Tabako: Japan's Tradition of Tobacco and Fine-Cutting

Tabako is the Japanese word for tobacco, borrowed from the language of the Portuguese who brought the plant to the country. Until cigarettes spread with the Meiji period, the form smoked in pipes throughout Japan was kizami-tabako: tobacco obtained by slicing the leaves hair-thin with a blade and smoked dry in the slender metal pipe called the kiseru.

This tradition was born in the same century that tobacco spread across Europe and the Mediterranean, yet it forms a branch all its own within the world history of the pipe.

Tobacco's Arrival on the Islands

Exactly when tobacco reached Japan is unknown. The plant is thought to have entered Kyushu in the second half of the 16th century through the nanban trade carried on Portuguese and Spanish ships; some accounts push this back as far as the 1540s, though documented traces appear only after the 1570s. The first records with a firm date belong to the early 17th century. In 1601, a Franciscan friar arriving at Hirado in Hizen is recorded as having presented tobacco seed to the local lord Matsura Shigenobu, and that same year a cleric named Geronimo de Jesus is recorded as having given seed to Tokugawa Ieyasu; a stone monument on the site of Hirado Castle commemorates the first of these events. The first planting is said to have taken place in Nagasaki in 1605. It is known that in the following decades the authorities tried to restrict both smoking and the area under cultivation, confining tobacco to land unsuited to rice, but that these prohibitions did not hold.