Every fude shokunin must, she says, adding that when brushes were a necessity, artisans used to take on a debt as big as a home loan to set up their workshop. It’s getting harder these days to find good hair for brushes - the last remaining supplier in Nara closed several years ago - but Tanaka has a lifetime stock of materials. I’m pleased with my brush, even if Tanaka did all the real work of blending the hair and assembling the brush head. Finally, I wrap a thread around the brush, hold it taut and pull the loop toward the tip to smooth the bristles into a shape like a candle flame. We squish the bristles into a bowl of gelatinous funori, a water-soluble adhesive made from seaweed, then comb them out. With Tanaka’s steady guidance, I use a blade to widen the opening of a bamboo handle, prep it with super glue (traditional nikawa, which is similar to rabbit-skin glue, is finicky and slow-drying) and press a fluffy brush head into the opening.
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After graduation, she became a deshi - a disciple or apprentice - to a master fude maker and worked for a brush company, before becoming an independent shokunin in 2009. She was already certified in ikebana and tea ceremony (but dismisses this mastery as marriage training), and she’d learned to sew kimono and Western clothes, but nothing held her interest until she tried brush making. It was rare then for women to work outside the home or family business, but she wanted something to do - a purpose of her own. She remembers bringing her daughter in a stroller to the craft school where she’d enrolled in a yearlong program. WHEN CHIYOMI TANAKA began studying fude making in 1982, her children were toddlers. But those Kumano brushes are linked to Nara fude, as beauty brushes were born from the venerated - and now disappearing - tradition of crafting fude for calligraphy. Most Japanese beauty brushes are manufactured in Kumano, a city in Hiroshima Prefecture with nearly 200 years of its own (more industrial) brush-making culture. High-end contemporary beauty brands such as Westman Atelier, Surratt, Rae Morris and others proudly share that their makeup brushes are made in Japan, using traditional techniques and materials. And now, brushes from esteemed Japanese companies like Chikuhodo and Kashoen 1883 are available the world over.
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Japanese brushes have long been popular with professional makeup artists, many of whom grew up admiring the pioneering work of the Japanese makeup artist Shu Uemura. But I’m really here to satisfy my own curiosity about how Tanaka makes her brushes - and to try to understand how Japanese makeup brushes relate to this storied craft. The process is so complex that an amateur can do little more than affix a brush head to a handle. I imagined I’d craft my own brush from start to finish, but even Tanaka’s adult daughter, who sometimes assists with workshops for groups of tourists, has not tried to blend and assemble the hairs herself. Tanaka leads me upstairs for an hourlong workshop. The oldest existing brushes in Japan (housed in the city’s Shoso-in repository at Todaiji temple) date to that period. Ink and brushes were employed to record extensive histories, copy sutras and draft laws. After Empress Genmei established the city of Nara as Japan’s imperial capital in the eighth century - modeling its bureaucracy and architecture on that of China’s Tang Dynasty - the monarchy used writing and religion to consolidate power.
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In the fourth or fifth century, Buddhist monks, traders, government officials and immigrants brought Chinese writing to Japan (via the Korean Peninsula), which continued to spread with Buddhism in the sixth century. “Fude” roughly translates to “brush,” but Tanaka uses the word only for the style of calligraphy and ink-painting brushes she makes in a tradition with roughly 1,300 years of history in Nara, the landlocked prefecture below Kyoto. Tanaka is one of seven remaining masters of crafting Nara fude. With tools so old they are no longer in production, it’s the workshop of a shokunin (master craftsperson), but as cozy as an auntie’s living room. Inside, brushes in every size - some fine enough to paint a doll’s eyelashes, others broad enough to draw characters as tall as the person writing them - line the walls.
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I follow a stone path down the flower-lined alleyway and duck under a mustard-colored noren curtain and into her tiny showroom. Among the low, tile-roofed wooden houses of the historic Nara-machi neighborhood of the city of Nara, a calligraphy brush as big as a broom marks the gate to Chiyomi Tanaka’s shop.