The Easiest Way to Add Whimsy to Your Tablescape Is Through Chopstick Rests

Eater

2 days ago

Verdant green okra, golden brown croissants, glossy dango, roasted fish: No, this isn't a farmer's market or a boulangerie or a Japanese night market or a themeless dinner party; it's a peek into Namiko Hirasawa Chen's kitchen drawer, dedicated to her meticulously organized collection of hashi oki, or chopstick rests.
'I've liked miniature hashi okis since my childhood,' says Chen. 'I've been collecting them since college and my mom has a beautiful collection. Whenever we travel in Japan on family trips, we always stop by a local ceramic store to buy hashi oki.'
Chen's collection, collected over nearly 30 years of cooking and traveling back and forth to Japan, is as vast as it is eclectic, a summation of her journey as the cook behind JustOneCookbook, the internet's largest English-language Japanese cooking site. It's also an inheritance, in more ways than one, from her mother — the original hashi oki collector in the family. If you peruse the hundreds of recipes that Chen has tablescaped on her website, you'll notice her photos include pieces from her collection — some of which she found, some she inherited from her mother — from the tiny ceramic eggplant she staged for her miso-glazed eggplant recipe to the shiitake mushroom hashi oki seen in her sukiyakidon recipe. For Chen, hashi okis are an unsung yet essential supporting player in Japanese tablescaping, and an easy, affordable, and meaningful way for hosts to elevate their dining tables.
'I think it's one of the most inexpensive investments out of all of the tableware that people can make,' Chen explains. While statement tableware pieces can run a pretty penny, hashi okis are remarkably affordable and approachable, with many priced around $10 in the United States — and even less in Japan, due to favorable exchange rates. 'Ever since I started blogging, I'm always thinking about how I can match my hashi oki with the dish based on the color, season, or food,' Chen says. 'It's a small thing that makes a huge difference in the presentation of a meal.'
While the cutlery rests you see in restaurants and food editorial spreads typically adopt a sterile, brutalist aesthetic designed with function and minimalism in mind, hashi okis are, in contrast, delightfully whimsical. They are usually handmade by craftsmen in Japan and are endlessly varied in form, function, setting and origin. Occasionally, they are maximalist for the sake of being maximalist, despite serving a simple, sanitary function: to hold the tips of your used chopsticks. In an era of laissez-faire, anything-goes tablescaping, hashi okis are a perfect outlet for self-expression and experimentation.
For the most part, Chen likes to match her hashi okis with the ingredients in the dishes she makes, but she also likes mixing it up, letting her intuition guide her.
Namiko Hirasawa Chen
'Hashi okis are definitely necessary for a proper set up,' Chen says. 'I pick things that bring me joy. For summer, I'll use a hashi oki shaped like a fan or made of clear glass, but if I'm serving a vegetable-based dish, I'll use a vegetable hashi oki.' Her absolute favorites are hashi okis shaped like Mount Fuji.
Chen's husband and business partner, Shen Chen, has his own preference. 'My favorite is the iron tea kettle hashi oki, the tetsubin, that can match a set-up that involves tea,' he says. 'There's an indescribable happiness that comes with matching hashi oki with a meal. Hashi oki really completes the story of the meal.'
While hashi okis can be an endless outlet for creative tablescaping, there are limits towhat constitutes a traditional Japanese tablescape, Chen says. For example, your chopsticks and hashi oki should never be positioned vertically in your set-up ('That's a big no no,' says Chen) but instead placed 'between yourself and the plate horizontally.' Part of this is etiquette ('it's rude to point the dirty tips of your chopstick to someone else,' Chen explains) and context ('When chopsticks are vertical, it's used for a funeral in Japan'), but there's also a deeper history at play, one that dates back to hashi oki's origins as a ceremonial tool in 7th century Japan.
Long before they arrived on dining room tables, chopstick rests were originally used by members of the clergy of Shinto shrines as a way to maintain the purity of their chopsticks when offering sacred food to the gods. Called mimikaware (耳土器), these clay rests were unglazed and, like their namesake, ear-shaped, and used in a horizontal orientation with chopsticks to signify a sacred boundary between the divine realm of nature and the impure human world. While mimikaware evolved and in the Heian period became hashi oki for aristocrats and the imperial family, this sensibility lived on as chopstick rests arrived at dining tables for the general public during the Meiji period with the introduction of western-style communal dining to Japan. Today, when Japanese people say 'itadakimasu' before a meal and lift their chopsticks from their hashi oki, they invoke a piece of this history, breaking a symbolic barrier with the impure to consume a sacred gift from the divine: food.
It's this ethos — that dining and table settings are deeply intentional acts, loaded with history, meaning, and, yes, beauty — that Chen inherited from her mother, and one that she hopes to impart to diners looking to shape their own tablescapes with hashi oki, whether it's found online or at tableware stores across Japan. This sensibility is a large part of the reason why hashi okis are a prominent featured category on the Chens' tableware store, JOC Goods, which they launched last September after visiting 15 kilns across Japan. The process of starting the business, along with a trip they made to kilns in the Aichi prefecture last February, furthered their appreciation for the craftsmanship and deep history behind something as simple and small as a hashi oki.
Jason Leung for Just One Cookbook
'In Japan, there are different regions and different regions have different clay, which leads to different styles of ceramics and craftsmanship,' explains Chen. 'We want people to know that when you see hashi oki, someone put care into making this, forming the clay, painting it, glazing it, baking it in the kiln, and inspecting it. So much is put into it compared to something that is mass produced.'
If you're looking to buy hashi oki of your own, Chen recommends collecting individual pieces slowly over time, whether that be on your travels or browsing online. She believes that intentionality is key to the joy of hashi oki, and that your collection should reflect your personal tastes and experiences. 'I always pick things I feel connected to,' she says. 'If you have hashi oki you like, just using that every day, just stopping and looking at it, that can give you so much joy.'
For the Chens, each hashi oki is a memory and a place; a reminder to pause, slow down, and appreciate the sacred in everyday life, whether that be a meal or a trip. There's the rustic, flat lotus root hashi oki they bought during an eye-opening 2023 trip to the Imbe township in the Okayama prefecture, the birthplace of the millennium-old craft of Bizen pottery known for its earthy red-brown tone and texture. There are the countless variations of ceramic hashi okis that they've found in stores across the Japanese countryside on summer family trips. And then, there are the hashi okis that started it all: the ones that Chen grew up setting on the table for her mother and carried with her halfway across the world in suitcases to the United States, where they now sit in her kitchen drawer, reminding her of how far she's come.
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