When the U.S. government decided to round up Japanese Americans at the start of World War II, Aiko Nakane and her husband, a minister, were living in Palm Springs. “They came for the leaders first,” Seattle-born Nakane says. “My husband was taken right away.” Soon they wanted everyone. The order, on as little as a week’s notice, was to leave everything and go. “Take only what you can carry.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
After the war Nakane raised her son and studied painting and pottery making part-time at the School of the Art Institute. During a visit to Japan, where she had lived as a child, she looked with newly appreciative eyes at the handmade papers pervasively used there and almost totally unavailable in the United States. There were papers that wed superbly with paint or ink; others that looked and felt like lace, or insect wings, or sand at the edge of the sea. She gathered as many varieties as she could to bring back as gifts for her art school friends. When they demanded more, she found herself in the import business. Aiko’s Art Materials Import, Inc. opened in 1957 in a tiny third-floor space on the corner of Wabash and Huron.
Even then, Nakane says, hand papermaking was a dying industry. These deceptively fragile-looking organic papers are the product of a process developed 2,000 years ago in China. Traditionally involving entire farming families, it is laborious and begins with the cultivation of a plant, often kozo (mulberry). New shoots of kozo, snipped at exactly the right time, are steamed and stripped of their outer bark. The remaining fibers are soaked, bleached by the sun, cooked, rinsed for 24 hours in running river water, and pounded until they separate. (The wife’s evening job, Nakane says.) The resulting pulp is mixed in a vat with cold water and plant-root mucilage. To make each sheet of paper, a rectangular frame and screen contraption is scooped into the vat. The pulp-mucilage mixture is rolled back and forth across the surface of the screen. When the water has drained off, the frame is inverted and the screen peeled away. What’s left is a sheet of dripping paper, usually measuring about 24 inches by 36 inches. New sheets are piled up, drained overnight, pressed gently for 12 hours, then hung individually on a board and brushed. Finally they are taken to the sunny side of the farmhouse to dry.
Nakane is 86 years old now. Her husband and son are both dead. Chuck Izui, who has worked with her for a decade, will carry on the business when she retires–something she’s thinking about. Meanwhile she’ll go on doing what she can to prevent Japanese papermakers from disappearing, taking all the fragrant gasen and soft-veined taiten and fly’s wing ganpi with them.
