What is Carbonized Bamboo?

Tsuruoka City Shonai of the Yamagata Prefecture, is located in the Northern part of Japan. The region is known as the habitat of Moso Bamboo (a type of bamboo which grows in the temperate and humid climate in Asia), which has been used in people’s daily lives from ancient times for food, charcoal and crafts. Among them, Shonai bamboo rod is the most famous. The story goes back to the 18th century when the Shonai clan encouraged the worriers’ families to fish as part of the code of the samurai. It is said “the noted rod is treated as nicely as the noted sword”. People admire the “noted rod”, which was produced with years of work, for its beauty of craftsmanship and colour. Bamboo Carbonization is the result of people who were enchanted by the beauty of bamboo and the region where bamboo was used in people’s daily lives.

There had been always strong connections between people and bamboos in the Shonai region. During the agricultural off-season people cut bamboos and used them for materials for fences, charcoal and various household goods. You can see bamboos are used for many different things in this flourishing agricultural land.

Carbonized Bamboo was accidentally discovered in people’s everyday life, when a piece of fresh-cut bamboo was used as a vase, it was seen that fungus grew on it, its colour faded rapidly and finally it cracked as it dried out. One day, a charcoal grill artisan picked up a poorly-made piece of bamboo charcoal, as he started to polish it he found that it transformed into a skin gloss bamboo craft. It became a useful and precious vase you can rarely find anywhere else. As another example, there were bamboos put together above the hearth in traditional houses. When the houses were demolished after years of use, those bamboos appeared as bamboo coals with a shiny red-brown skin. In the beginning, these precious products which came out of people’s everyday lives were only used in the tea ceremony, special architecture and crafts. Carbonized Bamboo became a more common product after a developer who noticed a need for the product started producing it as a specialized product.

The specialized kiln to smoke bamboos, to create the Carbonization Bamboo is located in the deep mountain village at the foot of Mount Zao in Yamagata prefecture. Its size is about 6 meters × 2 meters, and it can accommodate approximately 40 Moso bamboos. Bamboos are smoked in this kiln for two to four hours at 200 ° in Celsius. Since Bamboo is a plant with sealed tube sections overlapping each section, it will crack if heated at a high temperature. They have to be smoked carefully enough not to crack.

The next day the temperature of the kiln cools down, and the bamboos which have changed colour come full of soot. At this stage, the bamboo’s water has evaporated, oil has come out, sugar had been congealed just before carbonization, and you can see that the bamboos have transformed up to10 times more rigid than before.

The hardest part is polishing. The bamboos covered with soot are carefully polished one by one with a unique polishing machine. It takes 15 minutes to polish up a bamboo with a diameter of 8 cm and the length of 2 meters. However, once it has been done, even the manufacturer is usually impressed with the sleek clean look of the polished bamboos, all of which have unique shapes and colours.

As mentioned above, Carbonized Bamboo is a natural material which doesn’t contain artificial paint colours. If a fresh green bamboo is carbonized, it turns into distinctive blackish brown colour; if a bleached bamboo, its colour turns into precious reddish brown of Susudake. These materials have a high rigidity, and those colours will be hard to fade away as long as they are used indoors.

The finished carbonized bamboos can be used for floors, walls, spatial designs and indirect lightings. Carbonized Bamboo is available at a very reasonable price, if compared to general bamboos used for interiors. We can assist you by showing the novel examples for usages of the product. Our products are suitable for those who seek the beauty of an authentic Japanese atmosphere.