Things Japanese by Nicholas Bornoff

Author:Nicholas Bornoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-4-8053-1303-9
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Furoshiki

風呂敷

cloth wrapping

When it comes to buying gifts in a Japanese airport, beware of the furoshiki. What you thought was a beautiful ladies' scarf transpires to be too short and thick when folded around the neck; what looked like a set of attractive handkerchiefs could only feasibly be used as such by an elephant. The furoshiki is often made of silk and may be elaborately tie-dyed or printed, sometimes even by hand. So it's easy to make a mistake; you had already heard that the Japanese consider blowing noses beyond the pale, an act imposing privacy and preferably perpetrated with a tissue. The handkerchiefs everyone seems to carry in Japan are really for drying the hands in public washrooms. Unlike furoshiki, they are overwhelmingly white.

Moreover, traditional Japanese and western design concepts and clothing styles are kept pretty rigorously apart, so that scarves with oriental motifs are the kind of thing that Westerners wear. They are most unlikely to be made in Japan, where scarf wearers prefer Versace and Dior. So the furoshiki isn't a scarf.

So, what is it? Above all, a furoshiki is used much as a carrier bag, notably for bearing gifts, which is strange, because it started life during the Edo period (1603-1868) as a bath-mat (furo: bath; shiki: mat, cover). It was a square of cloth, usually cotton, which people used to carry toilet requisites, towels and clothing to and from the public bathhouse. After the bath, they stood on it while they changed. It must have soon become apparent that it was handy for carrying lots of other things; even today you see people tying up the four corners of a furoshiki and carrying a great variety of objects. The sizes can vary a great deal; furoshiki more than 2 sq m (22 sq ft) are by no means unheard of; one sometimes sees them used, for instance, to wrap large drums used during Shintō festivals. I once saw one used to carry a small grandfather clock from an antique dealer's shop.

Presentation is vitally important in Japan, so that gift-wrapping has become an art form demanding skill in paper folding. The furoshiki eliminates the need for wrapping paper, but dictates rituals of its own. When you bring someone a gift in a furoshiki, it is customary to unwrap the latter yourself in front of the recipient before presenting it to them. Otherwise, it would be the height of rudeness. Since no one keeps anyone else's furoshiki, the recipient would assume that you expect something in return and would be obliged to put something into the furoshiki before giving it back to you.

Depending on what is being carried, there are also different ways of folding the furoshiki and tying its corners. There are special folding techniques for watermelon and other round, heavy objects as well as for square ones. Like the tying and folding used to ensure that two large sake bottles can be carried without knocking into each other, the techniques can be very ingenious.

Often more the

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