Tanimura Tango and Japan's Vanishing Chasen Craft

In Takayama, Nara prefecture, Tanimura Jun, professionally known as Tanimura Tango, continues a legacy that few others have maintained. As the 20th generation chasen master craftsman, he creates bamboo whisks essential for preparing matcha tea. 

Growing up, he showed no interest in the family tradition, nor was he pressured to follow it. Many craft patriarchs actively discourage their children from continuing these traditions due to the demanding work and modest returns. Tanimura chose his own path, working as a salaryman and running a shop in Osaka until, at 28, he returned to Nara to care for his parents. Only then did he begin to study the craft his family had practised for centuries.

At first it was not easy to memorise all the steps required to make a chasen. Tanimura-san spent day after day looking at his father working. It took him 10 years to finally find the right rhythm and become a master himself, and has been at it for the past 26 years.

Will his son want to become the 21st generation? Tanimura-san is not sure but believes that how he approaches the pleasures and sorrows of daily life as a craftsman, is the best way to prove to him that this is a path worth pursuing.

It takes about two hours for Tanimura-san to make a chasen all by himself, that’s about 4 units per day. However, running the family business has many other requirements and he currently employs 15 other artisans, bringing the daily production to roughly 50. It’s not easy to find new apprentices and it takes them one-two years to conquer the necessary skills.

As an object, the chasen has been perfected over centuries and remained mostly the same for the last 500 years. Up to about a hundred years ago, they were made at night using candlelight to keep the process secret. When fluorescent light came about, the method had to be tweaked to take into account that light reflected differently on the cutting tools. 

While the overall shapes (there’s more than 100 different ones) haven’t changed, Tanimura Tango is known for adjusting the delicate balance between strength and flexibility of each whisk to the customer’s style of preparing tea. The shape of a whisk also affects how you prepare matcha. A chasen with straight tines, like the one that renowned tea master Sen no Rikyu used, produces less foam than a chasen with rounded ones.

Types of Bamboo Used in Chasen Making

A good chasen is defined by the carving hand and the quality of the bamboo used:

• Aotake (green bamboo): Fresh and used for new year celebrations. After a few uses its colour will change from green to yellow and there is beauty in that too.
• Shirotake (white bamboo): The most widely used and is preferred by the Urasenke school of tea.
• Kurotake (black bamboo): My favourite, used by the Mushakōjisenke school of tea.
• Susudake (smoked bamboo): Used by the Omotesenke school of tea. Obtained from stems that have been exposed to the smoke of the irori, the open hearth typical of old houses, and is deemed to eventually disappear, forcing the Omotesenke school to find an alternative.

When Tanimura-san was born, Japan had 55 chasen-making families. Today, only 18 remain, with numbers likely to decrease as cheap imports flood the market. Yet he remains confident that authentic craftsmanship will survive. Despite mass production trends, the hands that craft these bamboo whisks continue their work, maintaining a connection to Japan's heritage that machines cannot replicate.

Thank you to Postcard Teas for hosting and facilitating the interview with Tanimura Tango.