Tsuge

Tsuge is a brand founded in Tokyo in 1936, considered today Japan's largest pipe manufacturer. The company's story does not actually begin as a pipe story: founder Kyoichiro Tsuge entered the trade as an apprentice to a master who made ivory cigarette holders. This path — from ivory mouthpieces to cherry wood, then to briar, and finally to hand-shaped freehand pipes — also traces the main line of the brand's more than eighty years of production history.

From Ivory Mouthpiece to Pipe

Kyoichiro Tsuge, records indicate, was born in 1911 in the Ishikawa region of western Japan; what is told of his family background rests largely on the company's own catalog and has not been confirmed by independent records. Orphaned at a young age, he was brought to Tokyo by relatives and began learning to make ivory mouthpieces. In the language of the time, these thin mouthpieces were also called "pipes"; the brand's name was thus associated with a tobacco implement long before briar was ever worked.

He opened his own workshop in 1936. The Second World War, however, soon derailed the business; the benches were redirected at government demand to producing wooden rifle stocks. When the war ended, ivory supply was nearly impossible to come by, so Tsuge kept production going by sourcing cherry wood from the Tohoku region.