context: lacquerwork > objects > inro > technical

Materials

Note that while lacquer on wood is the dominant composition for inro, not all were lacquered and not all were on a wood frame. Leather was very common in the early days, but ivory, ceramic, metal, shell, sharkskin, agate and rock crystal inro are all known. Most of these are hard to fit into sections in the way the wood inro were made, so they were rarely for practical use. My favourite odd material, genuinely used to make some inro, was dried fungus.

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