In Aklan, the most common method of extracting fibers for cloth involves scraping the leaves by hand, using a broken porcelain plate and a coconut shell. This method yields good quality fiber and easily separates the liniwan (fine, white fiber) and the bastos (coarse, brownish fiber). The well-known Barong Tagalog and wedding dresses are made from liniwan. The fiber is cleaned by scraping it with a clam shell under running water, and is then dried in the sun. After drying, the fiber is soaked in clean water for beating. Beating is done with a smooth, clean length of bamboo, to soften and loosen the fiber bundles. Then the fiber is arranged in a bundle and fiber filaments are knotted end-to-end to form a yarn. Knotting is a long and tedious process; usually a single person produces only five grams of knotted thread daily. The number of warp threads on the loom determines the width of the woven fabric. The warp is wound around the warp beam of the native bamboo loom. It is then passed through the harness and the reed, which is held by the batten and fastened to the cloth beam. The knotted thread for the weft is directly wound onto a bobbin or spool. The bobbin spool is usually made from locally available materials, such as stalks of sugar cane or small bamboo sticks. Weavers in Aklan can make from one-half to one meter of cloth per day. One ounce of liniwan weft will make two-and-a-half meters; washed bastos (similar to liniwan, but weaker) will yield only two meters. * * * Hand papermaking is dying out in Japan. The traditional Japanese craft of weaving with paper thread, shifu, ceased in Shiroishi in 1921. In the Edo period, many samurai in Shiroishi were engaged in shifu making. Each samurai specialized in a different step, but all made the joints to form a continuous strip of fiber and all wove. Mr. Chutaro Sato and Mr. Nobumitsu Katakura revived Shiroishi shifu in the early 1940s and it has survived on a small scale. Mrs. Sadako Sakurai was interested in Shiroishi shifu in the early 1980s.1 She visited Mr. Nobumitsu Katakura and also received advice from Mr. Kazuo Seiki, a papermaker who lived near her. She started to weave Shiroishi style shifu, which required fine shifu paper. This she received from Mr. Seiki Kikuchi, son of Kazuo. It took a long time to satisfy Mrs. Sakurai's finger; she can tell whether or not a paper is suitable for making shifu. Mr. and Mrs. Sakurai came to Baguio in the Philippines in 1991 and taught shifu making to some of the local people. They made shifu with Hawaiian piña paper and wove it mostly on backstrap looms. This style of weaving is quite dense, not like cloth woven on a table loom. In 1994, Mr. Kiichi Sakurai came to Aklan with nine Japanese weavers to observe piña weaving and papermaking. One night he led a session on making paper thread for shifu. Aklan is known for cloth woven from sinamay, piña, and raffia. Many people there had a basic knowledge of weaving; some extract the fibers, some knot the fibers, and some do the weaving. For making shifu, the only skill lacking was making paper thread. Several papermakers live in Aklan but they cannot afford Japanese sugetas to make paper using the nagashizuki technique. Since the Philippines has no history of papermaking, we have adapted cheap and efficient techniques suitable for shifu making.2 The process of piña shifu making is almost same as Shiroishi shifu. Coincidentally, thread makers are all along one street near where we make piña paper. We call it "Shifu Avenue." The thread makers are eager to switch from sinamay knotting to making paper thread. Kami Philippines started its research and development of piña paper in Aklan in early 1993.3 Aklan is the only place where piña cloth is woven from native pineapple, which leaves a lot of waste fibers. When Mr. Katsu Tadahiko went to Okinawa in 1977 to revive basho paper, he initially used the same banana leaf stem fiber the local weavers used.4 But he could not reproduce the quality of the old basho papers, which had not been made since World War II. He wondered how the earlier papermakers had made them. One day he was watching basho extracting and saw the waste fibers separated from those used for weaving. He thought that waste fiber might have been the original raw material for papermaking. He brought some back and tested it to make paper. He was pleased to discover that this was the answer. Weavers and papermakers had co-existed in the old days, not using the same material. In the same way, we now use waste piña fibers for papermaking. Of the different fibers that can be extracted from the piña, white bastos and liniwan make excellent paper, but they are not for papermaking. These two are the traditional materials for weaving, so we do not use them. "Wealth from waste" is our simple policy at Kami Philippines, taken from Gandhi's slogan. Similarly, we use the Indian charkha, a book-type spinning wheel, manufactured during his movement to promote more jobs for local people. Making paper for shifu follows several sequential steps, listed below (Japanese terms are listed in parentheses). The dyeing step is only done sometimes. 1. Papermaking: piña brown bastos paper made using a Western mold and deckle (45 x 60 cm) with a silk screen and synthetic tororo-aoi, as dispersing agent. 2. Folding: cutting the paper in half and folding it into four parts. 3. Cutting: cutting the paper in connected strips two or three mm wide (kiru). 4. Dampening: spraying water on the cut sheet (shimerasu). 5. Rolling: rolling paper on a wooden board (momu). 6. Making joints: tearing and twisting alternate slits for form a continuous narrow strip (umu). 7. Spinning: spinning on the Indian charkha, a spinning wheel (yoru). 8. Boiling: boiling the paper thread briefly in water to secure the spinning and to shrink the fiber (niru). 9. Skeining: winding the paper thread onto a skein (kaseage). 10. Drying: drying the thread (kanso). 11. Dyeing: dyeing the paper thread (someru). 12. Weaving: weaving on the table loom, using the paper thread as weft (oru). Using washed bastos is a challenge for piña papermaking. The price of good quality bastos fiber has increased dramatically in the 1990s. The supply of bastos is short and we need to make our own bastos, which we prefer, or switch to using Hawaiian piña. Notes 1. Susan Byrd, "Shifu, Fine Handmade Paper Cloth," Hand Papermaking, Volume 1 Number 2, Winter 1986, pp. 18-22. 2. Article on Kalibo Atiatihan and piña paper, Pacific Friend Magazine, August 1994. 3. Asao Shimura, "Piña Story," Hand Papermaking, Volume 8 Number 2, Winter 1993, pp. 2-4. 4. Timothy Barrett, "Katsu Tadahiko, 1947-1987," Hand Papermaking, Volume 9 Number 2, Winter 1994, pp. 8-12.
