Gokayama and Washi Paper Making - Japan

In the town/prefecture of Gokayama, we visited a really old village.  The village wasn't bombed in the second world war, so it still had its traditional farmhouses houses called Gassho - a style that is now recognized as a protected UNESCO cultural style and the whole town is now a UNESCO heritage site.   I think my dad's going to do a post on the Gassho houses.

 
The houses are in really good shape because they are still being used by villagers and are now protected, so I guess they're maintained pretty well.  In Gokayama village, we found a workshop where we could make paper! REAL PAPER!!!  From scratch!!

Here are roughly the steps involved:

1. To make paper you need long fibres... they use a Mulberry tree known in Japanese as a Kozo
1. The fibres are bleached white in the winter in the snow
2. They use crushed Ocra root (called Okura in Japanese) to get a thick syrup to bind the fibres like a glue
3. These ingredients are mixed in a whopper tub of cold water 
4. A special tray with side handles and a sushi-rolling-mat-like bottom is used to filter the mixture into thin sediment layers onto the mat
5. This is done a few times until enough fibre sediment has collected to form a paper of the thickness you want
6. You pull the mat out of the holder and put the wet, gushy paper layer face-down on a cloth mat on a vacuum table (YES - IT HAS A VACUUM CLEANER ATTACHED!!!)
7. At this point, you can add leaves and other flat decorations into the paper surface
1. If you do this, you need to make another thin fibre layer on top of the first one to seal the decorations in
8. Then you pull the cloth with the paper on top over the vacuum cleaner slit to suck the water out of the paper
9. Once you've done that a few times, you peel the whole paper off the cloth mat and put it on a big, flat metal heater to fully dry it
10. After 5min, it's done

Collecting the paper layer

Peeling back the mat

Placing decorations - the wording celebrates the new Japanese Emperor!

Peeling the mat off

I really liked that the paper was hand-made and that the little store at the workshop had only handmade papers.  I loved to see how it was actually made, not just he finished product.

Making the paper myself was very cool - I was surprised how simple the process was (of course, I wasn't there when they prepared all the ingredients over the winter).

This experience taught me that just about everything you can make with a machine, you can also make by hand and that I felt accomplished and proud of making my own paper.