Made to age.

This is an Edo silver house in Taito, Tokyo — Nisshin Kikinzoku, where the silversmith is Kamikawa Yoshitsugu. Twelve generations, he told me; his son will be the thirteenth. The company kept its old name, and he built a second one, Gindendo, so the work could travel.

You hammer the ring by hand, he said, about four hundred and eighty times. That is what makes it strong: struck by hand, not pressed by a machine — a different kind of strong. Then five minutes more to strike in your own mark.

This silver isn't made to stay new. Wear it, and the tarnish wears off; that's the whole care routine. Most things are best the day you buy them — this one you grow, and hand down, your children then theirs. Even the checkered pattern some visitors call Louis Vuitton, he noted, is a Japanese one, and older.