| Making a cricket cage, Suruga Bamboo Work |
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Just a Grass
In the very recent past, pointing out that bamboo is a species of grass would have amazed many people. Today, with the very real agony of forest depletion and the other concerns about our environment and husbanding resources, bamboo is being given a hard but admiring scrutiny. Public knowledge about the plant has increased greatly, particularly in countries where it is not so common. As in the rest of the Far East, bamboo in Japan has been and remains an important substance and an integral part of the cultur.
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Tea whisk, Takayama
Tea Whisks |
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Versatility
Bamboo ranks high among the world's most versatile materials. In one form or another, just about anything can be made of bamboo, and the shoots of many varieties not only can be eaten but are delicious. Its tensile strength has been compared to steel, and larger varieties have a density like hardwood. There are 46 genera and over 1,200 species worldwide, of which Japan has over 600. The bamboos most often used in Japan to make objects are madake (Phyllostachys bambusoides Sieb. et Zucc.) and moso-chiku (Phyllostachys heteracycla Matsum var. pubescens Ohwi); some types of bamboo grass (sasa), though botanically different from bamboo, are also used for basketry. Height varies from a few centimeters to over forty meters, and color ranges from white to glossy black, though most common varieties are green when growing and golden when dry. One of the most attractive aspects of bamboo is that it is a renewable resource; it takes less than a year for a stalk to reach maturity, compared to the decades for most trees, whether needle or broadleaf. Though planks cannot be made of bamboo, in tropical countries it is woven to make walls, and in Japan it is used as wattle (as in wattle and daub) for the cores of earthen walls of traditional houses. Bamboo lends itself to so many uses, one begins to cast about to find things that it cannot do.
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Making a basket, Katsuyama
Bamboo Basketry |
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Bamboo Usually Means Baskets, But...
The word "bamboo" generally conjures up images of basketry, for good reason. Bamboo's ease of working, flexibility, and straight fibers, which give it the ability to be split along the entire length of a stalk, means that strips and splints for basketry are easily produced.
The types of bamboo baskets in Japan alone seem countless. Utility baskets included a wide range used in the kitchen (such as sieves and strainers, ladles, trays for drying, food holders, cooked rice containers, and so forth), for farm use (carrying baskets of many kinds, chicken baskets, various fish traps, creels, backstrap carrying baskets, seed holders, winnowing baskets, silkworm trays, and on and on). Decorative baskets and basketry sculptures are made as one-of-a-kind objects by basketry artists, most of whom sign their work. Today some bamboo basketry artists have been designated as "Living National Treasures," and their art fetches the highest prices.
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| Basket, Beppu Bamboo Basketry | |
Articles for LifeThe woven bamboo wattle used in architecture has already been mentioned. Kitchen floors were sometimes medium-sized bamboo stalks, slightly separated and raised above the earth, so water could drain, and a tightly bound arrangement of bamboo rafters to support the thatch was found in farmhouses. Years of smoke from hearth fires colored such ceiling bamboo a deep chocolate or even a glossy black, and such richly colored ceiling bamboo (susudake) was in great demand for making various decorative baskets as well as utensils.
Some other uses of bamboo in Japan are: fishing poles, particularly the telescoping kind; archery bows; musical instruments, such as shakuhachi and flute; chopsticks; tea whisks; a wide range of utensils for the tea ceremony, from tea measures to water ladles to wall vases for flowers; all kinds of boxes and vessels and containers made of the whole bamboo stalk (not woven); furniture, particularly stands and stools and benches; barrel hoops (twisted bamboo fibers); pipes (a long stalk split in half with nodes removed), and many many more. These are but some of the main categories.
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