Over the years, we’ve sold several unusual bamboo flower vases at Chidori Vintage.
They came in different sizes and styles, but all had one thing in common: they were made to resemble an enormous chasen, the traditional bamboo whisk used to prepare matcha.
One of the chasen-shaped bamboo flower vases we have sold at Chidori Vintage.
They were always unusual pieces, but what surprised us was what happened after they sold. Customers kept asking for them.
Every so often we would find another example in Japan and sell it, only to receive more inquiries after it was gone. Over time, they became increasingly difficult to find.
Recently, rather than waiting for another vintage example to appear, we decided to find out whether anyone in Japan was still making them.
That's when we discovered there was a much bigger story behind their disappearance.
The problem is the bamboo
These flower vases are connected to Takayama's traditional chasen-making industry in Ikoma, Nara Prefecture, an area famous for producing bamboo tea whisks for centuries.
One of the main materials Takayama craftsmen use is a species of bamboo called hachiku (淡竹).
Hachiku bamboo (Phyllostachys nigra var. henonis). Photo: Mark Pellegrini / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5.
We contacted a supplier who had previously made these flower vases to ask whether we could purchase them again. The answer was disappointing: they were no longer producing them because the necessary bamboo had become difficult to obtain.
At first, that sounded like a fairly ordinary supply problem.
It isn't.
Japan is currently in the middle of a natural bamboo event that occurs only about once every 120 years.
The hachiku is flowering.
Bamboo that flowers once in a lifetime — and then dies
Most people probably don't think of bamboo as a flowering plant. That's understandable. You could spend your entire life around bamboo and never see it bloom.
Hachiku has an extraordinarily long flowering cycle of approximately 120 years. Large areas of bamboo can flower during roughly the same period and then die.
The previous widespread flowering of hachiku in Japan occurred around 1908. Based on that cycle, another major flowering period was expected around the 2020s.
And it's happening now.
Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has documented the phenomenon, and scientists have been watching flowering hachiku in different parts of the country.
What happens after the bamboo flowers is particularly interesting.
It dies.
Not just an individual stalk here and there. In some areas, essentially an entire bamboo stand can disappear.
Flowering hachiku is part of an extraordinary natural cycle that occurs roughly once every 120 years.
Scientists are watching something they rarely get a chance to see
Researchers at Hiroshima University studied a hachiku grove that began flowering in 2020.
During three years of observation, more than 80 percent of the bamboo stalks flowered. The flowering stalks subsequently died.
Eventually, all of the mature bamboo stalks in the study area died, including stalks that had not flowered.
Normally, you might expect flowering to produce seeds and start the next generation. But researchers found no viable seeds. Normal bamboo shoot production also stopped.
Some small shoots appeared, but they were weak and short-lived.
Three years after flowering began, researchers had found no clear evidence that the bamboo forest was successfully regenerating.
And this is where things get strange.
We know hachiku eventually comes back.
Japan went through this approximately 120 years ago, and hachiku obviously didn't disappear from the country. But because these events happen farther apart than a human lifetime, surprisingly little detailed scientific information exists about exactly how the forests recover or how long that recovery takes.
The scientists studying today's flowering are observing something that researchers in 1908 simply couldn't document the way we can today.
Is climate change causing it?
That was one of our first questions when we started reading about this.
As far as researchers know, the flowering itself is a natural cycle rather than something caused by climate change.
Hachiku was already known to have an extremely long flowering cycle, and Japan experienced the same phenomenon at the beginning of the 20th century.
Scientists still don't completely understand the biological mechanism that allows bamboo to keep track of such an enormous period of time.
Think about that for a moment.
Some of the bamboo flowers in Japan today are effectively following a biological clock that started around the Meiji Era.
It grew for generation after generation without flowering. More than a century later, the clock ran out.
Climate and environmental conditions may certainly influence how bamboo grows and how successfully forests recover afterward. But the flowering and die-off itself appears to be part of the plant's natural life cycle.
Unfortunately, the timing couldn't be much worse
There's an irony to all of this.
Japanese matcha has become extraordinarily popular worldwide. That means more people are interested in authentic Japanese tea utensils, including traditional bamboo chasen.
But the number of craftspeople who can produce them has been declining.
The Takayama Chasen Producers Cooperative reportedly had around 55 member workshops in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Today, there are only around 16.
Now they also face a raw-material problem.
The cooperative has specifically identified both the current bamboo die-off and the shortage of suitable hachiku as challenges facing the industry.
So just as worldwide interest in matcha and Japanese tea culture is booming, one of the traditional materials used to make its most recognizable tool is becoming harder to obtain.
Back to our strange flower vases
This brings us back to the objects that started us down this rabbit hole.
Two other examples we have found over the years. The construction and shape vary considerably from one vase to another.
Looking back at the examples we've sold, it's interesting how different they are.
Some have relatively straight bamboo tines. Others have the elaborate curled ends that immediately make them look like a giant tea whisk. The bindings vary, as do the proportions and construction.
They aren't identical factory-made products.
They reflect the work of different makers and possibly different workshops, all playing with the recognizable form of the chasen and turning it into something completely different.
And they are surprisingly large.
A normal chasen is something you can comfortably hold in one hand. These were made to hold flowers.
The reverse view of another example shows just how extensively a single piece of bamboo has been split and worked.
We should be careful about saying the current bamboo flowering is the only reason these flower vases have become difficult to find. We don't know that.
The declining number of craftsmen almost certainly plays a role. Changing tastes and demand may play a role, too.
What we do know firsthand is that one maker who previously produced them told us they stopped because the right bamboo became too difficult to obtain.
That's what led us to start investigating the bamboo shortage in the first place.
Can they be made again?
We're trying to find out.
We've now contacted several craftsmen in Takayama, as well as the Nara Takayama Chasen Producers Cooperative, to see whether anyone would be interested in making these flower vases again.
We're also asking a slightly different question.
Does a flower vase actually need to be made from the same bamboo as a tea whisk?
A chasen has to perform a very specific job. Its finely split tines need the right combination of strength and flexibility to whisk matcha.
A flower vase doesn't.
If another suitable species of bamboo can be used, perhaps these can be produced without competing for the increasingly scarce hachiku needed by traditional chasen makers.
We don't know the answer yet.
But that's one of the things we enjoy about dealing in Japanese antiques and traditional crafts.
Sometimes researching an object takes you somewhere completely unexpected.
In this case, we started with a strange bamboo flower vase that customers kept asking us to find.
It led us to craftsmen in a small area of Nara, a shortage of traditional Japanese bamboo, and a biological cycle that occurs only once in roughly 120 years.
Hopefully, we'll eventually find someone who can make the vases again.
If we do, we'll certainly appreciate them a little differently than we did the first time we found one.
Update: We are currently looking for Takayama craftsmen or workshops interested in producing these flower vases again. If we are successful, we'll update and post here.
Sources
For readers interested in learning more about the current hachiku flowering, Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has information about bamboo flowering and its long cycle. Researchers at Hiroshima University have also published research following a flowering hachiku stand and documenting what happened during the subsequent die-off.
Japan Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries — Bamboo flowering
Hiroshima University — Hachiku flowering and regeneration research
The scientific study itself was published in PLOS ONE:
PLOS ONE — Regeneration of hachiku after mass flowering