A Year of Raw Material
It’ll soon be harvest season in Oguni and I’ll be heading back this year to assist with work that represents the culmination of a year of effort: months of ploughing, weeding, and thinning climax in 6 weeks of intense labour to process the bark from plant to fibre, ready for papermaking.
I’m trying something new this year: a newsletter with a definitive end date. Subscribers get a newsletter a day (or so) over 11 days, from the heart of the harvest. Then I erase the mailing list and we all move on — no hard feelings, maybe we’ll meet again somewhere down the road.
Harvest season in Oguni is a gonzo marathon. Beginning around mid-November and running through until Christmas or New Year’s, it includes the harvest itself, but also the cutting, steaming, stripping, and drying of the kozo (SO. MUCH. kozo). Most people picture craft as the finishing of the object: forming the sheets, applying the lacquer. But the real character of Oguni paper begins here, in the field and the steaming shed, in farming and harvest.
My personal challenge this year: close the gap between Imai san’s lightning-fast, never-sacrificing-quality bark stripping and my own deliberate but serviceable pace. You can follow along in real time.
Oguni Kozo Harvest pop-up newsletter starts Nov 22.
Sign up below.
Hope to see you there,
Paul