Takegami (Bamboo Paper)
Chuetsu Pulp & Paper Utilizes the Felled Bamboos

Date：31, May, 2013
Investigated and Written by Misaka Youhei
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Do you have any bamboo groves near? Bamboo, it grows so high and they say sometimes it gets taller over a meter for a day. We have to admire their robust power of life anyway. However, everything has pros and cons. The free-grown bamboos have the tendency to damage other floras in the forest, and so it has been a serious problem for all of Japanese to manage bamboo groves nicely.

Then, they had appositely cut some of the grown bamboos and had done nothing but leave the felled bamboos alone there. Could that be an apposite management? They needed to find a way. Chuetsu Pulp & Paper Co., Ltd. decided to utilize a lot of the felled effectively in 1998. From the time on, they have kept trial and error many times and succeeded in creating Takegami; paper made from bamboos.

Paper was originally developed in China of old days and was carried to Japan by a priest from Koguryo in 610. It is said they had invented paper made from bamboos; Chikushi in China of Tang era although that was seldom seen in Nippon.

As mentioned above, damages from a lot of bamboos are an intense question in Japan. Moreover, we must think how to make the most of the cut bamboos. So Chuetsu Pulp & Paper firstly built up their structure to pick the felled bamboos up and got to making paper from them.

The main offices of Chuetsu Pulp & Paper are established in Toyama and Tokyo. They are not a leading paper company in the least. They say themselves they are the seventh paper-manufacturing company in Japan. But after passing through the long winding road, they reached to the point to let them manufacture paper from only domestic bamboos in 2009. They have recently manufactured Takegami from bamboos of 20,000 tons a year.

We have a common saying which says grafting a bamboo shoot on a tree. Japanese say Ki ni Take wo Tsugu. It means mixing water with fire. But Takegami has no differences from our usual paper from woods.

By the way, let me here tell you bamboos are not a kind of the wood since they are in the grass family. We manufacture 99 % of Japanese paper from wood pulp. The story tells we can get paper from not only the wood however also the grass.