Shop by craft
Best of Kamakura; search or filter for all 10
Kamakura, Kanagawa, Japan
Founded in 1900 and rooted in ham-making techniques introduced to Kamakura by British trader William Curtis in 1874, this house still cures loin ham, boneless ham, sausage and canned specialties by hand. It has supplied hotels and Olympic events in Tokyo and Sapporo while keeping its original Kamakura workshop running.
Best for Traditional cured ham and sausage
Nishi-Kamakura (West Kamakura)
Chanoko is a Nishi-Kamakura wagashi shop that has passed recipes from father to daughter for over a century, making small-batch sweets from rice and beans with minimal preservatives. Its lineup runs from monthly seasonal confections to standing items like manju and sekihan mochi, sold both from the shop and by mail order.
Best for Seasonal wagashi and manju
Near Hase-dera, Hase, Kamakura
Chikaramochiya has made Gongoro chikaramochi, a soft rice-cake wrapped in sweet bean paste, for over 300 years and nine generations from the same shop near Hase-dera. The confections are still produced without additives, using the mochi-pounding method the family has kept since the Edo period.
Best for Gongoro chikaramochi rice cakes
Wadazuka / Kamakura Station area, Kamakura
Inoue Kamaboko hand-forms fish paste into kamaboko, hanpen and koban-age using whole fish selected for the Kamakura trade, a craft the shop calls the daiginjo of fish. It sells directly from its own storefronts near Kamakura Station rather than through department-store counters.
Best for Fresh kamaboko fish cake
Wakamiya-oji / Komachi-dori, Kamakura
Kamaku curates handmade tableware, glassware and pottery from independent Japanese potters across three small Kamakura storefronts near Tsurugaoka Hachimangu. Alongside ceramics it stocks grapevine-basket bags from Yamagata, coral jewelry and carved wooden Buddha figures, all chosen for daily use rather than display.
Best for Artist-made pottery and tableware
Kamakura / Japan / Online
Japan's great value shirtmaker — the Sciolto line is its one-piece collar family, from Tokyo Fit flannels to MTM bodies cut for the construction. Established 1993.
Best for Sciolto one-piece collars at honest prices.
Komachi-dori, Yukinoshita, Kamakura
On Komachi-dori in Kamakura for decades, Koju Tenkundo sells kyara, jinko and byakudan aromatic woods alongside incense sticks, and runs a monthly kōdō class taught by the head of the Iekyō-ryū school plus a beginner incense session.
Best for Kyara, jinko and byakudan aromatic woods alongside incense sticks
Koju Tenkundo (formally Kōshi Kitō Tenkundō) has traded on Komachi-dori, Kamakura's main shopping street, for decades, drawing on the fragrance culture that developed in the city during its centuries as a samurai stronghold. The shop's core stock is aromatic wood rather than pre-blended sticks alone: kyara and jinko (grades of agarwood) and byakudan (sandalwood), the base materials of kōdō, the Japanese incense-appreciation ceremony, sold alongside seasonal incense sticks and gift sets. Kōdō itself is one of Japan's three classical refinement arts, alongside tea ceremony and flower arranging, with roots reaching back roughly 1,400 years; Koju Tenkundo keeps the practice active rather than treating it as history, running a monthly class taught directly by the head of the Iekyō-ryū kōdō school, plus a more casual monthly incense-appreciation session for beginners priced around ¥3,500. The shop sits at 1-7-5 Yukinoshita in Kamakura, a short walk from the old town's temple district, positioning it as both a working incense retailer and one of the few remaining places where a visitor can sit in on formal kōdō instruction rather than just buying the wood.
Yukinoshita, near Tsurugaoka Hachimangu, Kamakura
Sansuido has hand-carved and lacquered Kamakura-bori tableware since 1980, near Tsurugaoka Hachimangu shrine. Its trays, bowls and tea implements in katsura and magnolia wood continue a technique tracing to 12th-century temple carvers.
Best for Hand-carved Kamakura-bori trays, bowls and matcha implements
Kamakura-bori dates to the 12th century, when Minamoto no Yoritomo established his shogunate in Kamakura and drew skilled Buddhist sculptors from across Japan to the new capital. Those carvers began making lacquered ritual implements and incense containers for the city's temples, and the style that resulted - fine relief carving under a muted, deepening lacquer finish - carries a clear imprint of Zen aesthetics rather than court decoration. Sansuido, founded in 1980 on the street leading to Tsurugaoka Hachimangu shrine, works in that tradition today with its own in-house artisans, who hand-carve trays, bowls, plates, chopsticks and tea implements from katsura and magnolia wood before building up the surface in layered urushi lacquer. The shop's catalog runs from round, hexadecagonal, mokko-shaped and square trays through matcha containers and sake cups to smaller pieces like card trays and hand mirrors, and it takes custom orders and lacquer-repair work on pieces already in use - a craft explicitly designed to darken and deepen with handling rather than stay pristine. In recent years Sansuido has shown its work at trade exhibitions in Frankfurt, Paris and Dalian, part of a deliberate push to carry Kamakura-bori beyond Japan. For visitors, it's a working shop rather than a museum piece: artisan-made lacquerware, sold a few steps from the shrine approach that gives the neighborhood its name.
Komachi-dori / Wakamiya-oji, Kamakura
Toshimaya has baked its butter-rich hato sabure, a dove-shaped sablé biscuit, in Kamakura since the Meiji era, and the recipe and pigeon silhouette have stayed the local souvenir of choice ever since. The company operates multiple shops around the city and Kanagawa but remains a single family confectionery business rather than a national chain.
Best for Hato sabure butter cookies
Komachi-dori, Kamakura
Mikura is a pickle specialist on Kamakura's Komachi-dori shopping street, selling tsukemono such as pickled eggplant, cucumber, radish and umeboshi plums by weight for tasting and takeaway. The shop lets browsers sample pickles before buying, a practice that has made it a regular stop on the pedestrian street leading to Tsurugaoka Hachimangu.
Best for Japanese pickles (tsukemono)
Neighbourhood walks
Area names come from each shop’s published address record; ORBIS does not invent neighbourhoods.
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