Why is Japan still so attached to paper?

Washi is to the Japanese what wine is to the French — a national obsession and point of pride, writes Nikil Saval

NYT

ONE of the cliches of modernity — but a cliche we nonetheless have to live through — is that new forms of technology make us nostalgic for prior ones and the eras they connote. When smartphones emerged, they brought the Internet into spaces that were once free of them, so that a poorly functioning flip phone now inspires a hint of wistfulness.

The pileup of digitised music since the emergence of the MP3 has prompted a retreat, however niche and ultimately minor, into the world of vinyl records and even tapes. The ransacking of the physical texture of the world — books, newspapers, retail stores, maps — has been so enormous and sudden that it becomes possible to see what we are losing and no longer regard the onrushing future as progress.

Because of the sheer accumulated weight of its past, and the velocity of its rush into the future, Japan offers these contradictions and anxieties of modernity in particular abundance. Japan was geographically isolated for centuries, so the time between the country’s opening and the post-war miracle of reconstruction produced a linear and especially propulsive narrative of an agrarian society becoming one defined by urban futurism.

Everything, from the country’s electronic manufacturing, the proliferation of its pop culture, the aggressiveness of its building booms — even as a threedecade-long economic decline strips these characteristics of their sheen — seems to serve as a reminder that throughout the post-war era, Japan was a byword for the future.

All of these forces — the past, the present, the future — can be crystallised in one persisting Japanese tradition: the longevity and depth of its papermaking. Perhaps chief among the historical foundations of Japan is that it is a country of artisans, so much so that the national government stipulates requirements for an object to be classified as a “traditional Japanese craft”.

THE PAPER TRAIL

The first of these requirements is that an object must be practical enough for regular use, which helps explain the continuing relevance of paper, or washi (which translates as “Japanese paper”). Many of its modern uses can be traced directly back to Japan, where the art of handmade washi began with the arrival of Buddhist monks to the islands from Korea in the seventh century.

Since then, washi has been used as stationery, as canvas and as art itself through the rise of origami, which was invented almost simultaneously with

washi — but these practices, which remain popular, overshadow just how deeply entrenched paper is in Japanese history. Some 700 years before the Gutenberg Bible, the Japanese were hand-printing Buddhist texts on paper.

Before printed periodicals began to appear in Europe in the 17th century as predecessors of the modern newspaper, Japan was printing yomiuri (literally “to read and sell”), handbills that were sold in major urban centres. (Today, Japan maintains the largest circulation of print newspapers in the world, and the second largest per capita.)

Paper was the dominant characteristic of Japanese aesthetics, appearing everywhere from domestic rooms to funerals. Paper lanterns were burned at religious ceremonies. Clothing was made from it. It became a popular building material. The shoji screens that were ubiquitous in the Edo period, which spanned the 17th to the late 19th centuries, reflected an appreciation for mood and tactility and, with their lunar opacity, contributed to the clean, mollified serenity that later so attracted.

Even a form of facial tissues, the kind you sneeze into when you have a cold, were used by the Japanese for centuries.

Paper has a long history all over the world, but it is to Japan what wine is to the French — a national obsession and point of pride. It remains, despite every innovation since, the central material of Japanese culture. It was the Korean Buddhist monk Dancho who is credited with supervising the production of the first pieces of paper in seventh-century Japan, using Chinese techniques. The court culture of the Heian era, which ran from the eighth through the 12th centuries, was one in which other Chinese developments — notably, bureaucracy — stimulated the demand for paper for record-keeping and bookmaking.

As the importance of the court declined, andthefeudal,polycentricsystemofwarrior potentates rose, so too did the manufacture of paper decentralise and proliferate. It was at this point that paper began to be used in architecture, for sliding doors and screens, and so the need for more, and longerlasting, variations became imperative.

This is how washi-making became a household tradition: By the 1800s, when capitalist industrial techniques were introduced, over 100,000 ordinary families were known to be making their own paper by hand for various domestic uses. But those same hyper-exploitative industrial techniques — including the mass production of cement and, a little later, warships — would gradually put an end to this era.

SHIFTING TIDES OF TIME

Today, though, the remnants of these traditions can be seen in the Modernist buildings that still stand in major cities, including Tokyo’s International House of Japan, one of the country’s most famous hotels, designed in 1952 by Japanese acolytes of Le Corbusier, which makes use of shoji screens. The architectural roots of paper are even clearer in more recent works by Shigeru Ban, whose emergency shelters following the 2011 Fukushima earthquake were made mostly of paper — in particular, recycled cardboard tubes — or by Kengo Kuma, whose buildings continuously riff on Japanese craftsmanship.

The great paradox of Japan’s paper culture is that the country was also one of the earliest producers of global technology, particularly with the founding in 1946 of Sony (originally called the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corp.), a company that could reasonably claim the mantle as one of the original tech supergiants. Having once been a papermaking innovator, the country also became the site of other crucial advancements.

But the country’s low-tech traditions have not been casually discarded. The same spirit that continues to cultivate beautiful washi also seems of a piece with the strange persistence of meikyoku kissaten, the “masterpiece cafes” where people sit and listen to recordings of classical music on old phonographs. Much like the more famous and trafficked vinyl bars — hole-in-the-wall haunts catering to audiophiles, hundreds of which speckle the streets and back alleys of Tokyo — they reflect a reverence toward a medium and not just the product produced via that medium.

In an age of sharply escalating computerisation and digitisation of everything into an intangible ether, it can be hard to remember that paper, too, is just another medium, something that acts as a transmitter for something written or typed in the past. Or better, it’s too easy to imagine that replacing paper with digital screens is just moving from one medium to another. Digitisation has produced a change not just in what we see and feel but in what we control.

If thousands of families could once make their own paper, it is now only a few monopoly companies that create virtually all the media through which we transmit communication today, and virtually all of it is being data mined in a way that letters never could be.

The fetish for media like washi is nostalgic on one account, clear-eyed on another: The paper bears an imprint, of the maker and eventually of the user, in a way no digital object ever can. For this reason, those pale, fringed sheets retain a measure of the time, and the sense of self, we are always losing as we rush heedlessly into the future.