After some 50 years of trial and error in Akita, a remote northern city, Biko Hayashi, 67, has succeeded in reviving a rare metal craft known as kin gin mokumegane (literally, "gold and silver wood grain metal"), a skill that was developed and then promptly lost almost 300 years ago during the Edo Period.

"I have turned a 300-year-long dream into a reality. I believe I have created artworks not found anywhere else and worthy of appreciation even overseas," he says.

Kin gin mokumegane is an extraordinarily difficult technique which involves gold, silver, copper and shakudo (literally, "red copper," an alloy of copper and gold) being fused into a thin plate, forming unpredictable, gleaming patterns that sometimes look like marbling, the grain in wood, ripples, flowing streams or clouds. The plate can then be hammered into three-dimensional shapes.