One-Wheeled Cart with Mother-of-Pearl and Maki-E Design

A Heian Lacquer Box Painted with Ox-Cart Wheels in Water

The lacquer box known as the Katawaguruma Raden Makie Tebako carries a single, strange image repeated across its whole surface: the wheels of ox-drawn carriages, sunk halfway into flowing water. It was made in the twelfth century, late in the Heian period, and registered as a National Treasure in 1952. Today it belongs to the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno.

A tebako is a lidded box that aristocratic households used to keep cosmetics, writing paper, combs, and small personal articles. This one is modest in size, roughly 22 by 33 centimeters and about 13 centimeters tall, with a lid that sits over the body rather than dropping inside it. The top is gently domed and the corners are rounded, so the box reads less as a sharp-cornered container than as a softly swelling form that fills the hand.

Around the rim runs a thin band of tin. On the long sides of the body, where cords would once have been tied to secure the lid, the maker fixed silver fittings cut into the shape of a wheel. That small detail repeats in metal the motif painted everywhere else, so the object holds together as one idea worked out in lacquer, shell, and silver.

Why Wheels in Water?

The motif is called katawaguruma, meaning a wheel seen partly, or a half wheel. In the Heian court, the carriage of choice was the gissha, a cart pulled by oxen, and its wheels were built of wood. Wood left to dry cracks and warps, so people soaked the wheels in rivers and streams to keep them supple. The sight of cart wheels half-submerged in a current was an ordinary part of Heian life, and painters and lacquerers turned it into a favorite decorative pattern.

The same wheels-in-water design appears on bronze mirrors of the period and on the decorated papers used for ornamental sutra scrolls. On this box, the wheels are scattered in a steady rhythm across the lid and sides, each one caught at a slightly different angle, with the water threading between them.

There is a second reading. Several specialists believe the box was not originally a cosmetic case at all, but a kyobako, a container made to hold a Buddhist sutra scroll. By this interpretation the water and the floating wheels echo the great lotus blossoms said to open on the ponds of the Pure Land, the paradise of Amida Buddha. A worldly scene and a religious vision sit inside the same pattern, which is part of what makes the design difficult to exhaust by looking.

The Techniques, and Why They Matter

Almost the entire surface is built up in makie, the Japanese method of drawing in wet lacquer and dusting metal powder onto the lines before they set. The specific variety here is togidashi-makie, or polished-out makie: the design is drawn, sprinkled with metal, sealed under more lacquer, and then ground back down until the picture surfaces flush with the surrounding black. The result has no raised relief. The image lies level with the ground, as if held just beneath a dark sheet of water.

The waves are worked in gold. The wheels use aokin, a pale gold that is actually an alloy of gold and silver, and its color shifts with the angle of the light, cooler or warmer as you move. Half of the wheels are not metal at all but raden, thin pieces of iridescent shell, cut to shape and set into the lacquer, with fine hairline engraving added in places to suggest the spokes. The dark ground itself is a hiraji surface, made by scattering filed metal grains over the lacquer and polishing them flat.

Lift the lid and the interior continues the care taken outside. On a paler ground, gold and silver togidashi-makie scatter clipped sprigs of plants and small birds: pine, cherry, plum, maple, mandarin orange, willow, chrysanthemum, gentian, pampas grass, bellflower, and patrinia, with butterflies and birds in flight among them.

The reason this box is treasured beyond its beauty is scarcity. Very few examples of Heian-period makie combined with shell inlay survive at all. Because so little of this kind of work has come down to us, a piece this complete and this accomplished carries unusual weight as evidence of how court lacquerers of the twelfth century actually worked. The box was first protected as an Important Cultural Property in 1931 and raised to National Treasure status in 1952.

What to Look For

Because the box is small, it rewards slow, close looking rather than a glance from across a gallery. Stand at the case and let your eye follow a single line of wheels across the lid; you begin to notice that no two are repeated exactly, and that the water never settles into a mechanical grid.

The most quietly impressive effect is the aokin. As you shift your position, the pale-gold wheels cool toward silver and warm again toward gold, so the surface seems to breathe under the gallery lights. Compare a metal wheel with one of the shell wheels nearby and the difference in luster becomes clear: the lacquered gold glows, while the inlaid shell flickers with rainbow color.

One more thing worth finding is the silver fitting on the side of the body, shaped as an openwork wheel. It is easy to miss, but it shows how thoroughly the single motif governs the whole object, down to its hardware.

Seeing It, and What Is Nearby

The box belongs to the Tokyo National Museum, the oldest and largest museum in Japan, at the north end of Ueno Park. Lacquer and other light-sensitive works are rotated through the galleries rather than kept permanently on view, so this particular piece appears only at intervals. Anyone hoping to see it should check the museum's current display schedule before visiting, since on most days it rests in storage.

Even when the box is not out, the museum's holdings of Japanese lacquer, painting, sculpture, and swords reward a full day. Ueno Park around it gathers several of Tokyo's major institutions within a short walk, including the National Museum of Western Art, the National Museum of Nature and Science, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. The park is a short walk from Ueno Station, served by the JR lines and the Tokyo Metro.

For visitors drawn to the carriage culture that produced the wheel motif, the ox-cart and the world of the Heian aristocracy also appear in illustrated handscrolls and in shrine festivals where such carts are still paraded, offering a living sense of the vehicles that the box quietly commemorates.