Isaburo Kado (1940–2005) was a Japanese lacquer artist born in Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture. At the age of 15, he became an apprentice to the master chinkin artist Tetsushiro Hashimoto. After completing his apprenticeship in 1962, he produced lacquer panels and other pictorial works using the chinkin technique, in which fine lines are carved into lacquer and filled with gold.
At the age of 24, Kado was accepted for the first time into the Nitten, Japan’s prestigious national art exhibition. He was selected 17 times thereafter and received the Nitten Special Award in 1978. In the early 1980s, he withdrew from public art competitions and devoted himself primarily to the creation of lacquer bowls.
Deeply inspired by the traditional gōroku bowls of the Noto Peninsula, which he encountered in the early 1970s, Kado sought to express the primal beauty of traditional Japanese lacquerware through a contemporary sensibility. He died in 2005 at the age of 65.