Why Is Lacquer Called "Japan"? The Word, the Fakes, and How It Differs From Chinese

Everyone knows that "china," lowercase, means porcelain. Fewer people notice its twin: for a stretch of English history, "japan," lowercase, meant lacquer. You can still catch it in an auction listing — a "japanned" cabinet — or on a museum label. The two words are not a coincidence. They are fossils of the same event, dug out of the same ships, and once you see why, a lot of confused antique-shop vocabulary suddenly lines up.

A word left behind by a shopping craze

In the 17th century, East Asian luxury goods poured into Europe. Portuguese ships had opened the sea route in the early 1500s, and after 1602 the Dutch East India Company (the VOC, then the largest trading company on earth) dominated the traffic. Alongside spices, silk, tea and porcelain came lacquer — glossy, jet-black, scattered with gold — and Europe lost its head over it. The stuff was sold as "japan wares," and by the 1680s English had coined the verb to japan: to coat something in that lacquer-like shine. The Victoria and Albert Museum puts the parallel plainly — in Britain the term japan attached to lacquer "mirroring how china referred to porcelain." Both were high-end Oriental collectibles, and both stood side by side in the same cabinets of curiosities.

It helps to see the words as a timeline, because each one is dated:

Word	When	What it marks
Japan (the country)	1570s	The place name enters English
"japan wares"	17th century	The lacquer import craze
to japan (verb)	1680s	Lacquering becomes a doing-word
A Treatise of Japaning and Varnishing	1688	The how-to book (below)
japonaiserie	1896	The taste for all things Japanese

One tidy footnote: the word lacquer itself is unrelated. It travelled a completely different road — Portuguese lacre, from Latin lacca, from Arabic lakk, from Persian lāk, from Sanskrit lākṣā, the name of the lac insect whose resin makes shellac. So "lacquer" comes from a bug and "japan" comes from a country, and neither, strangely, comes from the tree that actually makes the stuff.

Why Europe had to fake it

Here is the catch that most tellings skip: Europe could not make real lacquer, no matter how much it wanted to. Genuine urushi is the sap of Toxicodendron vernicifluum, a tree native to East Asia, and raw sap hardens as it cures. Sealed in a barrel for a year-long voyage around the Cape, it set solid long before it reached Amsterdam. The raw material simply did not survive the trip. (Urushi's stubborn, moisture-hungry chemistry is its whole strange story.)

So Europe did the next best thing: it imitated the look with materials it did have. That imitation is japanning. Instead of tree sap, japanners used resin varnishes — chiefly shellac (from the lac insect) and sandarac (from a North African cypress) — dissolved in solvent, brushed on in twenty-five to thirty coats, and dried by evaporation and heat rather than in a humid cabinet. The result copied the mirror-black ground and gold imagery beautifully, and the best pieces can fool the eye; but it never had urushi's near-indestructible resistance to water, acid and heat. It was décor, not armour.

The craze even got its bestseller. In 1688 in Oxford, John Stalker and George Parker published A Treatise of Japaning and Varnishing — over a hundred designs "in imitation of the Indians" (the period's catch-all for anything Oriental) plus recipes for the varnishes. It became the pattern-book of English japanning. In France the equivalent was Vernis Martin, named for the brothers who perfected it, and japanned black metalware — trays, tins — later poured out of workshops like those at Pontypool in Wales.

There is a dizzying nesting here worth savouring. Japan's finest gold lacquer was so prized that some 18th-century Chinese export lacquer was made in black-and-gold to imitate it — a style the V&A notes was not really typical of China. Then Europe imitated that with japanning. A copy of a copy: Japanese maki-e, imitated in China, imitated again in Europe.

The craze that ate its own treasures

The hunger had a destructive side. Real lacquer stayed scarce and expensive, and in Paris the marchands-merciers — the luxury dealers who set fashion — took imported Japanese cabinets and Chinese Coromandel screens and simply cut them apart, slicing off panels to glue onto new French furniture. The consequence is quietly tragic: very few Japanese lacquer cabinets survive intact in French collections, because the fashion for lacquer destroyed the lacquer.

What an unbutchered piece looked like survives in objects like the Mazarin Chest (about 1640–43), made in a Kyoto workshop associated with the Kōami family and carried to Europe by the VOC — a company record of 1643 lists lacquer chests valued at 144 taels each. It is dense with sprinkled and inlaid gold, and it is one of only a handful of intact top-tier export pieces left. That density of gold is the clue to the last question.

Sprinkle versus carve

If japan and china were twin words, Japanese and Chinese lacquer are twin crafts — same tree, opposite instincts. The Chiossone museum in Genoa sets them side by side: maki-e is "the Japanese technique par excellence," while carved lacquer is "a typically Chinese technique."

	Japan	China
Signature	Maki-e — sprinkled gold	Carved lacquer (tsuishu / tihong 剔紅)
Method	Paint in lacquer, scatter gold powder on top	Build up dozens of layers, then carve a relief
Instinct	Additive — add metal to make light	Subtractive — cut away to make shadow

Japan added: it drew in lacquer and sprinkled gold onto the wet surface, building pictures out of light. China subtracted: it painted on layer after layer of lacquer, sometimes a hundred, then carved a design in relief out of the sheer thickness — the deep-red tsuishu and the incised, pigment-filled Coromandel screens Europe imported by the shipload. Even Japan's answer to carving reversed the logic: rather than carve stacked lacquer, Kamakura-bori craftsmen carved the wood first and lacquered over it.

The most satisfying twist is that China itself confirmed the split. Ming-era records acknowledge that gold-decorated lacquer originated in Japan, and the Yongzheng emperor prized imported Japanese lacquer under its own name, yangqi. The distinction was not invented by Western museums; it was recognised across the sea, in the culture that gave Japan the tree in the first place.

So the little lowercase word carries a surprising amount. "Japan" for lacquer is not a quirk of spelling — it is the residue of a century when black-and-gold sap-varnish out of the East was worth cutting up cabinets for, when Europe faked what it could not import, and when, of everything Asia sent west, it was Japan's sprinkled gold that the West chose to name the whole craft after.