Source: Suzuki Kanamono tool-history site (道具の歴史, misyuku-suzuki-kanamonoten.com), (有)スズキ金物店 — Suzuki Kanamono Co., Ltd. Author: Suzuki Toshiaki (鈴木俊昭), Representative Director of Suzuki Kanamono Co., Ltd.
Translator's note: This file translates three related essay series by the shop's proprietor on his own specialty, the plasterer's trowel (左官鏝, sakan-gote):
- "On the History of the Plasterer's Trowel" (左官鏝の歴史について) — 6 pages (introduction, four sections, conclusion; dated Heisei 21 = 2009, March). Covers the trowel from the Nara period to the modern glued-blade (haritsuke) trowel.
- "On the Evolution of the Name 'Sakan'" (「左官」呼称の変遷について) — 5 pages (introduction, three sections, conclusion; dated Heisei 21 = 2009, January). Traces how wall-plastering craftsmen were named from antiquity until the word 左官 (sakan) became fixed in the early Edo period.
- "On the Handles of Plasterer's Trowels" (左官鏝の柄について) — 7 pages (introduction, five sections, conclusion; dated Heisei 21 = 2009, July). Demonstrates that the common rule "round handle = Kanto, square handle = Kansai" is historically false.
Translation notes: (a) Technical trowel terms are kept with Japanese on first use: motokubi-gote (元首鏝, "base-neck" trowel, tang attached at the rear of the blade plate) and nakakubi-gote (中首鏝, "mid-neck" trowel, neck riveted to the middle of the plate). (b) In the handles series, page 3 refers to cross-section drawings ("as shown below") of the Kyoto, Osaka, and Miki handle types, and page 4 to drawings of the Tokyo handle; these are images on the original pages and could not be reproduced — the labels are retained in position. (c) One smith's mark is written 瓢箪ト ("gourd + to"), a pictorial brand; it is rendered as "Hyōtan-to". (d) In series 1, page 1 the researcher's name appears as 西山マルセーロ (Nishiyama Marcelo) but in series 3, page 1 as 西山マルローセ (apparently a typo on the site); both refer to the same Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum paper. (e) The site gives the temple name 法興時 (Hōkō-ji) with a probable typo for 法興寺; translated as Hōkō-ji (present Asuka-dera). Dates are kept as era + Western year as in the original.
The trowel (kote 鏝) is the tool with which the plasterer (sakan 左官) coats walls. Although plasterer's trowels differ somewhat according to the finishing method, they are used chiefly to spread wall material out smooth and flat, and accomplished plasterers possess the wondrous, marvelous skill of producing a wide variety of finishes with this one tool.
It is said that you can judge a craftsman's skill by looking at the trowels in his toolbox, and trowels have been treated with care since old times. Moreover, in the households of Kyoto plasterers there was once a custom at New Year of placing the toolbox containing the trowels before the Buddhist altar, offering to their ancestors their daily gratitude and their wishes for the year, and thus enshrining the complete set of carefully maintained tools.
Spreading material smooth was in antiquity first done with the palm of the human hand; later a tool for coating walls appeared, and it has been called by the written forms 小手, コテ, 圬 (kote), and 鏝.
Thus, although the plasterer's trowel has been intimately connected with the long history of wall-plastering work from antiquity to the present, research on its origins, manufacturing methods, and makers lagged until recent years, partly because few records and traditions survive; recently, however, new investigations and research publications have appeared, and some of the accepted theories have been overturned.
Here, then, drawing on Suzuki Chūgorō (鈴木忠五郎), Dare ni demo wakaru sakan kōgaku (誰にでもわかる左官工学, "Plastering Engineering Anyone Can Understand", revised edition, 1980); Yamada Kōichi (山田幸一), Kabe (壁, "Walls", 1981); Satō Hiroyuki and Satō Kaichirō (佐藤ひろゆき・佐藤嘉一郎), Tsuchikabe / sakan no shigoto to gijutsu (土壁・左官の仕事と技術, "Earthen Walls: The Work and Techniques of the Plasterer", 2001); Nishiyama Marcelo (西山マルセーロ), "Sakan-gote keijō no rekishiteki hensen to keijō keisoku no tōkeiteki bunseki ni yoru kōsatsu" (左官鏝形状の歴史的変遷と形状計測の統計的分析による考察, "The Historical Evolution of Plasterer's Trowel Shapes, Considered through Statistical Analysis of Shape Measurements"), Bulletin of the Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum (竹中大工道具館研究紀要) No. 18 (2007); the magazines Tsuchi to sakan no hon (土と左官の本, "The Book of Earth and Plastering") and Tsuchi to sakan no chikara (土と左官の力, "The Power of Earth and Plastering") published by Kenchiku Shiryō Kenkyūsha; and stories heard from plasterers and from hardware wholesalers dealing in plasterer's trowels, let us survey the most current history of the plasterer's trowel in Japan.
The oldest tradition concerning plastering in Japan dates to the year 210, in the era of Empress Jingū (神功皇后), but it is entangled with the world of myth and its truth cannot be established.
The appearance of the plasterer's trowel in Japan is thought to date from the Nara period, when Buddhism was transmitted, new continental building technology was introduced, and many temples were built: trowels were presumably brought in together with the immigrant craftsmen who came to plaster the earthen and lime-plaster (shikkui 漆喰) walls of those temples. (See "On the Evolution of the Name 'Sakan'".)
In recent years objects that appear to be wooden trowels have been found among excavated artifacts of that era (see note 1), but since no documentary sources survive, we do not know well what kind of trowels were used to coat the walls.
(Note 1) The late Professor Yamada Kōichi, in his book Kabe (壁, "Walls"), introduces a wooden trowel excavated at Patsuo [a Silk Road site], a key point on the Silk Road at the western edge of the Taklamakan Desert in China, dated to the Northern and Southern Dynasties period (c. 420–589). That wooden trowel has a blade plate (kote-dai 鏝台) about 22 cm long with a maximum width of about 13 cm; the tip is pointed, and the grip that serves as the handle is carved from a single piece of wood together with the plate. It is surmised that the wooden trowels excavated in Japan were of this kind.
As the oldest trowels in Japan, wooden trowels have been excavated from the Asukaike site (飛鳥池遺跡, second half of the 7th century) and from sites along the Kosei Line in Shiga Prefecture (滋賀県湖西線関係遺跡, Asuka period or later). They were carved from a single piece of wood with the handle in the same position as on the present-day nakakubi (mid-neck) trowel, and have no neck.
An iron trowel has also been excavated from the ruined temple of Katayama (片山廃寺址), identified with the provincial temple (kokubunji) of Suruga. It is of the motokubi (base-neck) type with a long, narrow iron plate about 15 cm long and about 3 cm wide, and is thought to have had a wooden handle. In shape it is close to the present trowel called the flat kimekuri trowel 150 mm (平キメクリ鏝１５０mm). However, there is as yet no firm proof that it was a plasterer's trowel.
After this, in written sources the character 鏝 appears in the Shinsen jikyō (新撰字鏡) dictionary of Kanpyō 4 (892) in the Heian period, but until about the end of the Edo period we see plasterer's trowels only in pictures; no actual plasterer's trowels [from those centuries] have been discovered.
The oldest picture in which a plasterer's trowel is depicted is the "upper wall-plastering" (上壁塗) scene of the Muromachi-period Shichijūichiban shokunin utaawase (七十一番職人歌合, "Poetry Contest of Craftsmen in Seventy-one Rounds"). It shows a plasterer wearing a soft folded cap (nae-eboshi 萎烏帽子), an uchigatana sword thrust through his sash at the left hip (see note 2), squatting, holding a hawk board (kote-ita 鏝板) in his left hand, and in his raised right hand a pointed iron motokubi trowel.
(Note 2) In the medieval period the eboshi cap was the emblem showing that a man was an adult member of society. Court nobles wore the tall tate-eboshi, warriors the samurai-eboshi, and commoners and craftsmen the soft nae-eboshi. In the early modern period, adult male commoners and craftsmen ceased to wear eboshi. Also, at that time one could, upon application, wear an uchigatana (打刀, the later wakizashi). That a plasterer wore an uchigatana is thought to have meant that he staked his life on his wall-plastering work.
In the Edo period — called "the century of the craftsman" — a great many genre pictures of craftsmen were painted, and among them plasterers coating walls with trowel in hand appear frequently. Examples are the "Nagoya Castle wall paintings" (名古屋城障壁画, Keichō 17 / 1612); the plasterer in Jinrin kinmō zui (人倫訓蒙図彙, Genroku 3 / 1690); the plasterer in Edo shokunin utaawase (江戸職人歌合, second volume, Bunka 5 / 1808); and the plasterer in Ryakuga shokunin zukushi (略画職人尽, Bunsei 9 / 1826).
The plasterers depicted in these works wear no nae-eboshi and carry no sword. The trowels in their hands are all of the pointed iron motokubi type, resembling the present-day willow-leaf trowel (yanagiba-gote 柳刃鏝).
The Wakan sansai zue (和漢三才図絵, "Illustrated Sino-Japanese Encyclopedia") of Shōtoku 3 (1713) states: "The mud trowel is made of iron; there are several sizes, large and small, for coating earthen walls, used according to purpose — rough coat, middle coat, finish coat (eaves soffits, ceilings, etc.) — and according to their shapes they are called crane-neck (tsurukubi 鶴首), willow-leaf (yanagiba 柳刃), and so on." It carries drawings of two "willow-leaf" trowels, large and small, of motokubi form resembling the present willow-leaf trowel, and one "crane-neck" resembling the present crane-neck trowel.
The Dōgu jibiki zukai (道具字引図解, "Illustrated Dictionary of Tools"), thought to date from around Bunka 1 (1804), explains that the "large trowel" (大鏝) is the trowel used for middle coats and the like (a large motokubi trowel), and the "willow-leaf trowel" is used for small detailed work.
As can be understood from the above, from the Nara period — when earthen wall plastering was carried out in temple construction following the arrival of Buddhism — until around the end of the Edo period, the iron trowels used by plasterers were all of the motokubi type. It is conjectured that these trowels were not hard-quenched like the present fully hardened (hon'yaki 本焼) trowels, but were made of soft material like the unhardened mild-steel (jigane 地金) trowels, suited to spreading earthen plaster and lime plaster.
Here one riddle remains. Although wooden trowels are thought to have been used for the earthen wall plastering of temples, afterwards nothing about wooden trowels survives as historical material — in documents or in pictures — until the Meiji era (see note 3). Whether the wooden trowel was simply not important as a plasterer's trowel, or whether it fell out of use, is not well understood. (See note 4.) The one thing that can be said is that earthen walls are hard to coat with a wooden trowel.
(Note 3) Around the middle of the Meiji era the wooden trowel reappears, now in nakakubi form; yet among the very numerous trowels handed down in a Kyoto plastering family of four generations, there is for some reason only a single wooden trowel, believed to be about 210 mm long. (Magazine Tsuchi to sakan no chikara, p. 87.) Wooden trowels came into heavy use only from the high-growth era, when the building rush of mortar-walled buildings began; sizes of 270 mm to 330 mm became common.
(Note 4) The late Professor Yamada states in Kabe: "Leaving aside the finish coat, where smoothness of finish and clean release from the trowel are required, for the stages up to the middle coat I would prefer to suppose that the wooden trowel, rather than the expensive and hard-to-use motokubi-type iron trowel, was in ordinary use."
According to the accepted theory up to now, in Japan all iron plasterer's trowels until about the middle of the Meiji era were of the pointed motokubi type. The reasons given were: (1) no actual examples or documentary evidence of nakakubi trowels had been found; and (2) the technique of attaching the neck that carries the wooden handle not at the rear of the blade plate but by opening a hole in the middle and riveting (kashime) it dates from the mid-Meiji era or later (see note 5).
(Note 5) Until now, the origin of the nakakubi trowel was held to be a nakakubi trowel called "Bamboo Leaf" (笹の葉, Sasa-no-ha) made by Katō Heizō (加藤平蔵), first-generation Kanesada (兼定), resident of Nakameguro, who turned from swordsmith to trowel smith in Meiji 23 (1890). However, no actual example of this trowel has been found.
But the recent investigation and research of Nishiyama Marcelo has overturned this account of the nakakubi trowel's origin. Nishiyama points out the following:
- The motokubi trowels depicted in the Edo shokunin utaawase have the neck attached not at the rear edge of the blade plate but set inward from it, so the riveting (kashime) technique was already being used to join the neck.
- A nakakubi trowel bearing the mark of Karigane (雁金), known as an Edo-period trowel smith of Kyoto, and a nakakubi trowel with the octagonal-section handle characteristic of the Edo period, have been discovered.
- The first-generation Kanesada was in fact Katō Matazō (加藤亦造), whose business was founded at the end of the Meiji era.
He therefore argues that, while the circumstances of manufacture of thin, hardened nakakubi trowels remain unclear, it is highly probable that iron nakakubi trowels existed at least by the end of the Edo period.
After the appearance of the nakakubi type it became the mainstream form of the trowel. From Meiji into early Shōwa, many trowels were made to suit fine finishing work, and with the introduction of Western architecture, trowels suited to new wall materials such as mortar and to new uses came to be demanded, so that the varieties of trowel gradually multiplied. (See note 6.)
(Note 6) Because earthen walls were the mainstream of plastering work, the unhardened jigane trowel was the principal trowel for rough and middle coats; but from around Shōwa 30 (1955), as mortar-finished walls increased, half-hardened (han'yaki 半焼) and oil-quenched (abura-yaki 油焼) trowels appeared, and the jigane trowel gradually fell out of use.
Also, from about the beginning of the 1955–65 period (Shōwa 30s), the square trowel (kaku-gote 角鏝) appeared. For arris-forming (menbiki 面引) and edge-cutting (kiritsuke 切付) work, craftsmen had previously either ordered custom trowels or bent shaped sheet metal into the required profile; from the early Shōwa 30s these could easily be made with dies, and arris trowels and edge-cutting trowels came onto the market in quantity.
Then, entering the postwar high-growth era, large outdoor site work (nochōba 野丁場) such as building construction flourished, and to make plastering more efficient the length and width of trowels increased. There even appeared men who coated the mortar walls of buildings with metal nakakubi trowels 330 mm and 360 mm long. Trowels of new materials — stainless steel, aluminum, plastic — also appeared, and the varieties of trowel increased at a stroke.
Around the beginning of the 1980s, an epoch-making square trowel that deserves to be called "a revolution in trowels" was brought out by a trowel manufacturer in Miki City, Hyōgo Prefecture (see note 7). Until then the square trowel was made by riveting the blade plate to a spine (segane 背金) — a thin round metal rod attached along the center; but thanks to improved adhesive quality and innovations in bonding technique, there appeared a square trowel made by taking an extremely thin steel or stainless plate, 0.3 mm or 0.5 mm thick, as the blade, and gluing to it a thin, flexible, wide spine.
(Note 7) In 1982 (Shōwa 57), Miyazaki Kote Seisakusho (宮崎鏝製作所, founded Shōwa 40 / 1965) first marketed a spine-glued square trowel under the name "Arrowline trowel" (アローライン鏝). In 1988 the company name was changed to Arrowline Kōgyō Co., Ltd. ((株)アローライン工業). Since then, glued-type trowels have been sold by many trowel makers under names such as the Sparta trowel, the Penguin trowel, and the Super High-Soft trowel.
From about two or three years before this trowel appeared, glued-type trowels with plastic blade plates had been made; that provided the base technology, and with further improvement it became possible to make glued trowels in metal.
Since then many kinds of glued trowels have been made, being convenient both for new wall materials and for traditional ones. At present glued trowels are made even for external-corner and internal-corner work (出隅・入隅鏝), and they are becoming the mainstream of the trowel.
We have surveyed the history of the plasterer's trowel in Japan from the Nara period to the present; in closing, let us speak of the trowel's future.
Much of building work has left the craftsman's hands and been mechanized in the pursuit of efficiency and economy, but the plasterer's coating of walls is said to be the last remaining domain of handwork. Wall coating is difficult to mechanize, and therefore, in pursuit of efficiency and economy, new construction methods and new materials were developed to build walls without plastering work at all; since the bubble era the plasterer's domain has been shrinking.
In recent years, however, plastered walls have been reviving in new fields — as healthy "eco walls" and as design walls of high artistic quality. New kinds of plasterer's trowels are being made to match.
Miki City in Hyōgo Prefecture accounts for over 90% of national trowel production. The trowel smiths of Miki, owing to aging and the difficulty of finding successors, are quitting one after another, and forged trowels grow ever more expensive and harder to obtain.
However, with the appearance of the inexpensive glued trowel, both traditional and new wall materials can be handled perfectly well, and it has the advantage of being easy to obtain. It seems certain that the glued trowel will be further improved, multiply in variety, and take the mainstream position among trowels.
An auspicious day in March, Heisei 21 (2009) Suzuki Kanamono Co., Ltd. ((有)スズキ金物店) Representative Director, Suzuki Toshiaki (鈴木俊昭)
Today it is generally well known that a sakan (左官) is a person whose trade is coating walls; but as to the origin of the word sakan, and why the characters 左官 ("left official") are used, there are various theories, and neither in academia nor in the plastering trade is there a settled definition.
As theories that carry some persuasive force and are generally understood, the following are introduced in Satō Kaichirō and Satō Hiroyuki, Tsuchikabe / sakan no shigoto to gijutsu (土壁・左官の仕事と技術, "Earthen Walls: The Work and Techniques of the Plasterer", 2001):
One. "At ceremonies for palace construction works, craftsmen without rank or office could not enter the palace precincts; therefore temporary provisional ranks were conferred, modeled — following the customs of the court nobility of the age — on the grades kami (守), suke (介), jō (掾), and sakan (目), and the wall plasterers were given the title sakan (目)." Depending on the period, this rank of sakan was also written 属 or 志, and these characters too were read sakan.
Two. "From the customary order in which rewards were bestowed at construction works — carpenter, roofer, ornamental-metal (kazari 錺) craftsman, wall plasterer, i.e. fourth — the plasterers were called sakan." [Translator's note: by a play on 左官 understood as "the fourth official"; the essay simply quotes the custom.]
However, the late Yamada Kōichi, formerly professor at Kansai University, states in Kabe (壁, 1981), his historical study of wall plastering in Japan, that wall plasterers came to be called by the written name 左官 only from about the early Edo period, after a long history running from antiquity.
The appellation sakan arose in the course of the rising status of the wall-plastering trade within Japanese architecture and the establishment of wall plastering as a clearly defined occupation.
So, following the late Professor Yamada's book, let us describe how the names of the wall-plastering trade changed, while narrating the evolution of plastering work from antiquity to the early modern period.
Full-scale wall-plastering work in Japan begins in Sushun 1 (588), when craftsmen who crossed over from the Korean kingdom of Baekje (百済) for Buddhist temple construction carried out the building of Hōkō-ji (法興寺, the present Asuka-dera in Nara). In 593, lime-plaster (shikkui 漆喰) work was performed for the first time at the construction of Shitennō-ji (四天王寺) in Naniwa, Osaka.
Before this, in the Kofun period, earthen walls were not used: wall materials were exclusively vegetable — plain untreated wood (shiraki 素木) boards, bamboo, wickerwork (ajiro 網代) woven of bark, thatch, and the like.
Thereafter the continental architectural style spread beyond Buddhist temples to palaces and the mansions of the high nobility. But white lime plaster was a very costly wall material — the lime required great quantities of fuel, and rice was used as its binder-paste — so it was employed only in a very limited range of buildings, those of the powerful.
Under these conditions, in the Nara period the specialist wall plasterer was called tsuchi no takumi (土工, "earth artisan"), supervised under the ritsuryō system by the Office of Earth-Workers (土工司, doko-shi; later the Bureau of Carpentry, 木工寮, moku-ryō). Note, however, that work not demanding special skill, such as preparing the substrate and rough undercoating, was in principle done by corvée laborers (ekifu 役夫), and the white lime finish coat for walls receiving painted decoration was applied by the painters (eshi 画師); so the whole sequence of plastering work was not carried out by the tsuchi no takumi alone.
From the Heian period on, if one insists on pointing to technical change and development in wall plastering, there was little more than the use of bamboo in the komai (木舞) lath substrate onto which the earth is applied, and an increase in the white finish-coat material from white clay to slaked lime (lime plaster); there was no development great enough to transform plastering work.
Rather, what is striking through the medieval period is the expansion of demand for earthen-wall work, which came to be applied even to small buildings such as storehouses and earthen boundary walls. In the Kofun period people's interest in a building was concentrated on the roof; as the ages passed, people's interest turned to the walls.
In this process the names of the wall-plastering trade also changed. In the early Heian period, as the ritsuryō order loosened, the term tsuchi no takumi (土工) survived as a name for plastering work as a whole, but had already died out as a term for the individual trades, which came to be called nakanuri-kō (中塗工, "middle-coat worker") and nuri-kō (塗工, "coating worker", in charge of the finish coat).
From mid-Heian into the Kamakura period the names changed again: terms such as kabenuri (壁塗, "wall coater"), kabekō (壁工, "wall worker"), kabe-daiku (壁大工, "wall carpenter"), and kabefu (壁夫, "wall man") appear frequently in the documents.
This change of names occurred not only because major construction works had left the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Carpentry, but because the wall plasterers — who until then had largely been subcontractors under the painters — established their position as performing the entire process of earthen-wall construction, including the finish coat.
Through the medieval period, full plastering work carried through to the white lime finish coat gradually increased, but for the common people it remained far out of reach. This was still true in the Muromachi period: even in the central streets of Kyoto, the outer walls of townhouses received no finish coat.
Yet by the early Edo period, the town of Kyoto came to be filled almost entirely with white lime-plastered houses. What was the cause of so rapid a change in plastering work?
Here enter early modern castle architecture and, among the townhouses, the architecture of the rustic thatched tea hut (sōan teahouse, 草庵茶室).
With the year 1600 (Keichō 5) as the dividing line, almost all castles adopted for their exteriors, for reasons of fire resistance and resistance to projectiles, the fully plastered sō-nurigome style (総塗籠式 — full plastering work in which not only the exterior but even the lattices and the undersides of the eaves are encased in white lime finish coats); this drove a great expansion in the productive capacity of plastering work.
The sōan teahouse, for its part, prompted the introduction of new kinds of earthen walls, enriched the range of design, and promoted the qualitative development of plastering work.
In time the age of wars ended, and in the Edo period plastering spread rapidly to a great many buildings.
The reasons: in the Genroku era there was a technical revolution in the paste added to lime-plaster material — the shift from the costly paste made with rice to the cheap paste made with seaweed — and the introduction of colored walls using no paste at all, typified by Ōtsu walls (大津壁), made full plastering work affordable and familiar to the common people.
Furthermore, the Edo shogunate's urban fire-prevention measures and sumptuary edicts encouraged the building of many earthen storehouses (dozō 土蔵) among the townhouses. The dozō is of white lime nurigome construction — a small castle, so to speak — and it was the building type in which the plasterer's share of the work was greatest. It was precisely the dozō that became the greatest customer sustaining demand after castle building was discontinued: the very flower of Edo plastering.
In the course of these developments, the name of the wall-plastering trade changed: the written word 左官 (sakan) meaning wall plasterer appears. It first occurs in the construction account book of the Utsunomiya Daimyōjin shrine (宇都宮大明神御建立勘定目録) of Keichō 10 [sic] (1609). [Translator's note: the site pairs "Keichō 10" with 1609; Keichō 10 is usually equated with 1605 — the discrepancy is in the original.]
Yet even in Genna 3 (1617) there is a document still using the medieval name kabenuri (壁塗), and confusion of names continued.
The confusion between "kabenuri" and "sakan" was finally ended in Kan'ei 19 (1642), when in the wall works of the Kyoto Imperial Palace both the headings and the trade titles were unified as "sakan" throughout.
From then until the present, though the times have changed — in the Meiji era, with the use of cement, surface-finishing techniques diversified at a stroke, and new trades such as bricklayer and tile setter branched off from the sakan — the word designating the wall-plastering trade has not changed: it remains sakan.
We have described, across the evolution of plastering work from antiquity to the early modern period, how the names of the wall-plastering trade changed and roughly when the word sakan came into use. Why the use of the word sakan came earlier in the provinces (Utsunomiya) and later in the center (Kyoto) may have some significance, but it has not yet been explained.
On the etymology of sakan there are various theories and no clear settled view, but the late Professor Yamada puts it as follows:
Since Japanese architecture is fundamentally wooden, it was natural for the carpenter to be the leader, and that position has never changed, ancient or modern. But the standing of the other building trades has risen and fallen with the building forms of each age. Looking back at the early modern period, it was the era in which the weight of plastering work increased dramatically and won the position second only to carpentry. Precisely in the sense that the plasterer became a sort of vice-official assisting (佐ける, tasukeru) the carpenter who was the chief official (chōkan 長官), the choice of the characters 左官 may be called fitting.
Originally both 右 ("right") and 左 ("left") carry the meaning of helping: "right" means to help from above, "left" to help from the side. In that sense, that the wall-plastering trade, having won in the early modern period the position next after the carpenter, was called sakan (左官, "left official") and not ukan (右官, "right official") was, I think, exactly apt.
An auspicious day in January, Heisei 21 (2009) Suzuki Kanamono Co., Ltd. (有限会社スズキ金物店) Representative Director, Suzuki Toshiaki (鈴木俊昭)
Concerning the shape of plasterer's trowel handles, it has generally been said among people in the plastering world that the round handle (maru-e 丸柄) is the Kanto type and the square handle (kaku-e 角柄) the Kansai type.
However, when one investigates trowel handles in detail, the round and square handles each have their own historical background; there are also differences arising from how the trowel is used, and several variants of both round and square handle shapes exist — facts which make it impossible to state simply that round = Kanto and square = Kansai. There have, further, been various changes in the material of the handle.
Here, then, drawing on conversations with Seki Tadayuki (関 忠行) — chairman of Sekichū Co., Ltd. (株式会社 関忠), a hardware wholesaler of Miki, who is extremely knowledgeable about Kansai trowels in general — and with plasterers; on the monthly magazine Sakan (さかん), September and October 2008 issues; on Suzuki Chūgorō (鈴木忠五郎), Dare ni mo wakaru sakan kōgaku (誰にもわかる左官工学, "Plastering Engineering Anyone Can Understand", 1965); and on Nishiyama Marcelo (西山マルローセ [sic]), "The Historical Evolution of Plasterer's Trowel Shapes, Considered through Statistical Analysis of Shape Measurements", Bulletin of the Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum No. 18 (2007), let us discuss the little-known subject of the plasterer's trowel handle.
Handles of brick trowels and block (masonry) trowels are excluded.
Looking at the matter historically, the wooden trowel excavated in the western regions of China (made from a single piece of wood, blade plate through grip) has a square handle, and the wall-plastering craftsmen who crossed over from Baekje in the Nara period probably brought in and used wooden trowels of this type; along with them, wooden trowels with square handles carved from one piece of wood, blade through grip, are thought to have been made in Japan too. The square handle was probably due to the practicalities of carving from a single block. Thereafter nothing is recorded of this wooden trowel in the sources, and for some reason it vanishes from history. (See note 1.)
Iron trowels too, one supposes, were brought in at the same time by the immigrant craftsmen, but as no sources survive we do not know what shape their handles had. The trowel excavated in Japan and thought to be a Nara-period iron motokubi trowel has lost its handle to decay, so what shape of handle it carried is unknown.
Thereafter as well, the character 鏝 appears in the Shinsen jikyō (新撰字鏡) of Kanpyō 4 (892) in the Heian period, but no material evidence has been discovered, so we cannot know.
In the Muromachi period there appears the picture in the "upper wall-plastering" scene of the Shichijūichiban shokunin utaawase, depicting a plasterer holding a motokubi trowel with a perfectly round handle. Furthermore, in the Edo-period craftsman genre pictures and in the documents illustrating plasterers' trowels (see note 2), the handles of motokubi trowels are all drawn perfectly round; there is not a single square handle.
(Notes 1 and 2) For details, see "On the History of the Plasterer's Trowel".
In the late Edo period, plasterer's trowels made in nakakubi (mid-neck) form appear in Kyoto. Together with this, in Kyoto, the first nakakubi trowels fitted with square handles in Japan were born. Square-handled nakakubi trowels bearing the mark of Karigane (雁金), a trowel smith of late-Edo Kyoto, and unsigned square-handled nakakubi trowels have been discovered. These square-handled nakakubi trowels share the characteristics of being small, with a narrow trowel neck (the interval between blade plate and handle).
I surmise that the birth of the square handle is intimately connected with three things: Kyoto-wall plastering (京壁塗り), the nakakubi trowel, and the trowel handle. To put it another way: it was precisely because the nakakubi trowel appeared in Kyoto, where Kyoto-wall plastering flourished, that the square handle was born.
The reasons can be stated as follows:
- When coating Kyoto walls, the motokubi trowel is awkward — it is hard to apply force — while the nakakubi trowel has the advantage that force is easily applied.
- The nakakubi trowel is surmised to have been born in Kyoto in the second half of the Edo period.
- When coating Kyoto walls, the square handle is easier to use than the round. (See note 3.)
- The handle was not fitted by the trowel smith: the plasterer who bought the trowel directly from the smith fitted it himself, or had a carpenter or joiner fit it, so it could be given whatever shape was easiest to use.
(Note 3) According to Okuda Nobuo (奥田信雄), the master plasterer of Kyoto, the difference between round and square handles in coating Kyoto walls, and the shift to the square handle, is as follows (monthly Sakan, October 2008, round-table "The Trowel Speaks: From Edo to the Present" (鏝は語る 江戸から現代まで)):
"The round handle is a full-fist grip [washizukami, 'eagle grip']. (Note: for reference, the square handle is held with the thumb pressing on top.) If you don't need to store up that force, or store force in the elbow and shoulder, the round one lets the force in more easily and worked fine. Once you began holding it gently and storing up force, first it becomes octagonal."
"When you try to do high-grade work, relaxing your force and gripping the trowel in good balance, I think it gradually became square."
"Large trowels are mostly round-handled; a square handle on them is rare."
For the above reasons, I surmise that the square-handled trowel was first born in Kyoto. Then, as Kyoto plasterers went out to work in the provinces, and plasterers who had finished their training in Kyoto returned home, the square-handled trowel spread. (See note 4.)
(Note 4) Even around Hachiōji in Tokyo, elderly plasterers relate that square-handled plasterer's trowels and battledore-shaped hawk boards (kote-ita — the board that carries the material to be applied to the wall) were in ordinary use until around the Tokyo Olympics.
It is generally known in the plastering trade that Kansai-type trowel handles comprise a Kyoto type and an Osaka type. Their cross-sections are as shown below. [Translator's note: the original shows cross-section drawings, not reproduced here.]
Kyoto type (京都型) ・ Osaka type (大阪型)
The Kyoto square handle has already been discussed, so let us speak of the Osaka square handle. From about the beginning of the Shōwa era until a certain point near its end, there was in Osaka a trowel smith who made plasterer's trowels under the mark "Hyōtan-to" (瓢箪ト, gourd mark plus the character ト). In most cases it is the wholesaler who buys the trowels from the smith who fits the handles, but the Osaka "Hyōtan-to" smith made his square handles himself and fitted them to his trowels himself.
Though square, this handle's shape differed somewhat from the Kyoto square handle described above; hence this shape of square handle came to be called the Osaka type.
Today "square handle" means the Kyoto type, and the Osaka type has disappeared. When square handles are fitted to trowels made in Miki, they are all Kyoto type.
In fact — and this is not well known — there is one more Kansai-type trowel handle. It is an egg-shaped round handle, which I venture to call here the "Miki type" (三木型). Its cross-section is as shown below. [Drawing not reproduced.]
Miki type (三木型)
Because this egg-shaped handle is a round handle, many in the trade wrongly take it for the Kanto or Tokyo type; but it was devised by the Miki handle makers as an easy-gripping handle, and in that sense it is a purely Kansai type. This handle has reportedly been used in Miki as a trowel handle since the second half of the Meiji era.
From around Shōwa 30 (1955), Miki trowels came into wide circulation in the Kinki, Chūbu, Chūgoku, and Kyūshū regions (see note 5); and around the time of the urban redevelopment of Tokyo for the Tokyo Olympics (Shōwa 39 / 1964), Miki trowels poured as "Kansai trowels" into Tokyo, which the Nishikan (西勘) trowels had until then monopolized (see note 6); the market then widened further to the whole Kanto region, Tōhoku, and Hokkaidō, and the egg-shaped trowel handle spread nationwide.
(Note 5) I once heard the following from Yokoyama Hideki (横山豪樹), third president of Yokomitsu Kanamono Co., Ltd. ((株)横光金物), a leading hardware wholesaler handling Miki plasterer's trowels: "It is not well known even in Miki, but my grandfather Yokoyama Mitsunosuke (横山光之助), founder and first president of Yokomitsu Kanamono, in the early Shōwa 20s (late 1940s) bought a complete set of trowels from Nishikan in Tokyo, brought them back, and had the smiths of Miki copy them. That is one reason Miki's plasterer's-trowel manufacture flourished and it became a great trowel-producing center."
(Note 6) Seki Tadayuki, then head clerk of Yokomitsu Kanamono, traveled to Tokyo — monopolized by Nishikan trowels — to expand sales channels, sold Miki trowels into Tokyo for the first time, opened the market, and laid the foundation of today's Tokyo market for Miki trowels.
At present, Miki trowels sent to Kyoto and certain provinces are fitted with Kyoto-type square handles; otherwise, unless requested, nakakubi trowels are shipped with egg-shaped round handles and motokubi trowels with perfectly round handles. Recently, for reasons of handle-making cost, the nakakubi handle has been shifting from a distinctly egg-shaped section to a more rounded egg shape.
The trowel handle called the Kanto type or Tokyo type is a perfectly round handle. The handle of a nakakubi trowel bearing the mark of Nishikan Sō-honten (西勘総本店 — opened as a hardware shop in Ansei 1 at the end of the Edo period; making and selling plasterer's trowels from Meiji 22 / 1889), made and sold in early Shōwa, is perfectly round in shape, made of hinoki cypress, with the butt thicker than the head. Its form and section are as shown below. [Drawings — "front" (正面) and "side" (横) — not reproduced.]
This shape is the Kanto or Tokyo type, the handle fitted chiefly to Tokyo's Nishikan trowels. It appears to be the perfectly round handle of the motokubi finishing trowel used in Edo, carried over onto the nakakubi trowel. Nishikan made its perfectly round handles in-house and fitted every one to its trowels in-house before sale.
Until now all Nishikan trowels carried perfectly round handles; in recent years, however, the handle shape on Nishikan nakakubi trowels has been changing from perfectly round to somewhat egg-shaped.
As for the material of trowel handles, no plasterer's trowel from before the late Edo period has yet been discovered, so we do not know from what wood they were made. According to Okuda Nobuo, in Kyoto "at the transition from motokubi to nakakubi, the old ones are round-handled, and the material is sugi (cedar)" — so they may have been of sugi.
Further, the handles of the nakakubi and motokubi trowels used by kote-e (鏝絵, trowel-relief picture) craftsmen from the end of the Edo period to the end of Meiji, in Okuda's collection, are of hardwoods — ebony (黒檀), rosewood (紫檀), black persimmon (黒柿), and lacquered handles; but these are not typical, and I believe they were fitted according to the taste of the kote-e craftsmen.
It is not yet clear from when, but I surmise that in Kyoto, probably around the time of the change to square handles, trowel handles came to be made of hinoki cypress. Hinoki resists water, is soft to the touch yet light, and is a material that conforms well to the shape of the hand. At this period the plasterer ordered directly from the trowel smith and fitted the handle himself or had a carpenter or joiner fit it; ready-handled plasterer's trowels reached the market in the Kansai region only much later.
What wood was used for handles in Edo we do not know, since no sources survive; but I surmise that by around the time Nishikan — which opened as a hardware shop in Ansei 1 at the end of the Edo period — began making and selling plasterer's trowels in Meiji 22 (1889), hinoki was likewise used for trowel handles in Tokyo.
Thereafter, in Miki, which accounts for over 90% of national trowel production, hinoki continued to be used for trowel handles, employing offcuts from joinery factories in Nagoya and elsewhere. But from about ten years ago [c. 1999], hinoki ceased to be used for trowel handles on grounds of cost. From about twenty years ago, imported American hinoki (Port Orford cedar, 米桧) had been used alongside hinoki and then became the chief handle wood; at present, imported "Soviet hiba" (ソ連ヒバ, Siberian arborvitae), which has properties similar to hinoki, is used for trowel handles.
My motive for wanting to investigate trowel handles goes back some forty-odd years, to when, in my early twenties, I began helping in the shop my father ran and felt the simple question: "Tokyo trowels have round handles — why do Kansai trowels have square ones?"
At the time I asked the trowel wholesalers and the plasterers who came to buy trowels, but got no clear answer; the only reference work was Suzuki Chūgorō's Dare ni mo wakaru sakan kōgaku, which says merely "presumably custom made it so," and I could not really understand. And so it remained until today.
But recently, in the course of researching material to put on our shop's website — so that my eldest son, my successor, and people in the plastering trade might know the "evolution of the sakan name" and the "history of the plasterer's trowel" — I read the literature researched since then and the plastering-trade magazines, came to understand the history of the trowel handle in detail, and was able to hear at length from Seki Tadayuki, chairman of Sekichū Co., Ltd., the leading wholesaler of Miki plasterer's trowels, about the state of trowel handles in Miki, the great center of trowel production.
Thereby I was able, in my own way, to explain why the square handle was born in Kyoto, and to write it up under the title "On the Handles of Plasterer's Trowels".
To all who kindly cooperated with my inquiries in writing this manuscript, to the authors of the works I consulted, and to all who related valuable stories in the plastering-trade magazines or wrote the papers and articles I drew on, I express my deep gratitude.
An auspicious day in July, Heisei 21 (2009) Suzuki Kanamono Co., Ltd. ((有)スズキ金物店) Representative Director, Suzuki Toshiaki (鈴木俊昭)