Ms Yuriko Koike, Japan’s Minister of the Environment, has created the “Mottainai Furoshiki” as a symbol of Japanese culture to reduce waste. Furoshiki is a Japanese traditional wrapping cloth which is used repeatedly in a stylish way. The utilization of this “Mottainai Furoshiki” will contribute to reducing household waste from plastic bags.
I’ve created what you might call a “mottainai furoshiki”. The Japanese word mottainai means it’s a shame for something to go to waste without having made use of its potential in full. The furoshiki is made of a fiber manufactured from recycled PET bottles, and has a birds-and-flowers motif drawn by Itoh Jakuchu, a painter of the mid-Edo era.
The Japanese wrapping cloth known as the furoshiki is said to have been first used in the Muromachi Period(1392-1573), when people spread it out in place of a bath mat or wrapped one’s clothes with it.
The furoshiki is so handy that you can wrap almost anything in it regardless of size or shape with a little ingenuity by simply folding it in a right way. It’s much better than Plastic bags you receive at supermarkets or wrapping paper, since it’s highly resistant, reusable and multipurpose. In fact, it’s one of the symbols of traditional Japanese culture, and puts an accent on taking care of things and avoiding wastes.
It would be wonderful if the furoshiki, as a symbol of traditional Japanese culture, could provide an opportunity for us to reconsider the possibilities of a sound-material cycle society. As my sincere wish, I would like to disseminate the culture of the furoshiki to the entire world.
Ms Yuriko Koike
Minister of the Environment, Japan
- A Traditional Japanese Cloth to Achieve the 3Rs
A furoshiki is an oversized square cloth, dyed in one of any number of colors and patterns, used for carrying and storing things, as well as for wrapping gifts, spreading on the floor, or even decorating a room.
The word furoshiki, literally meaning “bath spread,” dates from the mid-Edo Period (1603-1868). Furoshiki were first used at public bathhouses - then a social center for the common people - as a wrap to hold the bather’s clothes. Gradually, it came to be used as a wrap for carrying a change of clothes and toiletries. The use of furoshiki as a way to carry things spread quickly as commerce became more active and people moved around more for both commerce and pleasure.
Furoshiki were used during weddings as well. From the mid-Edo Period until the mid-Showa Period (1926-1989), the parents of the bride would often prepare furoshiki with patterns such as cranes, other symbolic birds, fans, pine trees and waves, as they were all believed to usher in happiness and fortune.
After furoshiki gained greater popularity in the Edo Period, people came up with various ways to wrap things and handed the tradition down through generations until it became an indispensable tool for the life of the Japanese. However, the custom and culture of using furoshiki faded away in about 1975, the mid-Showa Period. It is just a very recent trend to revive the use of furoshiki as movements to conserve the environment and re-evaluation of Japanese traditional culture have become more prominent. A number of new and innovative uses of furoshiki have been proposed on top of its conventional techniques. The furoshiki is becoming more and more versatile, being used, for example, as a gift wrapper or as a table covering or other interior decoration.
An important feature of furoshiki is that it is always reused. One would never throw away a furoshiki. Using furoshiki will thus reduce the use of raw materials to create packaging and decrease the use of excessive packaging, and thus contribute to saving resources and energy. The furoshiki itself symbolizes a kind of circulation - people wrap things with a furoshiki, tie the ends of the cloth and make a knot which differs depending on the furoshiki’s current role, but once the knot is untied and the cloth is spread, the original form of the furoshiki - a simple cloth - comes back.
A lifestyle based on the 3Rs (the reduction, reuse and recycling of waste) plays an important role as one of the measures to conserve the environment, and this lifestyle is truly necessary today. It may be a time for the Japanese traditional cloth, the furoshiki, to flourish again.
- How to use A Furoshiki?
[ Found via Japan's Ministry of Environment and Nifty.com ]
