Takamatsu, Kagawa — one of a series of shore days Japan Royal Service builds for residents and guests of The World.
Twenty thousand years ago people in this province knapped a particular black stone into blades and traded them across western Japan. It was prized because it fractures to an edge sharper than steel.
Nobody knew, or nobody wrote down, that if you cut it into slabs of the right thickness it sings.
The stone that rings
In 1891 a German geologist named Weinschenk gave the rock a scientific name taken from the old province it came out of — Sanuki, the country that is now Kagawa. Sanukite. It is a fine-grained andesite, dense and almost without pores, and when struck it produces a sustained metallic tone with an extraordinarily long decay. It does not sound like wood or like metal. It sounds like a bell made of rock, which is what it is.
In the twentieth century it was cut and tuned into instruments. There are two. The sekkin is a stone xylophone, a rank of tuned slabs laid horizontally and struck with mallets. The tsuri-ishi is a set of stones hung to ring free, in one tier or two.
Why it belongs at Takamatsu and nowhere else
This province produces two stones and it is the only place that produces both.
One is Aji granite: the hardest fine-grained granite in Japan, quarried in the hills fifteen minutes from the berth and worked by hand there for over eight hundred years. That one you carve.
The other is sanukite. That one you play.
If you spend a morning in the quarries above Mure with a stone in your hands, and hear sanukite in the afternoon, you have heard the second stone of the same ground. We would build the day in that order deliberately, and we would put the performance outdoors beside the stone rather than in a concert hall, where the point is lost.
What a performance is
For a small party it is a chamber piece, and it can be heard from close enough to touch the instrument. Thirty minutes of solo playing stands on its own.
The repertoire runs from Japanese pieces every Japanese person knows — the cherry-blossom melody, the moon over the desert, the song of home — to Tsugaru shamisen material transposed onto stone, which is startling. Requests can be discussed in advance.
Afterwards, guests can strike the stones themselves. This is not a token gesture: the instrument is unfamiliar enough that everyone who touches it makes a sound they did not expect.
The one thing it needs
The player does not perform in English. Everything worth knowing about this instrument — how old the stone is, why it rings, what the piece is about — arrives through an interpreter or does not arrive at all. We supply one; it is not an optional extra.
What we arrange
The performance, in the configuration that suits the setting — the xylophone alone, or with one or two tiers of hanging stones. The place: a garden, a stone yard, a private room, the open air beside the quarries. The interpreter. And, where you want it, the whole sequence — the hill in the morning, the sound in the afternoon.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is sanukite?
A dense, fine-grained andesite found in the old province of Sanuki, now Kagawa. A German geologist, Weinschenk, gave it the name in 1891. When struck it produces a sustained metallic tone with an unusually long decay.
Can it be performed outdoors, or brought to us?
Both. The instruments can be set up indoors or outdoors provided the ground is level, and a performance can be brought to a venue rather than the party taken to one.
Is the performance given in English?
No. Everything worth knowing about the instrument arrives through an interpreter, which we supply as part of the arrangement.
More on this rotation
- The stonecutters of Aji — Takamatsu
- Isamu Noguchi's studio at Mure — Takamatsu
- George Nakashima's Japanese workshop — Takamatsu
For residents and guests of The World
The ship lies at Takamatsu for days, not hours. That single fact changes more than anything else on this page. A place that opens three days a week stops being a gamble. An artisan can give you a whole afternoon instead of a demonstration. Nothing has to be cut short to fit a gangway.
We are a Japanese company, working in Japanese, with the people who own these places. The arrangements are made by someone the other side already knows.
Enquiries are handled privately and directly, at japanroyalservice.com/contact. We do not publish our clients, our itineraries, or our rates.
Access notes
We asked these questions of each place directly, and the answers are specific to it. Most guests will have no use for them; they are here because somebody will.
The stone xylophone stands at roughly eighty centimetres — table height — so it can be played from a seated position, which is not true of most Japanese instruments a visitor is offered. The instruments travel, and can be set up indoors or on level ground outdoors.
