The incense holder that thinks it’s a button

It arrived looking like it had fallen off a very expensive coat. We kept it anyway.

Someone here spent a genuine minute working out which shirt it belonged to. In its defence, it is a convincing button: turned solid brass, a shallow dish of a face, a raised rim, and three drilled holes arranged just off-centre, the way a real button never quite sits straight either. It is about the size of the ones on a good winter coat, and roughly the weight of a pebble you would keep.

The joke, it turns out, is also the design. One hole takes an incense stick upright, for a slow burn straight up. One takes it at a lean, so the ash falls inwards. The third does nothing at all, which we have decided is for symmetry and not laziness. Or… Just use a different size of incenses.

Brass being brass, it will not stay this bright. Handled daily it dulls to a warmer, softer gold, and around the holes it will darken first — a small record of how often you use it. Left alone in a drawer, it stays smug and shiny and useless. We would rather you wore it in.

A small ritual for it, since a button belongs near a coat: keep it on the shelf or table where you put your keys down. Light a stick of Kayuragi as you take your coat off, before you touch your phone. By the time the smoke has found the ceiling, you are home — which is really all the object is for. It costs you the length of one match.

Worth knowing — incense in Japan was long used to measure time as much as to scent a room. A stick’s burn was a unit of work: temples timed meditation by it, and in the old entertainment districts an evening’s fee was reckoned in senkōdai, literally “incense stick money”. Your keys-down stick is an old habit in new clothes.

Click the image above to explore the Brass Button Incense Holder.

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The Incense Japan Reaches For Every Day

There’s a difference between an object kept for best and one that gets used without thinking. Mainichi-koh belongs firmly to the second kind. The name translates roughly as “everyday incense,” and that’s exactly what it is.

Made by Nippon Kodo, it’s the best-selling incense in Japan — the box that sits in a great many Japanese homes, opened without ceremony most days of the week. The scent is sandalwood: sweet, fresh and woody, elegant rather than heavy. It settles into a room rather than announcing itself, and lingers gently for a while after the last stick has burned down.

What sets it apart from most incense sold in the West is what’s missing from it. There’s no bamboo stick running through the centre. The whole stick is incense, pressed and dried, which means far less smoke and no undertone of burning wood beneath the fragrance — just the sandalwood itself. Anyone who has found conventional stick incense too smoky for a small room will notice the difference immediately.

Practically, a box goes a long way. Each stick is around 135mm and burns for roughly thirty minutes — long enough to see out a bath, a stretch of reading, or the slow part of an evening — and there are 360 sticks to a box. Bought once, it lasts.

If you’re new to Japanese incense, this is a sensible place to begin. It’s not trying to impress anyone. Light one when you sit down to work, or when the day turns over into evening, and let it mark the change.

Worth knowing: Mainichi-koh has been made since 1912, and it changed something. Before it, fine incense in Japan largely belonged to the world of kōdō — the refined “way of incense,” an aristocratic pastime with its own etiquette and appreciation games, well out of reach of most households. Mainichi-koh put good sandalwood on the shelf as an everyday thing, to be enjoyed simply for itself. Nippon Kodo’s own incense-making lineage runs back further still, to a Kyoto house founded in 1575 that supplied rare aromatics to the Imperial Court.

Click an image below to explore Mainichi-koh Sandalwood incense.