aburagiri

Aburagiri is the Japanese name for Vernicia cordata, a deciduous tree native to China and naturalized in Japan, whose seeds yield a fast-drying oil prized for finishing lacquerware and waterproofing paper. The word compounds abura, oil, with giri — a contracted form of kiri, the Japanese name for the Paulownia tree, which aburagiri superficially resembles in the shape of its large heart-shaped leaves. The name is therefore a kind of visual shorthand: the oil tree that looks like the kiri.

The tree arrived in Japan from China no later than the Heian period (794–1185 CE), carried along with the lacquerware traditions it supported. Japanese craftsmen ground the seeds and cold-pressed them to produce tung oil, which they applied as a drying base coat beneath multiple layers of urushi lacquer. Without a reliable penetrating oil to seal the wood grain, the finest Japanese lacquer objects — the inro, the jubako, the writing boxes — would not have held their surface for centuries.

Tung oil from aburagiri was not the only oil available to Japanese craftsmen; sesame and rapeseed oil were more common for general use. Aburagiri oil was specifically sought for its rapid polymerization: it oxidizes on contact with air and hardens in a way that vegetable oils do not, making it chemically closer to a varnish than to a food oil. The Edo-period craft guilds of Kyoto tracked aburagiri cultivation in the mountains of Shizuoka and Wakayama prefectures with the same care they gave to the lacquer trees themselves.

Western demand for tung oil surged in the early twentieth century when paint and varnish manufacturers discovered that it outperformed linseed oil for marine and industrial coatings. The Chinese variety, Vernicia fordii, became the dominant commercial source, and plantations spread across Hunan and Guangxi provinces and later into the American South. The Japanese aburagiri remained a smaller-scale tree, valued by traditional lacquer ateliers in Kyoto and Wajima who continued to source seeds from mountain growers as their Heian-period predecessors had done.