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.