Category: Journal

The oldest paper documents in the world that are still intact are Japanese, from the year 702. They are written on washi, and they look rather better than most paper from 1980.

Washi simply means Japanese paper, but the word has come to stand for a particular thing: paper made by hand from the inner bark of the kozo mulberry, the mitsumata or the gampi shrub, formed on a bamboo screen in cold water and dried in the sun. It is strong because its fibres are long, and it lasts because the process uses no acid, no chlorine and no wood pulp.

A winter job

Papermaking in Mino, the town in Gifu where our letter sets come from, has always been winter work. The kozo is harvested in December and steamed so the bark can be stripped; the bark is then soaked in the river, scraped clean of its dark outer layer, boiled with wood ash and beaten by hand into a soft pulp. Cold water matters: it slows the natural decay of the fibres and gives the papermaker more time to form each sheet.

The forming itself takes a few seconds and a lifetime. The papermaker dips a bamboo screen into a vat of pulp and water mixed with neri, a viscous extract of the tororo-aoi root that keeps the fibres suspended, then rocks the screen back and forth so the fibres interlock in every direction. Mino’s technique, nagashi-zuki, throws the excess water off the far edge of the screen in a single motion. Done well it looks like nothing. Done badly the sheet is thick at one end.

Why it feels different

Hold a sheet of Mino washi up to the window and you can see the fibres, laid in soft crossing clouds. The surface is warm and faintly textured rather than smooth, and a fountain pen glides over it with almost no feathering because the fibres absorb ink evenly instead of wicking it sideways. The edges, left untrimmed, are soft and irregular where the pulp thinned out against the frame.

In 2014 the hand-papermaking of Mino, together with Sekishu and Hosokawa, was added to UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage. There are now fewer than a dozen full-time papermakers left in the town. We buy our letter sets from one of them, a couple in their sixties whose daughter has recently started an apprenticeship. We are hopeful.

You do not need a tea room, a kimono or a year of lessons. You need a bowl, a whisk, 70 °C water and about two minutes.

Matcha has a reputation for being complicated, which is a shame, because the daily version is one of the simplest drinks there is. The tea ceremony is a beautiful thing, but it is a separate thing. Here is how we make matcha on a Tuesday morning.

What you need

• Matcha. Ceremonial grade if you are drinking it straight; a culinary grade is fine for lattes. Keep it in the fridge once opened.
• A bowl. Any wide bowl works. A proper chawan is nicer because it gives the whisk room to move.
• A bamboo whisk (chasen). This is the one tool worth buying. A milk frother works in a pinch; a fork does not.
• A small sieve. Optional, but it is the single biggest upgrade: sifted matcha never clumps.

Method

1. Warm the bowl with hot water, swirl, and pour it out. Soak the whisk in that water for a moment so the prongs soften.
2. Sift 2 grams of matcha into the bowl. That is about one heaped bamboo scoop, or half a teaspoon.
3. Add 70 ml of water at 70–80 °C. Boiling water makes it bitter; if you have no thermometer, boil the kettle and wait two minutes.
4. Whisk briskly in a W or M motion, from the wrist, for 15–20 seconds, keeping the whisk off the bottom of the bowl. You are looking for a fine, even foam.
5. Lift the whisk out slowly through the centre of the foam. Drink within a minute or two; matcha is a suspension, not an infusion, and it settles.

Three things people get wrong

Too much water. Usucha, the everyday thin tea, is only about 70 ml. If you are making a mug’s worth, you will need more matcha, not more whisking.

Old matcha. It oxidises within weeks of opening. If your tin is six months old and brownish, that is why it tastes of hay. Buy small tins and finish them.

Whisking in circles. Circles move the tea around; the back-and-forth motion is what folds in the air. It feels wrong for the first week and then it does not.

Our starter set has everything above, with a card showing the steps. The Uji matcha is the one we drink ourselves.

Hasami is a town of about 14,000 people in the hills of Nagasaki, and it has been making porcelain for everyone else for four hundred years. We spent a morning there in early September.

The first thing you notice is the chimneys. Dozens of them, brick and square, rising out of the valley between the rice fields and the low wooden houses. Most are no longer used; the climbing kilns they belonged to were replaced by gas and electric kilns in the 1960s. But they are still there, and the town still arranges itself around them.

Hasami’s story is unusual. Unlike its famous neighbour Arita, which made porcelain for feudal lords and European courts, Hasami made it for ordinary households: the plain rice bowls and sake cups called kurawanka that were sold cheaply across Japan from the seventeenth century on. The town was, in effect, the country’s first mass producer of everyday ceramics, and its instinct for the useful object has never gone away.

Division of labour

What surprised us most is how the work is divided. In Hasami, one workshop makes the plaster moulds, another casts the pieces, a third glazes and fires them, and a fourth handles finishing and shipping. A single mug may pass through four family businesses before it is boxed. It is a system built for consistency, and it explains why Hasami porcelain is so reliably thin, even and well-finished.

At the kiln we visited, the owner’s mother was trimming the unglazed rims of a batch of mugs with a small knife, one every eight seconds or so, while explaining that the rim is left bare because glaze would round it off and lose the clean line. “You should feel the clay somewhere,” she said.

Why it matters to us

The mug we sell is the one she was trimming. It is not rare or precious. It is simply very well made, in a place that has thought about nothing but well-made tableware for longer than most countries have existed. That is the kind of object Komorebi is for.