Suikaen Takayama Chasen: The Bamboo, the Craft, and Why It Matters

I want to start with the forest.

On my most recent visit to Takayama, Tanimura Keiichiro took me to one of the family's bamboo groves. Keiichiro is the son of Tanimura Yasaburo, the 25th-generation chasen master, and my counterpart at Suikaen for many years now. On this trip I also had the honour of meeting Yasaburo-san himself, something I will not forget. But it was Keiichiro who walked me into the forest.

I am not sure what I expected. What I found was something vast: thousands of stalks pressing upward, the light breaking apart as it came through, the ground dense with roots and shadow. It was, simply, one of the most beautiful things I have seen in Japan.

And then he began to point out which stalks might be usable come December. Not now: in June, the bamboo is nowhere near ready for cutting, which happens in winter when the moisture content is at its lowest. But Keiichiro was reading the forest six months ahead, seeing in the current growth which stalks had the right age, the right diameter, the right grain to be worth returning for.

I could not see it. Standing in that forest, I could not distinguish one stalk from another with any confidence, let alone project what they might become by winter. And that is when I understood something about the chasen I had been carrying in my bag for years, whisking matcha with every morning, replacing when the tines wore out. I had not understood what I was holding.

Tealife carries chasen from Suikaen (翠華園), the atelier of Tanimura Yasaburo in Takayama, Nara. We are fortunate and grateful to have a long relationship with them. This article is an attempt to share what that relationship, and that afternoon in the forest, taught me.

Takayama is a small village at the northernmost tip of Ikoma City (生駒市) in Nara Prefecture. It sits in a valley, quiet and deeply green, with bamboo forests pressing in from the hillsides. What Takayama has, and what it has had for over 500 years, is a single craft: the making of chasen (茶筅, tea whisk).¹

Japan has produced chasen in exactly one place for the entirety of its tea ceremony history. Every major tea school, Urasenke (裏千家), Omotesenke (表千家), Mushakoji Senke (武者小路千家) and the rest, has always sourced its whisks from this village.² Today, Takayama accounts for over 90% of all chasen produced in Japan.³

The origin story begins in the mid-Muromachi period (室町時代, roughly the 15th century). The second son of the lord of Takayama castle, known as Sozei (宗砌), was asked by his close friend Murata Juko (村田珠光) to make a tool for whisking matcha. Murata Juko is credited as the founder of wabi-cha (侘び茶), the austere, inward-looking tea aesthetic that Sen no Rikyu (千利休) would later bring to its full expression. The chasen Sozei created was presented to Emperor Go-Tsuchimikado (後土御門天皇), who was so taken with it that he bestowed on it the name "Takaho" (高穂). The village name itself was eventually reshaped in honour of this event.¹

From that point, the art of chasen-making was held as a secret of the Takayama family, passed down through the practice of ichishi-soden (一子相伝), the transmission of technique from parent to a single, chosen child. No one outside the bloodline was permitted to learn it. It was only much later, when the technique was shared with sixteen retainers of the Takayama clan, that the craft began to spread within the village itself.² After the post-war period, when the old restrictions could no longer be sustained against labour shortages, the knowledge became more openly held, and a small community of chasen-making families in Takayama has carried it forward ever since.⁴

In 1975, the Japanese government designated Takayama Chasen a national traditional craft (伝統的工芸品) under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.⁴

Today, approximately 18 chasen workshops remain in Takayama, down from around 50 at the craft's peak.⁵

Suikaen is the atelier of Tanimura Yasaburo, a 25th-generation chasen maker. The studio traces its roots back to the golden age of chado (茶道, the way of tea), when Sen no Rikyu made tea for Oda Nobunaga in the 16th century.

What that generational depth means in practice is this: Tanimura Yasaburo did not simply learn a craft. He inherited it from a father who inherited it from a father, across an unbroken line of 25 generations. The knowledge embedded in his hands is not the product of training alone. It is the accumulated result of centuries of people working with the same material, in the same place, for the same purpose.

Keiichiro returned to the family workshop in 2020 after years abroad studying economics and working at a global sportswear company. Together with his wife, Keiichiro launched a second strand of the Suikaen identity, one that carries the same traditional construction and bamboo but presents the craft to a new, global audience through coloured thread weaving patterns, graphic designs, and decorative charms. The father was initially resistant. A craftsman who has spent his life guarding a tradition has earned the right to be. But Keiichiro's persistence, and the clear separation of the heritage line from the contemporary line, eventually brought them into alignment.⁵

When Tanimura-san visited Singapore last year, he mentioned something that has stayed with me. Sen no Rikyu surrounded himself with a circle of artisan families: lacquerers, ceramicists, kettle casters, woodworkers, whose relationships with the Sen schools were formalised over generations into what became known as the Sen'ke Jisshoku (千家十職), the ten hereditary craft lineages of the Sen schools. These families and their descendants are still active today. The objects they made were chosen, named, and treasured.

There is no chasen family among the ten.

The tea whisk stands apart. It was always made in one village, by families outside the inner circle of the tea world's official craft relationships, and it was always meant to be used and replaced. Even at the pinnacle of chado culture, the chasen occupied a different category from the chawan (茶碗, tea bowl) or the natsume (棗, lacquered tea caddy). It was indispensable and it was expendable.

Understanding this makes what follows more striking, not less.

A chasen is made from a single piece of bamboo. Not assembled from parts, not reinforced with anything: one piece of bamboo, split by hand into as few as 16 or as many as 120 or more individual tines, shaped over a series of painstaking steps into the elegant, fanned form you hold when you whisk matcha. Every quality in the finished chasen, its flexibility, its resilience, the way the tines spring back after each stroke, begins with the bamboo itself.

The bamboo used for Takayama chasen is hachiku (淡竹, known botanically as Phyllostachys nigra var. henonis). Hachiku is slender and fine-grained, with a smooth, powder-dusted surface and relatively thin walls, qualities that make it exceptionally suited to the fine splitting work that chasen-making demands.⁸ It is not used for eating (that is the job of moso bamboo, 孟宗竹, the large-stalked variety whose shoots become takenoko, 筍). It has its role: the tea whisk. And for that role, it is irreplaceable.

Hachiku shoots sprout in May, a full month or two after moso bamboo, which pushes through the ground from March into April.⁶ From that small shoot, the bamboo will reach seven to eight metres in height within a single year.⁷ Growth rates of over 100 cm in a single 24-hour period have been recorded for madake and moso, closely related species.⁷ Suikaen harvests hachiku that sprouted in the same year, cutting in winter when the moisture content is at its lowest and the fibres are most stable.⁸ After cutting, the bamboo is processed and then aged in storage for approximately two years before a chasen can be made from it.⁸

Tanimura-san travels to different parts of Japan to source his hachiku. The Kinki region produces bamboo with the density and fibre quality the craft requires, and it remains the primary sourcing area. But the search goes wider than that. Bamboo from certain regions, such as Kyushu, tends to be softer and less suited to the precision splitting that chasen-making demands, a distinction that is invisible until you try to work the material and find it gives where it should hold.

And this is where the forest comes back.

Standing among thousands of stalks, each one reaching upward, each one looking, to my eye, more or less like the others, the challenge becomes real in a way that no description quite captures. The bamboo must be young, but fully upright and self-supporting. Too young and it lacks structural integrity. Too old and its fibres are too rigid to split cleanly. It must be the right species. And hachiku and madake (真竹), which is used for other bamboo crafts, are extraordinarily difficult to tell apart without training. I know this not just from standing in the forest but from holding both in my hands, side by side, and staring at them. I still could not tell the difference. The distinctions are there, in the surface, the node spacing, the way the skin catches light, but they are beyond what an untrained eye can read, even up close.

The people who do the cutting are the kiriko-san (切子さん, bamboo cutters). Many are in their seventies and eighties. When they go into the forest in winter, they can identify the right stalks at a glance, reading the grain, the surface, the nodes with an eye built over decades of this work. And then they cut, and carry. Snow-covered ground, ice-cold air, dense mountain forest, and men in their eighties hauling bamboo out on their backs. It is not a romantic image. It is punishing work, and the people doing it are not young. When a kiriko-san retires, that eye retires with them, and so does the willingness to walk into a frozen grove and do what needs to be done. There is no textbook for it, no shortcut, and not enough young people learning it to cover the losses.

Securing quality bamboo is becoming harder every year, not only because of who is left to find it, but because the forests themselves are increasingly unmanaged. With fewer people maintaining the mountain bamboo groves, overgrowth has become the norm. And within an overgrown grove, finding bamboo of the right age and quality is exponentially harder. The forest is vast. The suitable candidates within it are few. And the people who can see them are disappearing.

There is one more hazard: wild boar (猪, inoshishi). New bamboo shoots, in the weeks after they emerge from the soil, are dug up by boar before they can grow. The vulnerability of this craft begins at the moment the bamboo first breaks the surface.

Once the right bamboo is found and cut, always in winter when moisture content is at its lowest and the fibres most stable, the raw material undergoes a process that takes years before a single chasen can be made from it.

The first step is oil removal. The cut bamboo is boiled to draw out its natural oils (油抜き, abura-nuki). This also transforms its appearance: the deep green of a living stalk gradually whitens and brightens as the oil is extracted, becoming the pale, lustrous material known as shiratake (白竹, white bamboo). The boiling is followed by sun-drying, the bundled stalks set out in the cold winter air, which tightens the grain further.⁸

Then comes the waiting. The bamboo is stored and aged for approximately two years. This strengthens the material through continued stabilisation, but it also does something else: it filters. Weaker bamboo cracks and splits during these two years. Only the stalks that survive intact are worth working with.⁸

Of everything that is cut and brought down from the mountain, Tanimura-san estimates that roughly 80% will never become a chasen. Some are lost during the initial selection, others crack during the two years of ageing, others still snap during splitting or shaving, and some break even in the final stages or in transit. The losses happen at every point along the way. What reaches you represents, at most, one in five of the stalks that were carried out of a frozen forest in winter.

All of this, the sourcing journey, the boiling, the months of drying, the years of ageing, happens before the making of a single chasen begins.

The production of a Takayama chasen involves eight formally defined steps, all performed entirely by hand.⁴

It begins with cutting the dried, aged bamboo into sections (コロ, koro), then splitting each section into flat strips (片木, hegi). These strips are divided further by hand along the bamboo's natural grain, a process called kowari (小割), until the individual tines begin to emerge. The number of tines determines how the chasen whisks: a standard 80-tine chasen suits everyday use; 100- or 120-tine versions are used in formal tea ceremony.

The step that separates competent from exceptional is aji-kezuri (味削り, "flavour shaving"). Each tine is individually shaved on its inner surface, from root to tip, thinning progressively until the tine ends at near-transparency. The finished thickness is approximately 0.03mm, less than half the width of a human hair. The traditional instruction passed between generations of chasen-makers is to shave each tine to "the thickness of half a sheet of washi paper." How the whisk performs in the bowl, whether it glides or drags, whether it produces fine foam or coarse bubbles, whether the matcha integrates smoothly or clumps, is decided at this step. "The taste of the tea changes with how the tines are shaved."⁹

After aji-kezuri comes chamfering (面取り, mentori), trimming the edges of each outer tine so that matcha does not cling to them. Then the weaving: outer tines folded outward and woven with thread in the upper and lower pattern (下編み・上編み, shita-ami/ue-ami) that gives the chasen its characteristic skirt. The inner tines are arranged around a central core (腰並べ, koshi-narabe), and the whole is brought to its final form.

Breakage happens throughout all of this. Tines snap during splitting. They crack during shaving. Finished chasen break in transit. This is not poor craft. It is the nature of bamboo, a material that is simultaneously supple and brittle. Every chasen that reaches a customer has survived a process in which breakage, at every stage, is the more common outcome.

To produce your first acceptable chasen takes approximately two years of daily work under a master.¹⁰ To complete all eight processes to a consistent standard takes around ten years.¹⁰ To truly master the craft, to read each individual piece of bamboo and adjust accordingly, to produce a consistent result across the full range of the material's natural variation, takes fifteen to twenty-five years, in Tanimura Yasaburo's estimation.