Chasen by Tanimura Tango 20th Generation - Information and Care

Thank you for your recent chasen purchase! This guide will have some information about Tanimura Tango (Jun), the maker of your new chasen, with some care tips to help it last as long as possible!

Jun is the 20th generation in the Tanimura Tango chasen making family line that have produced tea whisks for 500 years, who are one of only three remaining families that were granted their surnames by the government in the Edo era, and one of about 18 total families left making chasen in Japan. He makes the chasen for the tea masters of two of the main three tea schools (Urasenke and Mushakojisenke). We are honoured to be able to sell his beautifully hand-made chasen, chashaku and hishaku in our small teahouse on the other side of the world!

With your purchase you may have been given a leaflet which outlines the chasen making process from start to finish, but we will briefly describe it here also. Bamboo is harvested at around 3 years of age, sun dried for a month or so in the rice fields around Takayama, and then stored for a further two-three years. One ~1.7m length of bamboo can only make three or four chasen because the joint on the whisk needs to be placed precisely. One end of each piece is split into half, quarters, eighths, and then sixteenths. The inner part of the bamboo is removed, leaving only the thin skin around 1mm thick. For an 80 tine whisk, each sixteenth is split into ten, giving 160 tines total with 80 in the middle and 80 around the outer ring. The tines are softened in hot water and then shaved even thinner with the chasen master working only by feel, and then the tines are separated inside and outside by weaving a string through the tines all the way around until the chasen is finished. Throughout this process the chasen master is carefully adjusting each tine resulting in a beautiful and even final product.

The intricate knowledge that his family have learned over generations of practice and feedback from tea masters is passed down only within his own family, and if you visit his studio (with a translater unless you speak Japanese) you may be lucky enough to see some ancient scrolls that detail different types of chasen made for different uses. We are wary of any chasen not made by one of these 18 or so families in Nara, as much of the vast knowledge will be missing, and important steps may be skipped or overlooked. We are particuarly suspicious of chasen that come with a silica gel packet with the chasen - if the time is spent to treat the bamboo properly, it will not have any excess moisture inside the bamboo itself and won’t need a silica gel pack there to stop mould growth.

We hope you can appreciate the craftsmanship and experience that goes into each chasen.

Caring for your chasen

After taking your chasen out of the box, there will be some dry glue and paper stuck to the bottom of it. This is easily removed by soaking the bottom of your chasen in some warm water for a minute or so, and then rubbing or peeling it off.

Before making matcha, we preheat our chasen in hot (~70-90°C) water for 5-10 seconds. Thin bamboo is brittle when cold and dry and becomes more flexible when warm so this helps make the tines less likely to break when whisking. Disclaimer - Jun himself says this is not a necessary step so don’t worry if you don’t do it.

While whisking, don’t press down very much onto the bottom of your tea bowl - gentle contact is okay though.

After making matcha (remember to sift it beforehand), rinse your chasen again in hot water or run under the hot water tap to remove any matcha residue, then shake a few times to remove excess water drops. You will notice over time that this is the easiest method to maintain your chasen, as if you leave the matcha residue to dry on the tines it is much harder to clean! To remove more stubborn matcha residue from the tines you can gently wipe the tines with wet fingers, but (from our own experience) be careful not to bend the tines accidentally while doing this - ‘pulling’ gently from the base to the tips is better than ‘pushing’ down from the tips to the base. While drying, the outer layer of tines will want to close up slightly, so after shaking excess water off, you can put the chasen straight onto the kusenaoshi to preserve the shape of the chasen and prevent it closing up. If doing this we recommend to keep the kusenaoshi in an open space like on a countertop etc, as if there is moisture on the chasen and it is put into a cupboard, there is a chance of mold formation. We generally don’t recommend to keep the chasen and kusenaoshi in a cupboard anyway, unless they are completely dry. If you want to store the chasen in its box it is recommended to dry the chasen for a few days first to avoid mold.

If taken care of there is no reason why your chasen can’t last a good few years, but it will need to be replaced eventually as it is a consumable product. If any tines are completely bent or hanging off, cut below the break line with scissors - if you pull/rip the broken tine it is likely to rip all the way down to the base as bamboo is a fibrous material.

If you have any questions about your new chasen don’t hesitate to message us on Instagram or by email and we will be more than happy to help.

Happy whisking!