How to Build a Sundown Set
If you're new to this, the first thing you notice is that nobody explains it. Someone posts a photo with a row of feathers, a few small silver charms and a wheel hanging off a chain, and there's no obvious entry point. Prices run from a few tens of pounds to a few hundred and it isn't clear which of those you need, or in what order.
Where this comes from
The Japanese take on Native American silverwork is about fifty years old and it starts with one man. Goro Takahashi spent time with the Oglala Lakota, was adopted by a Lakota family, and became the first Japanese person to dance in a Sun Dance. He came home and in 1972 opened a shop on Omotesando-dori in Harajuku, becoming the first officially sanctioned Native American-style silversmith in Japan. Goro's is still there, and still has no website.
What followed became a craft tradition in its own right. First Arrow's arrived in 1996 under Kazuya Ito, Tady & King belongs to the same scene, and a whole vocabulary grew up around them along with a set of unwritten rules about how the pieces get worn.
Two separate traditions sit inside the work. The technique is Southwest, where Navajo silversmithing sits, so stamping, turquoise in rope bezels, everything struck by hand. The symbolism is Plains, largely Lakota, so the eagle, the feather, the thunderbird and the medicine wheel.
Katou Shun works in that lineage. He trained in Harajuku and has been making jewellery for nineteen years, now from his own workshop in Kameari, out in the shitamachi on the north-east edge of Tokyo.
The chain
Hand-stamped sterling silver in azuki link, in a range of gauges and lengths. 50cm is the standard men's length and where most people land.
The clasp is an eagle head hook and a jump ring rather than a lobster, which is the detail that makes the whole system work, since pendants thread on and off from the hook end without dismantling anything. The same detail is the one thing about these chains that will let you down, because a hook can come undone in water, so take it off before you swim.
On gauge, the lighter chains sit close and stay out of the way of what they carry. The middle weight handles almost anything, which is why most people end up there. The heaviest has real presence but loses the smaller feathers in those links, so pair it with the larger sizes. If you already own a chain you like, every feather we sell will fit it.
The feather
Every one is the bald eagle's tail feather in 925 silver, and the full size runs 7cm by 1.6cm. What separates them is ornament, and the price ladder maps onto it almost exactly.
Plain is the starting point and comes in several sizes. Arabesque adds engraving cut down the vane by hand. Then the chest feather that covers the eagle's heart, then the talon gripping the quill, cast from Shun's own sculpture, then turquoise set in a rope bezel. The most worked pieces carry all of it at once.
The thing to understand before ordering is that each feather is mirrored, left facing and right facing, and you are buying one of them. Our photographs show both so you can see the difference, which we know reads as a pair, and it isn't. It's also why they work together, since a left and a right curve away from each other, and that's what you're looking at in every stacked photo you've seen.
Ordered without a chain, every feather comes strung on a leather lace with antique red trade beads, so it can be worn from the moment it arrives.
The connector
The medicine wheel sits at the clasp, where the hook meets the chain, so it rides at the side of your neck rather than the front. That surprises most people, because it looks like a pendant.
Its job is to gather what hangs behind it, holding a row of feathers and charms so they sit the way you want. The Eagle Plate Connector does the same work with a bird instead of a circle. Either can be hung at the front if you would rather, but that is not what they were made for. Whichever you choose, the jump rings come with it.
The charms
The small pieces, and the reason a set carries on growing.
Most are a single strike. The silver gets melted down, worked by hand, and the design goes in with one blow, so there's no correcting it afterwards. The roses take five stamps to build. The small Light eagle takes two punches and fifteen blows.
They hang from the hook, from a wheel, or beside a feather, and they fit every chain we sell.
The four Ls
Shun puts one of four meanings into everything he makes: Love, Life, Luck or Light. It's struck into the back of the piece, where nobody but the wearer sees it.
The medicine wheel is the exception. For him the cross inside the ring stands for all four together, and the ring means that everything, including you, is connected. It's the only piece carrying the whole set, which is part of why it sits at the clasp rather than out front.
Where to start
A light chain and a small plain feather is a complete piece to wear rather than the beginning of a project, and it's the cheapest way in.
If you can stretch further, the full-size plain feather is the piece the rest of the range is built around. Whichever you begin with, the second purchase is usually another feather in a different design rather than a larger version of the same one.