Shunsuke Wada - Fifth-Generation Metal Engraving Artisan

Shunsuke Wada 

Fifth-Generation Metal Engraving ArtisanTakaoka, Toyama, Japan · Wada Engraving Studio · Est. 1919

He doesn't begin with a sketch. He begins with silence.

And then — one strike — the chisel finds the line that was always there.

I. The House He Grew Up

Most children learn the world through classrooms and playgrounds. Shunsuke Wada learned it through the smell of warm brass, the ringing of hammer against tagane, and the slow miracle of watching a flat sheet of metal become something with a face, a fury, a spirit of its own.

His studio was born in 1919, founded by his great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather in Takaoka, a city in Toyama Prefecture where metalwork is not simply an industry but an identity. Takaoka is home to Takaoka Douki, one of Japan’s most celebrated copper alloy craft traditions — a 400-year-old heritage that lives in the city's hands, its air, and its sense of itself.

The studio they began continues today, passed carefully from generation to generation, until the chisel arrived in Shunsuke’s hands in 2022, when he stepped forward to carry it into its next chapter. He is the fifth to hold it.

From an early age, the workshop was his first classroom — not textbooks, but hands at work. Learning how metal resists. How a line emerges. How patience builds form before the mind even knows what form it is searching for.

The sound of hammer on tagane was his lullaby. His grammar. His first language.

II. He Came Back

But a workshop is not a destiny. And Wada needed to discover that for himself. He left Takaoka and stepped into the world of media and game production — a world built from pixels, animation, and the ceaseless search for new images. There he learned how contemporary visual culture moves, how narrative energy travels, how a single image can hold an entire mythology.

When he eventually returned to the workshop, something stopped him cold. The dragons coiled in hundred-year-old brass — he recognized them. They were the same creatures he had spent years working with in games and animation. The same coiled fury. The same transformation. The same ancient storytelling — expressed through different centuries. Traditional motifs, he realized, are not the past.

They are the same stories that manga, anime, and games are still telling today — dressed in different forms, but driven by the same human imagination. He wasn't preserving a relic.

He was continuing a conversation — one that began long before him and, through his hands, will continue long after. In 2022, he stepped fully into that role and took the studio forward as his own.

III. What His Hands Do

Wada’s technique is called Wabori — the traditional Japanese art of hand engraving using chisels known as tagane. There is no automation in this process. Each strike of the hammer creates a permanent line in the metal. There is no undo. There is only the next decision, the next mark, the gradual emergence of a form from hundreds — sometimes thousands — of deliberate, irreversible strikes. Each line is cut entirely by hand, one hammer strike at a time — ensuring that no two works are ever exactly the same.

He works primarily in brass and copper, the metals refined through centuries of Takaoka Douki craftsmanship. Brass, in particular, for what it becomes over time — its weight, its depth, the way it ages into something richer than it began.

After engraving, each piece is finished through polishing and traditional oxidation — a blackening process that creates contrast between carved lines and surface so the image does not simply sit on the metal, but seems to rise from within it. Depending on the project, Wada also incorporates 3D modeling and collaborates with fellow craftsmen across Takaoka, combining contemporary tools with the irreplaceable humanity of a hand-held chisel. Every engraving, without exception, is carried out personally, by his own hands, in his own studio.

A Hannya mask, suspended between grief and rage. A dragon coiling with quiet, barely contained power. A phoenix — not yet bird, and no longer flame. A skull that speaks not of death — but of how to live while time is still ours. These are not decorations. They are presences — objects with the particular gravity of things that took time, patience, and a human life to make.

IV. The Four Motifs

Each motif Wada works with carries centuries of meaning — and his own reinterpretation of it.

Dragon · 龍Not a destroyer, but a guardian. In Japanese tradition, the dragon commands rain, water, and the heavens — a symbol of wisdom, strength, and the power to rise beyond adversity.

Phoenix · 鳳凰A bird that appears only in times of harmony. It represents renewal, rebirth, and auspicious beginnings — the quiet strength to rise again after fire.

Hannya · 般若Born from Noh theatre. A mask that holds jealousy, sorrow, and transformation in a single fierce expression. Yet it is also a protector — believed to ward off evil and reveal inner truth.

Skull · 髑髏In Japanese thought, the skull reflects mujo — impermanence. Not a symbol of death, but a question: knowing that time is finite, how will you live it?

V. Two Ways to Live

Wada’s work exists in two forms — one created to inhabit walls, the other to be worn close to the body. The WABORI Art Panels are hand-engraved brass works. Each line is struck directly into metal, one irreversible blow at a time. Every panel is individually made; no two are identical. They bring the full weight of Wabori tradition into contemporary interiors as objects that shift with the light and deepen with the years.

The WABORI Talismans were born from a Kickstarter campaign titled Embrace the Japanese Mystique, which attracted support from collectors around the world. Cast in brass through the lost-wax process and finished by hand, they carry ancient symbols into everyday life — because some meanings are best understood when worn, held close to the body, and lived with.

VI. What He Believes

We live in an age that often celebrates the minimal — smooth surfaces, empty walls, the elegance of absence. Wada does not reject that beauty. But he holds something else alongside it. Ornamentation is not excess. It is memory. It is the moment when a surface reveals that someone cared enough to make it more than it needed to be — leaving in the metal proof that they were here, and that it mattered. Every piece he engraves is unique — not as a marketing promise, but as a physical truth. The human hand cannot repeat itself exactly.

Every variation is a signature. Every so-called imperfection is evidence of a life applied directly to metal. He welcomes collaborations with interior designers, architects, and collectors who wish to bring narrative and presence into a space — who understand that the right object can allow a wall to hold a story for generations.

Some things are made to be used. Some things are made to be seen.

Shunsuke Wada creates works meant to be felt —across a room, across years, across the distance between nowand the long lineage of handsthat first taught metal to speak.

Discover Wada-san’s creations — shaped by heart, hands, and the spirit of craftsmanship