Many culturally significant products and practices go down this path. I believe washi particularly shoji will eventually settle into the category of "isn't produced on an industrial scale but never stops being made" with other products such as chainmail, non-electric typewriters, swords, powder horns, quill pens, parchment, monocle, coonskin caps, cathode ray tubes, hand drills, etc.
If that rang a bell for you, it might be via Baumgartner Restoration [0], the excellent painting restoration YouTube channel. He refers to it as "Japanese mulberry paper" and IIRC relies on it for its light weight but reliability.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvZe6ZCbF9xgbbbdkiodPKQ/videos" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvZe6ZCbF9xgbbbdkiodPKQ/vid...</a>
When I see articles on these kinds of materials - handmade and fairly unique, but not in wide demand any longer - I tend to wonder:<p>Are there any applications for the techniques used in the making of the materials that could be applied to other modern materials that could potentially create new uses for those materials.<p>For instance - just spitballing - but what if a different fiber and "glue" were substituted; could a very thin "mat" of such material be made, and what could it be used for?<p>I'm sure I'm not the first to think about this, though...
This is bit nit-picky of me, but it's a thread I've been noticing lately in some international news, so I'd like to know if anyone has observations or thoughts.<p>In South Korea, China, and Japan (to the extent of my observations), it seems when some culturally significant norm, craft, or product begins to lose said status, partit chalked up to a result of (what tone usually conveys as destructive) "Westernization". But a significant amount of the advances (i.e., emergent products or norms that have supplanted the ones in question) themselves tend to be celebrated and attributed to the progressive trajectory of their culture & state. It's just an odd bit of nationalistic hypocrisy that gives me an itch.<p>Of course, I do not think for a moment this is the case for everything, or that their peoples even embrace this view (as I believe to have been conveyed by the media). And I'm sure the West has behaved or.continues to behave in a similar manner, either now or (surely) in the past.<p>Perhaps I'm completely amiss, which, in that case, all the better.
Japanese Washi Paper making video. John Daub interviewed Washi paper master, Rogier Uitenboogaart living in Kochi Japan. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwu1t3d6kU4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwu1t3d6kU4</a>
Dave Bull of Mokuhankan has occasional blog posts about problems sourcing washi paper:
<a href="https://mokuhankan.com/conversations/archives/2016/04/how_are_we_doing_part_three.html" rel="nofollow">https://mokuhankan.com/conversations/archives/2016/04/how_ar...</a>
<a href="https://mokuhankan.com/conversations/archives/2016/07/paper_breakthrough.html" rel="nofollow">https://mokuhankan.com/conversations/archives/2016/07/paper_...</a><p>Though I seem to recall one other earlier post, but I can't find it at the moment, it was about debris/bark being mixed into the paper IIRC.
There is even a photographic "film" made from washi paper:<p><a href="http://filmwashi.com/en/products/handcrafted_films/" rel="nofollow">http://filmwashi.com/en/products/handcrafted_films/</a>