Eriko Horiki: The Artist Who Gave Washi a New Life
By Jeyup S Kwaak
Next time you see a bottle of Japanese fine whiskey, hold it in your hands for a moment: get a good feel of the label, the paper its name is printed on. If you’re lucky, you may be touching something special, a product of a Japanese tradition that stretches back over a thousand years. The sensation may be ever-so-slight, yet the particular softness and texture you feel is handmade washi—traditional Japanese paper made by artisans.
It was decades ago when washi pioneer and entrepreneur Eriko Horiki first encountered handmade papermaking—after leaving her job in banking to join a washi company facing financial hardship. Inside one of the country’s last-surviving washi workshops, in freezing temperatures that made her breath visible, Horiki observed craftpeople dunking bare hands into icy water as part of their age-old papermaking process. They repeated it several times over in a painstaking effort to rid of impurities like scratches or dirt from the fibers of paper mulberry. She felt a sense of urgency grow inside of her, she says: She had to save a 1,300-year-old tradition on the brink of extinction.
“To put it simply, washi is an art of water,” says Horiki. To produce large-sized washi, a team of ten people has to work together, and even the slightest difference in movement and breath would shift the pattern of the final product. “Each process borrows from the power of water, relying on the infinite number of chances that water can affect it. We cannot create with 100% of the design fixed. About 30% is left to chance, fortuity. That way we are given a pattern that transcends our human abilities.”
Despite the palpable beauty of the process and product, handmade washi was in decline when Horiki studied washi-making and later took over. Newly developed machines were churning out standardized washi, replacing the handmade product in daily use, from gift boxes to origami. That version remains widely used and highly coveted, too: washi is the go-to material in artwork conservation around the world. But that efficient process had made the traditional labor-intensive hand-and-water method “obsolete.”
Where others saw an irreversible decline, Horiki saw potential. The finest-quality washi, which Horiki compares to skin, just needed different uses, namely artistic outlets that would fully leverage handmade washi’s beauty and sophistication. In the following decades, Horiki grew from a two-woman team handling everything from washi production to on-site installation, into a Kyoto-based company that collaborates with a long list of renowned architects, designers, and artists. Their creations range from artworks hanging on the walls of Tokyo’s Narita International Airport to a 2-meter-wide washi-and-crystal chandelier created with Baccarat, the French fine crystal brand. At the 2000 Hannover World Expo, Horiki even unveiled a two-seater car made from three-dimensional washi embedded with resin—a one-of-a-kind vehicle that reached speeds of up to 125 km/h.
Following that visit to the workshop in Fukui Prefecture, central Japan, paper to Horiki was no longer just a page in a book or a wrapper hiding a gift. The key to success, however, was convincing others to see washi in a different light, too. Resistance came from all corners but none stronger than from the artisans themselves, who “aren’t used to trying something new,” she says. “But do we wait for someone else to make new precedents for us or do we step up to make these changes ourselves?”
Horiki didn’t give up. She drove those often-unimaginable changes since then to apply washi to new domains. On one hand, she made it stronger. To use washi in architecture—and to pass safety regulations—she, with experts of various genres, developed a treatment to make washi resilient against fire, stain, tear, and discoloration. On the other hand, she sought ways with artisans to adjust the thickness and texture of washi, then went to printing houses to modify the print compatibility for washi. That’s how the whiskey labels were realized. “Craft by definition needs to be used in daily life,” she says.
This was no easy feat especially in Japan: For washi artisans and its traditional admirers, handmade white paper is a symbol of purity. Not only is kami the Japanese word for both paper and god, she notes, white washi is used accordingly to “cleanse impurities.” It is an integral part of religious altars and the envelope used for monetary gifts is meant to purify money, she adds. Horiki remembers artisans refusing to exchange words after she suggested introducing color and other materials to washi. But they’ve come around: today, Horiki's washi have 3-to-7 layers and many patterns produced by hand and water. The way they are stacked directly influences the way they interact with light; it's a marvel to observe how they change appearance as sunlight slowly shifts from dawn to dusk.
Artisanal craft is often a closely guarded secret, passed down through generations within a select few families. Therefore, Horiki, who took over the washi operation with no apparent ties at the time, was a noteworthy exception. But on her third year of washi career, she discovered a forgotten part of family history that stunned her. Records show that in late 17th century, Chujiro Horiki, an ancestor, invented imitation paper (擬革紙, gikakushi). What is internationally known as Japanese leather paper was inspired by the European imitation leather (金唐革, kinkarakawa) that was used to adorn palatial walls. But at the time, leather was also considered impure, and the senior Horiki’s paper invention served as an alternative. Centuries later, at the 1900 Paris Expo, his descendants won the gold prize with wallpaper using that material, putting gikakushi to international fame.
Little did Eriko know, apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
