in the 20th century, establishing a separate line through the workshop tradition that grew up around Tsuge. Beginning in almost the same years as tobacco's arrival in Ottoman lands, these two stories show just how differently the same plant could take shape.