Gold in Japan: From Sado to the Kihei Chain

Around 1300, Marco Polo's Travels described an island called Zipangu whose king lived in a palace "roofed with pure gold", its floors paved in gold "two fingers thick". Polo never went there, and the palace has never been found. Yet the rumour carried a truth that outlasted the legend. For thirteen centuries Japan has mined, coined, beaten and worn precious metal with unusual seriousness, and it has kept what it made. That long habit of keeping is why Tokyo remains one of the best places in the world to find gold and platinum in fine order today.

This essay follows the metal from the gold-leafed hall at Hiraizumi to the flat gold chain on a Tokyo commuter's neck. It belongs to a set of five: the flagship essay Why the World's Treasures Came to Rest in Japan, a walk through Okachimachi, Tokyo's jewellery quarter, an account of Ginza and the watch, and a guide to how Japan cares for jewellery and watches.

A palace roofed in gold

Japan's first gold was found in 749, in the river gravels of Oshu in the north-east. It arrived at the right moment: Nara was casting the Great Buddha, and about 439 kilograms of the gold used on the statue, completed in 752, came from Oshu. By one estimate Japan produced around 255 tons of gold between the eighth and sixteenth centuries, roughly five per cent of everything mined in the world before the California gold rush. Polo heard the echo of that output in China, and his "palace roofed with gold" was enough to send Columbus west in search of it.

Many visitors to the north like to think the palace Polo heard of was a real building. Its best candidate still stands.

Hiraizumi and the Konjikido

In 1124 Fujiwara no Kiyohira completed a small hall at Chuson-ji, in Hiraizumi, and covered it in gold leaf inside and out. The Konjikido, the Golden Hall, enshrines Amida and serves as the mausoleum of the Northern Fujiwara, whose mummified bodies lie beneath its altars. Its pillars carry maki-e lacquer, mother-of-pearl inlay and gold; its peacocks were hammered into shape and gilded. The city around it was largely destroyed in 1189, yet the hall survived with almost ninety per cent of its original fabric. It was enclosed by a wooden shelter in 1288, and since 1965 it has stood behind glass inside a concrete building.

The Konjikido was the first structure in Japan designated a National Treasure, and Hiraizumi was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in June 2011. Whether it was Polo's palace is another matter. Chuson-ji's own scholars are careful: as Haseki Shinsho told a government journal, "there really is no historic basis for the 'King's palace' theory at present." The hall does not need the legend. It is evidence enough of a region with so much gold that it could clothe a building in it.

Silver from Iwami, gold from Sado

The sixteenth century turned Japan from a gold country into a silver power. In 1526 the merchant Kamiya Jutei developed the Iwami Ginzan mine in Shimane, and he later introduced a refining method from Korea, known in Japan as haifukiho. At its peak in the early 1600s the mine produced around 38 tons of silver a year, and Japan as a whole is estimated to have produced about 200 tons annually, often cited as a third of the world's silver. The figure is an estimate and should be read as one; the scale it describes is not in doubt. Iwami worked for almost four centuries until it closed in 1923, and it became a World Heritage Site in 2007.

Gold came from the island of Sado, off Niigata. In 1603 Tokugawa Ieyasu took direct control of the Sado mine, alongside the gold of Izu, to fund the shogunate's new currency. Sado's miners worked by hand, without machines, until the end of the shogunate in the mid-nineteenth century, and that late flowering of traditional mining is what UNESCO recognised when it inscribed the Sado Island Gold Mines on 27 July 2024, by consensus of the 46th World Heritage Committee.

Oban, koban and the ryo

The shogunate built a money system on three metals: gold, silver and copper. At the top sat the oban, large oval plaques of gold between 14 and 17 centimetres long. The Tensho oban of 1588 weighed about 165 grams and held 70 to 76 per cent gold. Oban were rarely spent; they served mostly as gifts. Everyday gold was the koban, a smaller coin first struck in 1601 with a face value of one ryo. Six main varieties of oban are recorded, and koban were reissued, and debased, many times before both were retired after the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

Japan did not always keep its gold. When the ports opened in 1858, gold abroad was worth fifteen or sixteen times its weight in silver, while in Japan silver coin could be converted at about five to one. Foreign traders brought silver in and carried gold out: in 1860 alone some four million ryo, around 70 tons of gold, left the country before the shogunate cut the gold content of its coins by two thirds. The inflation that followed is counted among the causes of the shogunate's fall.

Gold beaten thin: Hideyoshi's tea room and Kanazawa leaf

Gold in Japan has often been spread rather than stacked. Around 1586 Toyotomi Hideyoshi had a portable tea room made of gold, about the size of three tatami mats, and carried it to the Imperial Palace to serve tea to Emperor Ogimachi. It appeared again at the Grand Kitano Tea Ceremony on 1 November 1587. The original is lost; the most carefully researched reconstruction stands at the MOA Museum of Art in Atami, and another at Osaka Castle. The wider story of Japan's appetite for gold surfaces is told in Japanese Maximalism and, for temple sculpture, in Gold on the Buddha.

The leaf on those surfaces comes, overwhelmingly, from one city. Kanazawa produces about 99 per cent of Japan's gold leaf and has done so for more than four hundred years. Its beaters work gold down to about one ten-thousandth of a millimetre, and the quality of the paper between the sheets is said to decide the quality of the leaf. Kanazawa leaf gilds the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto and the Toshogu shrine at Nikko; it also finishes the lacquer and ceramics that find their way into Japanese homes, and the golden seams of kintsugi.

Platinum, the white metal of Japanese vows

No country took to platinum as Japan did. In 1891 Mansaburo Muramatsu became the first person in Japan to melt it successfully, and in 1893 the Tokyo jeweller Tenshodo showed a jewelled platinum clip. By 1910 Mikimoto's platinum pieces were a mark of status, and the Imperial Household commissioned tiaras and regalia in the metal. Platinum imports were freed in 1952, ahead of gold and diamonds; Crown Princess Michiko wore a platinum tiara in her televised wedding parade in the late 1950s; and when De Beers arrived in 1965 with the diamond engagement ring, platinum became its natural setting.

The habit holds. In 2024, 92 per cent of engagement rings and 82 per cent of wedding bands sold in Japan were platinum. The reasons are practical as well as symbolic: a naturally white metal needs no plating, does not tarnish in a humid summer or a mineral-rich hot spring, and holds a stone securely. A saying familiar in the trade puts it simply: good jewellery is platinum jewellery. This is why so many pieces from Japan carry the stamps Pt900 or Pt850, explained in our guide to Japanese gold and platinum marks.

Tanaka and the habit of holding gold

Japanese households have long treated gold as something to hold, not only to wear. Tanaka Kikinzoku, founded in 1885 by Tanaka Umekichi, grew into one of the country's great refiners and still keeps a public face in the Ginza Tanaka store. Its own company history records a "Second Gold Boom" between November 1981 and September 1982, when a fall in the domestic gold price drew large numbers of private buyers into bars and coins. Gold bought in those years did not vanish; much of it was made, sooner or later, into chains and rings.

The kihei chain

Stand on any Tokyo platform and you will see it: a flat, close-linked chain in yellow gold or white platinum, worn at the neck or wrist by people of every age. Japan calls it kihei. It is made from a chain of rounded links, the kind the trade calls azuki chain, twisted and pressed flat so that the links lie in a single shining plane. The facets are then cut: two, six, eight or twelve faces, the more faces the finer the sparkle. Single, double and triple constructions change the density, and a triple kihei weighs noticeably more than a single of the same length. For how each length sits on the body, from 40 to 75 cm, see our necklace length chart, worn.

The name is disputed. One account credits an Edo-period craftsman called Suzuki Kihei; another links it to the chains carried by cavalry, kihei, in the era of the American Civil War; a third says only that the chain's roots lie in Europe. What is clear is when it became Japanese. In the high-growth decades kihei became a way of wearing savings, and it is still made chiefly in K18 gold and Pt850 platinum. A kihei with its purity stamp and a recorded weight is one of the most honest objects in jewellery: its value is written in its metal.

A timeline in metal

Era	Metal	What it shaped	Where to see it today
749–752	Gold from Oshu	The gilding of the Great Buddha	Todai-ji, Nara
1124	Gold leaf	The Konjikido, a hall clothed in gold	Chuson-ji, Hiraizumi
1526–1923	Silver	Japan's place in world trade	Iwami Ginzan, Shimane
1588–1868	Gold coin	Oban gifts and the koban of one ryo	Sado Island; the Bank of Japan Currency Museum, Tokyo
c. 1586 onwards	Gold leaf	The golden tea room; Kanazawa's craft	MOA Museum of Art, Atami; Kanazawa
1891 onwards	Platinum	Imperial regalia, then the wedding ring	Ginza jewellers; any Japanese bride's hand
1950s onwards	K18 gold, Pt850	The kihei chain as worn savings	Okachimachi's workshops and counters

The great houses in Japanese hands

Japan's taste for honest metal made it one of the most faithful homes for the jewellery houses of Paris, Rome and New York. The pieces we hold from them were bought, worn and kept in Japan; a few facts about each explain why they deserve the care.

• Cartier: Aldo Cipullo designed the Love bracelet in 1969, closed with screws and opened only with the small screwdriver supplied with every bracelet, and followed it in 1971 with the Juste un Clou nail. See the Cartier collection.
• Van Cleef & Arpels: the first Alhambra long necklace, the clover of luck, was made in 1968. Its story is told in our Alhambra guide.
• Tiffany & Co.: the house adopted the English sterling standard of 925 parts in a thousand well before it became the official standard in the United States. The marks are read in Tiffany Silver; pieces are in the Tiffany collection.
• Bulgari: founded in 1884 by the silversmith Sotirios Voulgaris, the Roman house introduced its Serpenti bracelet-watches at the end of the 1940s and the B.zero1 ring in 1999. See the Bulgari collection.
• Harry Winston: the "King of Diamonds" gave the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian, and it arrived on 10 November 1958 in a plain brown package sent by registered mail for $145.29. See the Harry Winston collection.
• Chrome Hearts: in 2026 the Los Angeles silver house returned to Mikimoto for a second collaboration, this time in 22-karat yellow gold with Akoya pearls, offered at Mikimoto's Ginza Main Store among others. The house's silver is read in our Chrome Hearts guide, and Japan's pearls in Pearls Explained.

Five things worth knowing

• Every one of the roughly 5,000 medals at the Tokyo 2020 Games was made from recycled phones and small electronics: 6.21 million phones, which yielded 32 kilograms of gold, 3,500 kilograms of silver and 2,200 kilograms of bronze.
• In Kanazawa, a piece of gold the size of a coin can be beaten into a sheet as large as a dining table.
• The Tensho oban of 1588 weighed about 165 grams, heavier than many modern bangles.
• The Konjikido was the first building in Japan to be named a National Treasure.
• Japan's platinum craft is younger than many assume: it began in 1891, when Mansaburo Muramatsu first succeeded in melting the metal.

Reading metal as a collector

All this history arrives on the counter as small, practical questions. Look first for the purity stamp: K18, K22 or K24 for gold, Pt900 or Pt850 for platinum, sometimes with the Japan Mint's assay mark. Ask for the weight: for a kihei it is part of the description. Check clasps, and on chains look for stretched or flattened links. The original box and papers matter as much here as with a watch; why Japan keeps them is the subject of Kept in the Box.

Frequently asked questions

Why is so much Japanese jewellery made in platinum?

Platinum reached Japan's imperial jewellers in the 1890s, was freed for import in 1952 and became the setting for the diamond engagement ring from 1965. Today most Japanese engagement rings and wedding bands are platinum, valued for its natural white colour and its resistance to tarnish.

What is a kihei chain?

A flat chain made by twisting a chain of rounded links and pressing it into one plane, then cutting facets (commonly two, six, eight or twelve). It is made mostly in K18 gold and Pt850 platinum, and is valued by weight as well as by craft.

What does K18 or Pt850 mean on a piece from Japan?

K18 is 18-karat gold, 750 parts in a thousand; Pt850 is platinum at 850 parts in a thousand. Our hallmark guide explains every common stamp and the Mint's mark.

Can I see historic Japanese gold in person?

Yes. The Konjikido at Chuson-ji in Hiraizumi, the Sado and Iwami Ginzan mines, the golden tea room reconstruction at the MOA Museum of Art and the Bank of Japan Currency Museum in Tokyo all show it.

Further reading

• Why the World's Treasures Came to Rest in Japan
• Okachimachi: Tokyo's Jewellery Quarter
• Ginza and the Watch
• Kept in the Box: How Japan Cares for Jewellery and Watches
• Japanese Gold and Platinum Marks
• Nihonga materials: mineral pigments, shell white and gold leaf, for the materials behind the luminous surfaces of Japanese-style painting