Documentary photograph: a papermaker at a wooden vat in a daylit workshop, moving a screen and frame through water clouded with plant fibre.
the water has not settled

A wooden vat. Water gone pale and opaque. Fibre held in suspension, never quite still.

Two hands take a screen and its frame, lower them in, and begin to move the water across.

Ino, Kōchi. Nothing is named yet. Watch first.

A kongCast reading

The Weight
of a Sheet

A title given here, not the craft's own. The paper is 土佐典具帖紙 — Tosa Tengujōshi, made by the Hamada family in Ino, Kōchi.

Not an account of how washi is made. One movement, watched closely through three published records — and a question about the part of the work none of them holds.

The movement, as the records describe it

流し漉き (nagashi-zuki): the sheet is built from water thrown across the screen and drained off again, pass after pass, rather than left to settle. Hand Papermaking set the technique down in 1986; the 2010 photographs show it in motion.

  1. 01The 簀桁 (sugeta) — screen and frame — enters the vat.
  2. 02Water carrying 楮 (kōzo) fibre runs across the screen.
  3. 03The wrists rock; the throw quickens.
  4. 04Water and loose fibre are thrown off, again and again.
  5. 05The frame comes up.
  6. 06A sheet is lying on the screen.
kongCast observation

Somewhere inside that rhythm, the sheet is judged finished. Numbered on a page it looks like a step; we suspect it arrives faster than words could carry it.

That suspicion is a reading of photographs, not a statement by the makers. No source in this Station locates a decisive instant, and none of them counts the passes for us.

Documentary photograph: a bamboo screen hanging in the workshop with a newly formed sheet on it, beside buckets and a window.

kongCast question

“What is the hand reading?”

Resistance in the water? Fibre gathering thick in one place and thin in another? Weight arriving in the wrists? Perhaps all of it at once — perhaps nothing that separates into parts at all.

The records do not answer. The 1986 article sets out technique. The 2010 photographs show movement, arms, water, wet paper. The 2013 event report keeps a voice. None of them tells us what his hand feels, and this page will not supply it.

Hands, one after another

In 1986, Hand Papermaking documented Sajio and Setsuko Hamada at work in Ino and described the making of Tosa Tengujōshi — paper thin enough to be spoken of as an insect's wing, and strong enough that conservators use it.

In 2010 a visit from Hiromi Paper photographed Hironao Hamada in the workshop; those photographs were published the following year, and they are the images on this page.

In 2013 the Japan Foundation Los Angeles hosted a demonstration by the brothers Hironao and Osamu Hamada. Its event report identifies them as Sajio Hamada's grandsons and the generation now making this paper, and notes where the paper travels — conservation work, including at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

What each record holds is different: a technique written out, a gesture photographed, a sentence spoken aloud in a hall. Between them the work stays reachable. None of them is the work.

Documentary photograph: a stack of freshly formed wet sheets, squared along one edge on the press bed.

Documentary photograph, Hiromi Paper Blog, Washi Tour 2010: wet sheets stacked and squared along one edge. The image shows the pile. It shows nothing of the judgement that ended each sheet.

Documentary photograph: the papermaker turning at the press bed, peeling a brown mat back from the surface of a white sheet.

One sentence on the record

“In a way, I become half-human, half-machine. This releases me from all emotion, and from all reason.”

Hironao Hamada, quoted in the Japan Foundation Los Angeles event report, 2013.

kongCast note

The report keeps the sentence; it does not open it. What half-machine names here — concentration, long habit, something with no settled English equivalent — is not recorded, and we leave it closed.

“If these hands stopped, what would be missing that no description could replace?”

Records used

  • 01Japan Foundation Los Angeles, event report, 2013 — jflalc.org Source of the quotation; of Hironao and Osamu Hamada as Sajio Hamada's grandsons and the current generation; of the demonstration and the paper's conservation uses.
  • 02Hiromi Paper Blog, “Washi Tour 2010 Part 7: Handmade Tengucho Paper by Hamada,” published 2011 — hiromipaper.wordpress.com Source of every photograph here: the 2010 visit to the workshop, and visual observation of Hironao Hamada at the vat and the press.
  • 03Hand Papermaking, “Tosa Tengujo-Shi,” Winter 1986, Vol. 1 No. 2 — handpapermaking.org Source for Sajio and Setsuko Hamada, and for the description of the technique named in the sequence above.

The photographs prove what is visible in them — water, fibre, screen, hands, wet paper. They carry no evidence about sensation.

Everything on this page that goes beyond the three records is marked as a reading.

The question stays open: the hands knew something the record cannot repeat.