Green Chopsticks

Extracts

• Chopsticks!: an owners manual by Hashi-san
• A Dictionary of Japanese Food by Richard Hosking
• some citations from articles
• Back to the Reading Room

from Chopsticks!: an owners manual

by Hashi-san, 1991

A Mountain of Chopsticks

The disposable chopstick was born in 1878 when a Japanese schoolteacher named Tadao Shimamoto found that while he had carefully packed a delicious lunch and brought it to school with him, he had completely neglected to include a pair of chopsticks.

Fortunately for Shimamoto the school was located in Yoshino County, which was famous throughout Japan for the production of high-quality cedar barrels. After explaining his predicament to one of the local coopers, Tadao Shimamoto was given a cedar sliver to carve into chopsticks.

History does not record exactly why he chose the method he did, but he carved the two chopsticks together attached by a small wooden bridge. The design is no doubt familiar to anyone who has eaten in a Japanese or Chinese restaurant, but Tadao's hunger-driven carving created a sensation of commercial activity in the local area which began turning out disposable chopsticks ‹ called wari-bashi ‹ in large numbers

It is unclear whether or not Tadao Shimamoto shared in the profits that rolled in from the rapid spread of disposable chopsticks, but he certainly receives his share of appreaciation. Each year representatives from the disposable-chopstick manufacturers and marketers of Japan gather at a shrine in Shimamoto's hometown to perform a disposable-chopstick ceremony in honor of the wari-bashi.

Down With Disposables

Japan was the sourse of the disposable chopstick, and it is fitting that Japan now leads the world in environmental resistance to them. In fact, the first active resistance to throw-away chopsticks arose in Japan in the late 1930s. With the onset of World War II other issues took over center stage, but the anti-disposable sentiment broke out again in 1972 as a spontaneous campaign of housewives in Sapporo.

More recently, environmental groups such as the Japan Tropical Forest Action Network have led the struggle to return to a reliance on reusable chopsticks. About half of the disposable chopsticks are produced in Japan, and the remaining half are imported from China, Indonesia, Korea, and the Philippines. Estimates vary greatly, but Japan alone uses somewhere bewteen 13 and 25 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks each year ‹ which represents somewhere between 120 and 200 million cubic meters of lumber a year, enough to build over ten thousand homes.

Lately, disposable chopsticks have become a symbol of disdain for the environment in Japan, and increasing numbers of Japanese have taken to carrying their own personal chopsticks to restaurants in order to avoid using the ever-present disposable variety.

Be a Culinary Environmentalist

The bamboo chopsticks that came with this book can last you through many years of good eating and can be your regular companion whenever you dine at a restaurant that might try to force a pair of disposable chopsticks on you.

Make yourself a small holder (or if you are lazy use a clean child's sock) so after use you can stuff them back into your pocket and wash them at home. Bamboo will withstand dishwashers and just about anything else, but the best way to clean them is with a gentle rinse of soapy water.

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from A Dictionary of Japanese Food

by Richard Hosking, 1996

Appendix 1: Chopsticks

The Japanese have not always eaten with chopsticks (hashi). Until the end of the eighth century the common people ate with thier hands. The nobility had already started using chopsticks and spoon after the Chinese, but the spoon was never taken up by the common people and by the tenth century had gone out of use among the nobility.

compared with the flat-ended Chinese chopsticks, the Japanese ones are rather short, On average, Chinese chopsticks are 26 cm long, whereas the Japanese ones for home use are about 22 cm and the Korean ones even shorter at 19 cm. However, different kinds of chopsticks are used for different purposes and some of these are very short.

At home, chopsticks for eating are usually made of laquered wood or bamboo, and superior ones are, or rather were, made of ivory. On special occasions such as New Year, high-quality plain wood disposable chopsticks are used, folded up in a special paper called hashigami. On such occasions a chopstick rest (hashioki) might be used, but many people don't even possess chopstick rests, let alone use them.

In the kitchen, saibashi of various sizes are used for cooking and for other purposes, such as getting things out of bottles. Such chopsticks are estremely convenient.

Out-of-doors, waribashi are the rule. These are disposable chopsticks and are made as a pair in one piece, prepared so as to be pulled apart into separate sticks at the time of use. It is quite obvious that they have never been used. They usually come in a little paper envelope called hasibukuro. Being disposable, they same restaurants a lot of washing up, but they do seem to be rather wasteful. It is estimated that eight billion of them are used in a year. From the point of view of a foreigner not entirely at ease with chopsticks, waribashi are wretched. They always break apart the wrong way, sometimes so much so that you have the embarassment of asking for another pair. And being much shorter than ordinary chopsticks, they are difficult for people with large hands to manage. The only way to avoid problems with waribashi is to carry your own chopsticks, a custom that might well be encouraged.

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