The bamboo that holds a hillside
Takano Chikko was founded in 1968 in Nagaokakyō, in the Nishiyama-Otokuni district that Kyoto’s bamboo has come from for centuries. Bamboo work, sashimono joinery, urushi lacquer and maki-e all happen under one roof — most workshops do one part and send the rest out.
There is an old Japanese instruction: when the ground shakes, run into the bamboo. The workshop keeps a long study of it, drawn from Ueda Kōichirō’s 1986 book on bamboo culture. In the 1923 Kantō earthquake, the people in Odawara and Hadano who knew the saying and ran into the groves came through. In the 1968 Ebino earthquake, forty-four major landslides took more than a thousand houses and killed three. After the Hester typhoon of 1953, of the hundred and twenty points where embankments failed, a hundred had no bamboo on the bank.
The root mat is the reason: it knits the soil together and holds it. The same fibre, cut and split and dried, is what a spatula, a tray or a tea whisk is made of.