How a Wagasa Is Made

The steps, and what they are for.

It begins in selection.

Wagasa-making begins with bamboo — specifically with the decision of which bamboo to use.
Node spacing, straightness, density, the particular quality of flex in a given culm. This selection is itself a skill. The right bamboo makes every subsequent step easier. The wrong bamboo makes them harder, and the errors compound.
Once selected, the bamboo rests for several weeks to dry.
Forcing the drying introduces stress into the material that surfaces later — cracking along the grain, uneven flex in the finished rib.
There is no shortcut to this part.

Splitting and shaving.

Dried bamboo is split lengthwise into individual ribs — between thirty and seventy per wagasa, depending on the design.
Each is shaved by hand with a blade.
The target is consistent cross-section and flex along the length.

In practice, no two ribs are exactly the same. Bamboo has grain; the grain varies. The craftsperson reads each rib as it comes, adjusting the angle and pressure of each stroke.
The work is meditative in the way that demanding, repetitive precision tends to be.

The hub that holds everything.

The rokuro — the wooden hub into which every rib is seated, and which governs the open-and-close movement of the wagasa — is turned from dense hardwood.
Two pieces: the upper and lower rokuro.

Misalignment here propagates through the entire structure.
A wagasa with a poorly made rokuro opens unevenly, holds unevenly, and eventually stresses its own joints.
This is the step that determines whether the finished object is in balance.

Cutting and laying.

Once the skeleton is assembled, the washi panels are cut into fan shapes and pasted between the ribs.
The direction of the washi grain relative to the rib is not incidental — it affects how the panel responds to movement and how light passes through it.

At the base of each rib, where the most movement occurs when the wagasa opens and closes, a technique called hida-bari is used: the washi is laid in with a small intentional pleat rather than pulled taut.
A taut sheet tears under repeated flex. A pleated sheet follows the movement and survives it.
This small decision — to leave material rather than tension it — is one of the steps that separates a wagasa that lasts decades from one that does not.

Linseed oil, sun, and time.

Once the washi is in place, linseed oil is worked into the entire surface.
The wagasa is then dried in sunlight. Then oiled again.
This cycle continues until the oil has penetrated the washi evenly.
The number of cycles depends on temperature, humidity, and the quality of the day's sunlight.
There is no fixed schedule. The craftsperson checks the surface, reads the penetration, decides.
The oil is what gives the finished washi its translucency.
In a room, a wagasa with well-oiled washi does not simply block or pass light.
It holds it, briefly, and releases it changed — warmer, softer, with the grain of the paper visible as texture within the glow.

More than eighty steps.

Across all of this — selecting, splitting, shaving, turning, assembling, cutting, pasting, oiling, drying — the total number of individual operations exceeds eighty.
Completing one wagasa takes the better part of a week.
There is no version of this process that is faster without being worse.
What arrives in the box is the result of that time.
The weight of it, the particular quality of the surface, the way it holds itself when open — these are not accidents of material.
They are what eighty steps of skilled attention produces.