Mutsume Morikago Part 3: Final Steps

It's taken me several weeks to finally put together the last post for this basket. Sorry to keep you waiting. While I've been busy showing Caitlyn's family around Oita and taking care of other odds and ends, nearly five weeks have flown by. During those weeks we managed to finish the mutsume basket, and, as of Friday, nearly bring the second basket on our agenda to completion. I have a lot of catching up to do.

So, back to the mutsume morikago. With the masa and inner and outer rims firmly fastened with wire, it was now time to secure the entire set with a long strand of thin rattan cane.

Yamato Musubi 大和結び
The rattan we tainees use is purchased by the kilogram unit and comes from Indonesia. It's expensive--about 200 dollars per kilogram when bought as a bundle of thin cane like in the picture. We processed the rattan the same way we do bamboo higo in the latter steps, first by running it between two blades to make it an even width of 2.0 mm (a process called haba-tori, 幅取り), and then running it through a plane-like tool (called urasuki-sen, うらすき銑) to bring it to an even thickness of 0.6 mm. Easier said than done. This was my first encouter with rattan as a raw, workable material rather than as a finished product, like a chair, and it was endlessly frustrating. It's so soft compared to bamboo that attempting to shave off too much at one time runs the blade entirely through the cane, severing it--a mistake I made about 10 or 15 times. When shaving bamboo higo to a certain thickness, we try to find the sharpest part on the urasuki blade; with rattan we had to search for the dullest part, and lower the cutting angle, because it's so soft.

Rattan is probably used in basket making if for no simpler reason than that it is more flexible and less prone to cracking or breaking than bamboo when wound tightly. Brought to the dimensions of 2.0 by 0.6 mm, it really feels like soft leather string, or some synthetic material--but unlike either of these, less dependable. I found this out when tying my baskets with it. The knots in this basket are called yamato-musubi (大和結び), yamato being an ancient word for "Japan." Just as with bamboo, we wet the rattan first to make it even more flexible and to keep it from snapping when tying the knots. For me, this was the most difficult step in the entire basket. Pulling too hard when finishing each knot makes the rattan snap, and not pulling it hard enough produces a loose knot, which in this case is more worrisome aesthetically than technically because there are enough knots on the entire rim to keep it in place. Hoping to make beautifully snug nots, I must have snapped the rattan about 10 or so times, each time requiring a special grafting knot that takes even more time to complete. I had to keep telling myself that it's in fact a plant.

Outer rim ↑ Inner rim ↓
About 2.5 meters of rattan was used to tie the entire circumference. When everything goes well and the rattan doesn't snap it works it's way around the basket continuously, stopping at every other hexagon to wind around the rim twice, pass through a few of it's own loops, and move on. About 10 cm of end left from the first knot is met with the last knot and looped through to give it a truly continuous appearance. When finished tying the rattan, all the metal wires are snipped off. Another challenging part worth noting: when tied well, the two strands on the inner side lie parallel to each other and don't cross (in this case, the right knot is dangerously close to crossing and not as visually pleasing).

Ikada-dake 筏竹

Now virtually finished, the only thing missing in this basket is some support for its bottom end. With the hexagonal weaving left alone, you can probably imagine it's a bit too weak to maintain a clean shape over the long-term if made to contain, say, apples or other heavy fruit. To solve this problem, ikada-dake ("raft bamboo") are used.

Top view (before) ↑ Top view (after) ↑ Bottom view (after) ↓

Technically, this step is simple and doesn't require much explanation. Bamboo strips measuring 14.5 mm wide by 1.8 mm thick are cut to form a perfect, larger hexagon and then woven into the basket's hexagonal latticework. As in many Beppu bamboo craft items, form is prioritized alongside function, so the problem of which strips go over and which go under the ikada-dake is handled with special care, and produces a series of concentric diamonds on both sides. It's this aspect of basket making that gets the wheels in my mind spinning when I think about designing my own baskets in the future.

Mutsume Morikago: Part 2

Allow me catch you up on what we've been working on in the last two weeks. After weaving the bottom of the mutsume morikago, we erected the six sides and continued the same weave using four more horizontal higo (called mawashi-higo, 回しヒゴ; meaning "circular higo"), being careful to keep all the holes on each row perfect hexagons. Once the top mawashi-higo was in place we bent all vertical higo located on the outside inward; this secures the top mawashi-higo and finishes the weave. This entire process is done with three relatively thick prong-like pieces (kari-chikara-dake ; 仮力竹; "temporary strength bamboo") inserted in the bottom, used to keep the basket from losing its shape.

From there we moved on to fashioning the parts that would make up the basket's rim. There are three: the outer rim (soto-buchi; 外縁), inner rim (uchi-buchi; 内縁) and a filler piece that fits flushly between the outer and inner rims and hides the end of the higo weaving underneath (masa; 柾) (any one know the technical term for this piece?).

The inner and outer rims we made in the same way as higo, but these were much thicker pieces--2.0 and 2.5 mm--so when it came time to bend them we used what they call a heating jig (himage-jigu, 火曲げ治具). It's basically a tiered, hollow metal tower under whicih a burner is lit. Bamboo apparently bends more easily when it is heated and retains its shape well after it cools, so this seems to be the method of choice for bending thicker bamboo into perfect circles or semi-circles. Our instructor said that back when this contraption wasn't used craftsmen would bend the bamboo around their knee and rub it back and forth to create heat through friction, thus making it more pliable. Still, it would be difficult to bend it into a perfect circle through such a process. I can't imagine how difficult the task was back then. I finished bending all ten of my rims in about 30 minutes.

After molding the rims, the ends of each rim were cut to match the exact circumference of the basket. Next, 7 cm of each end were shaved away so the two ends could overlap each other, forming a closed circle. Both outer and inner rims were adjusted this way, but only the outer rims were glued shut; the outer rim decides the absolute circumference of the basket's rim, while the inner rim is made to expand freely to fit the outer rim. The rims are then clipped temporarily onto the basket so the masa can later be inserted between them.

The masa is fashioned like a higo, but made to be thick so it fills the groove between the two rims. The masa's skin is placed on the outside to match the rims, and it's split down the middle to help make it fit smoothly along the entire circumference. The picture above shows the outer and inner rims clipped temporarily, and the picture below shows the masa fit snuggly between them, this time secured by wire twisted tightly around all three. Notice the two bumps; this is the bamboo's joint. They become staggered because of the difference their circumferences.

Basket #1: Mutsume Morikago

On Thursday this week we started work on our first basket: mutsume morikago. Mutsume, as I explained in the last post, is a hexagonal weave (me refers to the holes between the higo, so, literally, "six hole"), and morikago means a "basket [on/in which you] pile [things]," or more simply, a tray. The bottom is hexagonal in shape, almost 20 centimeters across, and each side tapers together at the top to form a circular rim.

　第一の課題作がとうとう出題された！六つ目盛籠です。先週から練習してきた六つ目編みを活かした籠で、今週の木曜日からその作業をヒゴ取りからスタートさせた。今度はこれまでの練習の時よりも遥かに多いヒゴを取るために、長さ約６メートルの２本の竹を５０と９０ｃｍの長さ（節がそれぞれ一つ、二つ付いた状態）に鋸で切り、割り剥ぎの工程に入った。

We started preparing the materials for this basket by cutting 6-meter-long culms (proper term for the "trunk" of the bamboo) of dried madake bamboo into 900 and 500 mm-long segments, and proceeded with processing these into higo to be used to weave the bottom and sides. I haven't yet properly described the process of making higo, and I've been trying, unsuccessfully, to find a good pictorial explanation online somewhere, but it's basically a long process of cutting bamboo vertically into strips and thinning those strips over a series of steps to bring them to a precise and consistent width and thickness. This was my first time processing over 200 strips at a time--great practice for improving my abilities, but also probably a realistic taste of the extreme repetitiveness that bamboo basket makers experience to make as ornate baskets as they do. All day Friday I worked on the same usuhagi step, in which I tried to thin higo 1.2-1.5 millimeters thick to a goal thickness of 0.6 millimeters. It's a frustrating process--any strip with a part less than 0.55 millimeters (the final thickness for weaving) thin is worthless. Measuring my strips with electronic calipers, my higo after usuhagi wavered between .5-something and .7-something millimeters; many I had to throw out because they were too thin in places, and many I had to thin again between they were over 0.8 millimeters, too thick to take to the next step. The picture below is my workspace; it shows a pile of segments in the arawari stage, where the bamboo is split radially (what they sometimes call "chrysanthemum splitting"), before the hagi stage when the strips are thinned by removing their inner side, opposite the skin.

　今度はものすごい数のヒゴだから、例えば今まで２０分ぐらいしか掛からなかった荒割り（半円に割った竹を６ミリなどの幅の棒に割る作業）の工程が２、３時間掛かった。金曜日の訓練時間もすべて薄剥ぎ（竹割り包丁で約１．４ミリの厚さに剥いだヒゴを更に薄く、０．６ミリの厚さに剥ぐ作業）の工程に使っちゃった。私の性格で言えばもともと繰り返しの多い作業には別に飽きはしないが、しかもこれは自分の腕を上達させるためにも必要な時間だったけど、２００本ものヒゴを加工することがこんなに体力、手間が掛かるのは経験上知らなかった。そして何よりも、慣れない正座や胡坐で一日中座って作業するのだから、脚がしびれたり、膝も痛くなったりして、こ～れは大変と思った。剥ぎの段階で失敗が多いから、ヒゴはわざと必要以上に作っているんだけど、もっと緻密な編みの籠となると、もっともっと作らなければいけなくなる。やはり、いろんな人から聞いた通り、竹細工の職人になるまでの道程は長いな～と、竹そのものに思い知らされている感じだった。