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 encountered handmade papermaking as a bank employee surveying a struggling washi-making company. Inside one of the country’s last-surviving washi workshops, in freezing temperatures that made her breaths 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 insects or dirt from the mulberry tree pulp. 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 the maker 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 one-woman operation making cold calls to 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 jewelry house. Horiki at the 2000 Hannover World Expo even presented make a two-seater washi-framed car using resin she developed, boasting a top speed of 125km/h. She took home the grand prize.
Following that serendipitous 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 partners developed treatment to make washi resilient against fire, stain, tear, and discoloration. On the other hand, she sought ways with artisans to make it thinner, then went to printing houses to modify the printing speed 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, their washi have on average 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.
Artisansanal 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 gilt paper. What is internationally known as Japanese leather paper was inspired by the European gilt leather 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 silver prize with wallpaper using that material, putting the kinkara kawakami paper to international fame.
Little did Eriko know, apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
