Women in Japan’s Contemporary Craft: Crossing the Boundaries of ‘Tradition’ in Arakawa, Tokyo

THIRD THURSDAY LECTURE Originally held on Thursday 18 June 2026. Speaker Clara Momoko Geber-Mérida (Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow 2025-2026) About the Talk Despite the longstanding dominance of men in Japan’s traditional craft industry, women have always been integral to it, even if largely invisible to outsiders. Working behind the scenes in workshops, they were often responsible for administrative tasks and specialist techniques that enabled master craftsmen to focus solely on creating objects. It is only recently that women have begun to receive the recognition needed to forge their own pathways into the field. Today, women still constitute a minority, making up just sixteen per cent of all registered craftspeople in Japan. Yet with greater visibility has come new responsibility, and with it the opportunity to construct new professional identities. Nowhere is this emerging generation of women more visible than in the district of Arakawa, Tokyo, known as the ‘City of Traditional Craft’ (dentō kōgei no machi). Arakawa’s distinctive apprenticeship system, designed to train the next generation of young craftspeople, has opened pathways for women into an industry that long excluded them. This lecture traces the stories of women who are challenging tradition across disciplines such as metal carving, lacquerware, ornamental hairpins, and woodblock printing: From family members working as invisible ‘assistants’ to a new generation of craftswomen actively reshaping the industry through their designs, visions, and teachings. About the Speaker Dr. Clara Momoko Geber-Mérida is a Japanese-Austrian scholar of modern and contemporary craft studies with a focus on Japan, gendered labour, and jewellery. Currently serving as a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in Norwich, she previously spent six years as a lecturer and assistant professor in Japanese Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Her monograph on women in the traditional craft industry of Tokyo is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Publishing as part of the SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan series.