Takayama: the village that makes the whisk

Where are matcha whisks made? The short answer

Takayama, in the city of Ikoma in Nara Prefecture, makes over 90% of Japan's bamboo whisks, according to the prefecture, and the Takayama chasen is a nationally designated traditional craft with a history of about five hundred years. Japanese industry sources put domestic consumption at roughly a million whisks a year, of which about 70% are imported, mainly from China, at around a tenth of the price. Takayama makes the other 30%, by hand, in household workshops, from bamboo aged for years.

The place

Takayama sits at the northern tip of Nara Prefecture, on the Nara side of the Ikoma hills, half an hour by train from Osaka and a world away from it: a district of low houses, bamboo groves, and workshops with racks of split cane drying in the sun. In winter the fields fill with a sight the region counts as a seasonal emblem — bundles of pale bamboo, twenty-five to fifty stalks cut to a meter and a half and stood in cones like rows of closed umbrellas, left out in the cold wind for weeks. That is the kanboshi, the winter bleaching, and it is the first step of a whisk. You would not know from the road that the whole of a national craft lives here. There is no factory. There are households, and a cooperative of makers, and a bamboo park the city built to show visitors what the households do.

The five hundred years

The story the village tells begins in the Muromachi period, in the fifteenth century, when the second son of the lord of Takayama — then written with different characters and read Takayama all the same — made a whisk at the request of Murata Juko, the tea master credited with the first ideas of wabi tea. The whisk found favor at court; the emperor, by the account kept at the village’s museum, gave it the name Takaho, “high ear,” after which the village and the ruling family took the name Takayama in its honor. When the castle fell, sixteen retainers were permitted to go on making and selling the whisk, on condition of secrecy. For five centuries the technique was kept within those families, taught to one son in each generation and to no one born outside the name; daughters did not learn it, and neither did apprentices.

That secrecy ended in the twentieth century for the plainest of reasons: there were no longer enough sons. After the war, tea practice revived and demand for whisks rose past what the sixteen lines could meet, and the craft was opened so that it would not die. In 1975 the national government designated the Takayama chasen a traditional craft, and the village that had guarded its method for half a millennium began teaching it in public — on Sundays, at the bamboo park, to anyone who comes.

The whisk itself is older than the village’s claim to it. Chinese texts of the Song dynasty describe a bamboo whisk for whipping powdered tea, and a mid-sixteenth-century Japanese inventory of tea utensils lists “Nara whisks” first among the whisks of the country, ahead of those of Kyoto, Owari and Kaga. What Takayama did was take a tool that already existed and make it so well, for so long, that the others disappeared.

The whisk, in eight steps

A chasen is one piece of bamboo, and the making is a sequence of divisions. The makers’ cooperative demonstrates it at the bamboo park, and this is the order.

1. Cutting and bleaching. Hachiku, the pale “white” bamboo, is cut in winter, boiled to remove its oils, and stood in the fields in the cold wind for weeks until it whitens. It is then stored, in the dark, for two to three years. A whisk made from young bamboo cracks; this is why a Takayama whisk is expensive before anyone has picked up a knife.
2. Katagi — the section. A length of cane is cut to the size of the whisk and the outer skin shaved at the top where the tines will be.
3. Kowari — the splitting. The top is split into sixteen strips, then each strip is split again and again until the count is reached — eighty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty. The splits are made with a small knife and a twist, by feel.
4. Ajikezuri — the flavor shaving. The hardest step, by the makers’ own account. The tips are soaked in hot water, and the inner side of each tine is shaved so that it thins from the root toward the tip. This is what makes a tine flex instead of snap, and what lets it fold air into the water; a whisk shaved badly makes a poor foam no matter how many tines it has.
5. Mentori — the chamfering. The two corners of each outer tine are shaved off, so that matcha does not cling to the edges when whisking.
6. Shitaami and uwaami — the lower and upper weaving. The outer tines are bent outward and bound with thread in two rows: the lower weave spreads the tines, the upper weave fixes their roots. The thread is white, black or red, by the custom of the school the whisk is made for.
7. Koshinarabe — arranging the waist. The inner tines are gathered toward the center, the size of the whisk is set, and the height and spacing of the roots are evened.
8. Shiage — finishing. The tips are straightened, the curl is set, the spacing corrected to the tip, and the whisk is complete.

Asked how many a workshop makes, the makers give the answer the museum records: a husband and wife who finish five to ten a day are considered competent, and the work is study until death. The count depends on the type and on the piece of bamboo, which is never the same twice.

Forty-eight kinds

The standard Japanese reference counts forty-eight kinds of Takayama whisk, from thirty-two tines to a hundred and twenty, and the variety is not decoration. Each tea school has its custom.

By tine count and style. Shin, the formal whisk; kazuho, “numerous tines,” the fine whisk for thin tea; araho, “coarse tines,” with far fewer and thicker tines, for kneading thick tea; nakaaraho, in between, at around sixty-four tines, for koicha in some schools; gobunaga, a longer form; and small whisks for travel or for a single sip. Retail labels today mostly give the number directly — 80, 100, 120 — and the everyday choice for thin tea at home is around a hundred.

By bamboo. White bamboo, hachiku bleached in winter, is used by the Urasenke and Enshu schools and is the standard for most buyers. Smoked bamboo, susudake — cane that spent decades in the rafters of an old farmhouse above a hearth, and comes out the color of tobacco — is the custom of the Omotesenke school. Black or purple-black bamboo, kurochiku or shichiku, is used by Mushakojisenke and the Sohen school. Green bamboo, cut fresh, is for the New Year. None of the four is a quality tier.

By thread and node. White, black or red thread; a whisk with no node showing, one node, or the node at the middle. Each is a school’s preference.

For someone outside the tea schools, the practical reading is simple: the number of tines decides the foam, the bamboo is custom rather than grade, and the workshop’s name is what tells you the whisk is from here.

The other seventy percent

Here the story turns. Japanese industry sources put domestic consumption at about a million whisks a year, and about seven in ten of them are imported, mostly from China, made by the same basic method at a fraction of the labor cost and sold for a few hundred yen — around a tenth of the Takayama price. They are not counterfeits; most are simply unlabeled, and the buyer does not ask. The Takayama whisk costs several times more, is finished by a named workshop, and is bought by people who know the difference — tea schools, and increasingly, people abroad who read the label.

The village’s problem is not competition so much as succession. There are fewer makers each decade; the makers are aging; and the knowledge that was once hoarded is now scarce for the opposite reason. The cooperative’s Sunday demonstrations, the city’s bamboo park, and the export demand that has arrived with matcha’s popularity abroad are the three things working against that. A whisk bought from a named Takayama workshop is, among other things, a vote that there should still be a workshop.

Visiting

The Takayama Chikurinen, “bamboo park,” is run by Ikoma city on a hillside at the north end of the district. It has a museum hall with whisks, tea utensils and the village’s knitting needles on display and a film of the process; demonstrations of whisk-making by members of the makers’ cooperative on Sunday mornings and afternoons for most of the year; a garden of bamboo species from Japan and abroad — the pale hachiku and common madake, the tortoise-shell kikkochiku, the black kurochiku; a tea room in a Japanese garden; and a shop where the village’s whisks can be handled and bought. In autumn the park holds a large tea gathering that includes tea served from a bowl nearly forty centimeters across. The district is reached from Osaka or Nara by the Kintetsu line to Gakken-Kita-Ikoma and a short bus ride. If you go, look for the bundled bamboo in the fields in winter and for the sound of splitting behind the workshop doors in any season.

What to look for

A whisk that names Takayama, and better, a workshop, is telling you where it came from. The tines will be even, thin at the tips, and curled inward in a neat spiral; the thread will be tight and in two rows; the handle will be a single unbroken node of bamboo; the bamboo will be pale and dense, not green or soft. It will be light in the hand and it will break, eventually, at the tips, as every bamboo whisk does. That is the material, not a fault.

Soak it in warm water before use so the tines relax. Rinse it in water only afterward. Dry it tines-up on a stand so the center airs. A good one lasts a year of daily bowls. Then you buy another from the same hillside, which is how the hillside has stayed in business for five hundred years — one whisk, one household, one winter’s bamboo at a time, in a village that opened its secret so that the buying could continue.

Why bamboo, and why this bamboo

A whisk has to do two contradictory things: flex fast enough to fold air into water, and hold its shape after a thousand strokes. Bamboo does both because it is a grass with a hard outer skin and a fibrous, springy interior, and because it splits along its length into strips that stay straight. Hachiku, the species Takayama uses for its white whisks, has thinner walls and straighter grain than the common madake, which is why it can be split into a hundred and twenty even tines from a single section. The winter cut matters because the sap is down and the cane is at its densest; the boiling removes the oils that would otherwise darken and soften it; the weeks in the cold wind bleach it and drive out the last moisture; and the two or three years in storage let it settle so it will not warp or crack after it has been split. A whisk from young, unaged bamboo looks the same on the day it is sold. It does not look the same after a month.

What the whisk does in the bowl

The village’s own museum makes a point that outsiders often get backward. The purpose of the whisk is not to make foam. It is to mix the powder and the water evenly, so that no lump of dry matcha survives and the tea reaches the tongue as one suspension; the foam is what happens when a fine whisk does that job quickly, and it is welcome, but it is a by-product. This is why the tines are shaved thin toward the tips — thin tines pass through the liquid with less resistance and reach every corner — and why the outer tines are chamfered so powder does not cling to their edges. It is also why a whisk with a hundred tines, well shaved, makes a better bowl than a whisk with a hundred and twenty, badly shaved. The number is the easy thing to print on a label. The shaving is the craft.

Takayama beyond the whisk

The whisk brought the other tools with it. Alongside chasen, the district makes the bamboo tea scoop (chashaku), the water ladle (hishaku), flower vessels, incense containers and sweet-picks — a repertoire the city dates to some four hundred years, kept by the same secret methods as the whisk. In the late nineteenth century the village turned its bamboo skills to knitting needles, which became a second industry and are still displayed at the museum beside the whisks. The pattern is the same in every case: one material, split and shaved by hand, made into a tool for a purpose that has not changed.

The cooperative and the mark

The Takayama Chasen Production Cooperative — the makers’ association of Nara Prefecture — is the body that demonstrates the craft at the bamboo park and speaks for the village’s makers to the government and the trade. The national designation of 1975 lets the whisks carry the traditional-craft mark, and individual makers who have passed the national examination carry the title of traditional craftsman. A whisk that names its workshop, and a workshop that belongs to the cooperative, are the two disclosures that put a Takayama whisk beyond doubt. Neither appears on an imported whisk, because neither can.

Buying one from abroad

Takayama whisks reach the United States through specialty tea retailers, through Japanese online shops that ship overseas, and occasionally through the workshops’ own pages; they rarely appear on general marketplaces under their real name, and when a marketplace listing says “made in Japan” without naming Takayama or a maker, it is worth asking. Expect to pay several times the price of an unlabeled whisk. Expect the tines to be lighter and more even than you are used to, and to break at the tips a little sooner than a thick imported whisk’s do, because they are thinner — and expect the bowl to be better for it. A stand to dry it on is the one accessory that repays its cost, and the village makes those too. If the retailer can tell you the maker’s name and the tine count and nothing about the bamboo’s age, ask about the age; a Takayama seller will know, because it is the part of the price that took the longest.

Numbers and facts at a glance

• Share of Japanese-made whisks: over 90% from Takayama (Nara Prefecture).
• Designation: national traditional craft, 1975.
• History: about 500 years; sixteen families under secrecy until the twentieth century.
• Domestic consumption: about 1 million whisks a year; about 70% imported, mostly from China, at roughly one-tenth the price.
• Kinds: 48, from 32 to 120 tines.
• Bamboo: white (hachiku) for Urasenke and Enshu; smoked (susudake) for Omotesenke; black or purple-black for Mushakojisenke and Sohen; green for the New Year.
• Aging: cut in winter, bleached in the cold, stored two to three years.
• The hardest step: ajikezuri, shaving each tine thin toward the tip.
• Output: five to ten whisks a day for a competent couple.
• Museum: Takayama Chikurinen, Ikoma city; cooperative demonstrations on Sundays.