Kyoshinkai: A Competitive Exhibition of Urushi

Kyoshinkai is a competitive exhibition annually held in November in Joboji.  It is divided into three sections in accordance with three tapping seasons: Hatsu, Sakari, and Sue.   As an experienced urushi tapper slots in a paddle into each barrel and pull it up, judges quickly check quality of the urushi by their eyes and record it on a rating form.  Receiving a prize in Kyoshinkai is a great honor for tappers.

Collection of Urushi: Urushi Tapping

The process of urushikaki, or tapping urushi trees, consists of 3 steps.  It might seems very simple and easy, but it's NOT! It requires delicate sensitivity and years of experience to be able to collect urushi for one whole season without killing trees. 

1. Bark tree with "kawahagi kama" to make the rough surface flat and easier to work on:

2. Make a horizontal scratch with "kakikama":

3. Scoop up urushi drop using "kakibera" and put it into "kakidaru":

The white line on the top is the scratch we just made.  Here you can see white tree liquid is pouring out from it!  

From the moment it is taken out from trees, urushi quickly starts oxidization and changes its color from white transparent to milky brown. 








All the pictures were taken in Ibaraki Prefecture, 2009 summer.

Collection of Urushi: Season and Tools

You might have seen natural rubber being collected from a tapped tree; they make a scratch on a gum tree and put a small pail under that, letting rubber to drip down automatically into it.  However, process of urushi tapping, urushikaki in Japanese, is very different from the image.

    

Tree tappers make the rounds of each tree everyday (except rainy days) during summer time from June to October or November.  One urushi tree is tapped once a four days, so scratches look like the above picture in the middle of the season.  This is a technique to get the maximal amount of urushi from one tree in accordance with its biological nature.

An experienced tree tapper usually works on about 400 to 500 urushi trees in one summer and collects 180cc to 200cc of urushi from each. After the season, they cut down the trees they tapped, and wait the stumps sprout out again and grow for the next 10-15 years (this method popular in Japan today is called "koroshigaki").

These are tools they use for urushikaki.  Names and combination seem to vary by region; since this picture was taken in Ibaraki Prefecture, I would like to explain them in its manner.

The long blade in the lefthand is called "kawahagi kama" and used to strip bark off a tree.  The small one with a complex curving at the point (see the closeup picture on the right) is "kakikama," a knife to make a scratch on tree surface.  The flat metalic spatula,  "kakibera" is used to collect urushi sap into the container called "kakidaru".  The next post will explain the process of urushikaki using these tools.

What is URUSHI?

First, let me briefly introduce what urushi is.  Urushi is refined tree sap used for traditional art and crafts in Japan.  It functions as adhesive, protective and decorative coating on different materials: wood, paper, metal, etc.

The process of creating urushi  art/crafts can be mainly divided into three phases:

1. Collection of urushi (urushikaki): 

urushi is collected, literally "drop by drop", from tree called urushinoki.

2. Purification and refinement (seisei): 

urushi is purified and refined (e.g. colored, blended).

3. Artwork (nuri, kashoku):
urushi is used for decoration of plates, furnitures, etc. (click here for some images)

Millions of other works are included in each step; for example, they need to grow urushi trees for about 15 years before collecting tree sap.  It is impossible to mention everything here, so I'd like to explain them in detail in the following some posts.