Japanese Fans, Umbrellas & Seasonal Accessories

About this book

Written and produced in Japan by a Japanese author and a Japanese publisher — a Japan-brand guide to the tools that open. One idea at three sizes — or two hundred entries in one guide? Japanese Fans, Umbrellas & Seasonal Accessories covers 200 entries in a single uniform format: every entry gives the Region & Materials, the Origins, How to Recognise it at a counter, and Buying & Experience — where to buy, what to check, and how to care for the piece afterwards. Every entry runs to more than 200 words of substance.

Kyoto's painted sensu and Edo's restrained frames; Marugame's single-culm uchiwa and the Boshu rounds; Gifu's hundred-process wagasa, the bull's-eye janome and Kanazawa's snow-built umbrellas; then the companions that keep them alive — cases, stands, sedge hats, rain geta and the accessory drawer of the Japanese year. Forms are only half the book: the working knowledge that protects a buyer fills the rest — the sixty-second routine (open, light, flex, touch), the separate price ladders of fans, flat fans, umbrellas and accessories, first-piece briefs for each craft, commissioning, drying and repair, and the districts worth travelling to.

No photographs: the recognition fields are written for the hand and eye in person instead — opening action, transmitted light, bamboo flex and surface touch — because those are checks a buyer can actually perform in a shop.

Companion, kept separate: the textiles volumes treated cloth itself and the washi volume paper itself. This book follows what bamboo, paper and cloth become when they are built into tools that open — and the makers whose benches build them, every entry written fresh.