Thanks for your help, really appreciated. Ultimately though the wood doesn’t even matter as they are all quite beautiful
Considering I got them at auction. I guess I was just lucky, as not all auctions had perfect pictures and descriptions.
bogiesan wrote:
Really hard to tell on the last bowl but, if you compare the quality of the lathe work (precision of the thickness, elegance of the shape, evidence of knife marks, the wax finish, and the difficult bits such as the lid coming from the same wood blank, the lid fit, and the parting cuts on the base that separated the bowl from the wood blank), you can sort of decide if they are in the upper or lower quality range.
These bowls were more or less an afterthought as the main act of the auction were size 30 (many 31 when measured with calipers) yuki stones in great condition. Both bowls and lids have the same dimensions with a difference of < 1 mm, they are smooth to the touch. Especially the lids have an impeccable finish. They seem to be crafted by an artisan. Initially I thought of Kusu, the golden shimmer reminded me of
your bowls, but then the annual rings of my bowls aren’t as pronounced and they aren’t as dark and more reddish as well. So maybe Keyaki, described on
kiseido.com as having "golden brown color". That would be an adequate description, even more so would be "they glisten and change color as they are tilted in the light". That’s how Shimakuwa (island mulberry) bowls are portrayed on kiseido. But again annual rings on all Shimakuwa bowls I’ve seen are way more pronounced, all their lids had a lip/rim and I think they wouldn’t be a good match for the stones mentioned earlier given their price.
I guess I have to dig a little bit deeper and look for a Japanese Go forum