Last part of the series on traditional handmade paper from Mino went up on Papersky’s International Edition (HERE). In the above photo Hoki Naritoshi is showing us Mino’s first plantation of Kozo (Mulberry) trees. The bark is used to make Japanese Washi. Mino has traditionally sourced it’s Kozo bark from Ibaraki, but this plantation marks a localization of paper making. Mino didn’t even grow it’s own Kozo tree’s when the town started making paper about 1300 years ago. I feel like this is a good example of the “long tail” (HERE) – a theory of change which seems to have an increasing efficacy in explaining consumer behavior, e.g. consumable phenomena like ‘music’ go from being large monolithic ‘things’ – with a few huge artists consumed by most of the population – to conglomerates of millions of tiny ‘things’ – where itunes and blogs offer endless artists consumed by endless niche groups. Perhaps even Mino’s tradition of paper making is an example of these ideas – rather than each city honing in on one element of a tradition (the tree’s, the tools, the paper itself), it seems Mino is an example of ‘total tradition’, where one town, one suburb or even one person, is required to be skilled in all areas of a tradition. This seems to go against the idea of the craftsman or “shokunin,” who spend their lives endlessly perfecting one discrete action or item, not growing tree’s to make their own tools or raising sheep to make their own garments, but repeating movements to achieve something good, something approaching perfection.