Paper Making in Japanese Countryside
Day 20, Grand Asia 2018
Saturday, Oct. 20, 2018, Kochi, Japan:
The Japanese coast is dotted with port cities of various sizes. This island nation of mountainous terrain is most easily traversed by water, especially for commercial shipping. A few cities are well known to Americans — Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Nagasaki and Hiroshima come to mind.
The beauty of this cruise (and last year’s) is that we are visiting many smaller Japanese ports. By smaller, I don’t mean small. Many are cities of considerable size. Our ship usually docks in a commercial shipping port area, and the cities provide shuttle buses to a convenient location in town. That can make it easy to see a bit of the city. But it doesn’t get you into the surrounding countryside. That’s where tours can expand your view.
On my ship’s tour today, I got a view through the bus window of the city, the suburbs, smaller villages and the countryside. I‘ve found it frequently doesn’t matter the destination of the tour, as long as it gets out of town and shows me the area.
Our destination was Tosa Washi, where they have been making paper for more than 1,000 years. During our ride there, our guide described the process of gathering pulp from behind the bark of bushes to make the paper. Once at the site, we each got to get our hands in the pulpy water, filling a wooden frame with a screen backing and then shaking it while the water slowly dripped out. When we removed the frame, we had eight postcard-sized cellulous rectangles still very wet but holding their shape.
The pages went into a pneumatic press to expel more water out and then to a back room for further drying. We went back on the bus and continued the tour, returning to the papermaking facility a couple of hours later to get the postcards we made.
The paper is surprisingly strong – we saw a beautiful wedding dress made of paper. I had fun participating in the process, knowing how much my mother would have enjoyed it. She founded a company manufacturing paper quilling paper, books, kits and supplies that grew to be the largest in the relatively small world of the craft.
Once we had left Kochi, our bus followed the Niyodo River, the other feature of the tour. Typical Japanese rivers are small and frequent, starting high in the mountainous terrain. This one is known for its clear water, which makes it look blue when the sky is cloudless as it was today. It meanders through a fairly wide valley, but when typhoons come, the river expands to both shores.
That’s why many bridges are submersible, as our guide described them. Back home we would call them low-water bridges, although they are a few feet above the typical water level. Building them low allows the limbs and other debris of raging floodwaters to pass over rather than become entangled in the bridge structure.
Initially our guide said we would not go out on the bridge because it was too windy and the bridge was narrow without side rails. By the time we arrived, there was little wind. I estimate the bridge was at least eight feet wide. So we all headed out.
Do you remember the recent viral video of the weather channel reporter fighting against the hurricane winds when two young men walked calmly through the background? Our tour guide reminded me of that reporter.
She leaned against the breeze, warning us that she couldn’t swim to rescue us if we fell. (I think after three weeks eating on a cruise ship, it would have taken a mighty wind to blow any of us off.) Needless to say, we all survived the experience.
We stopped for Kochi Ice, a cross between ice cream and sherbet, and watched two kayakers on the river. We also visited a Shinto shrine (must be a requirement of Japanese tours), where the shinshoku (priest) was blessing a new car. The surrounding fence sported funny masks.
At our shrine visits I have learned the purification ritual. You take a long-handled ladle of water in your right hand, spill some over your left hand, then switch hands and repeat. You can pour a little water in a cupped hand and rinse your mouth if you want. Then you hold the ladle vertically to allow the remaining water to rinse the handle.
At the shrine, you can ring the bell, make a small donation and then deeply bow twice, slowly clap and then bow once more. If there is a statue of the shrine’s deity, you can rub different areas for different blessings. The shrine we visited on this tour had a prosperity deity.
On a hill overlooking the city of Kochi is the Kochi Castle. We drove along the moat, or honmaru, as we returned to the ship. Many passengers who took the shuttle to town climbed to the castle (and commented on the ordeal later at dinner).
As we sailed away from Kochi, we had our most professional send-off yet. Dancers entertained us with traditional moves and music.
We have one more port before leaving Japan for China, although we will return to Japan before moving on to Hong Kong and Vietnam. This is our longest stretch of port days in a row – six – and I think everyone is looking forward to a couple of sea days to recover. I know I haven’t had any trouble getting in my 10,000 daily steps.
