Littell's Living Age/Volume 132/Issue 1711/Fans
FANS.
The manufacture of fans is an important branch of industry in Japan, and no fewer than three million fans, valued at ninety thousand dollars, were, according to Mr. Consul Annesley's commercial report on Hiogo and Osaka, lately issued, exported from those ports in 1875. Osaka is the principal city for manufacture of the ogi, or folding fans, which are those almost exclusively exported, all descriptions of the bamboo kind being made there, the figures, writing, etc., being executed in Kiyôto. The principle of division of labor, as explained in an extract from the Hiogo News quoted by Consul Annesley, is carried out a long way in this branch of industry. The bamboo ribs of the fans are made by private people in their own houses, and combinations of the various notches cut in the lower part is left to one of the finishing workmen, who forms the various patterns of the handles according to plans prepared by the designer. In like manner the designer gives out to the engravers the patterns that he thinks will be salable, and when the blocks have been cut decides what colors are to be used for each part of the design, and what different sheets are to be used for the opposite sides of each fan. When these sheets with the sets of bamboo slips which are to form the ribs have been handed over to the workman, he, in the first instance, folds them so that they will retain the crease. This is done by putting them between two pieces of heavily oiled paper, which are properly creased. The fans are then folded up together and placed under pressure. When sufficient time has elapsed the sheets are taken out and the moulds used again, the released sheets being packed up for at least twenty-four hours in their folds. The ribs, which are temporarily arranged in order on a wire, are then taken and set into their places on one of the sheets after it has been spread out on a block and pasted. A dash of paste then gives the woodwork adhesive powers, and that part of the process is finished by affixing the remaining piece of paper. The fan is folded up and opened three or four times before the folds get into proper shape, and by the time it is put by to dry it has received an amount of handling Japanese paper alone would endure. When the insides are dry the riveting of the pieces together (including the outer covering) is rapidly done, and a dash of varnish quickly finishes the fan. The highest-priced fan that was ever used in the days of seclusion from the outer world was not more than five yen. Since foreigners have been in Japan, however, some few have been made to order as dear as ten and fifteen dollars each. The general prices of ordinary fans range from fifty sen per one hundred to fifteen yen per hundred, though an extraordinarily costly fan is turned out at fifty yen per hundred. The number of fans ordered for the Philadelphia Exhibition alone amounted to over eight hundred thousand, at a cost of about fifty thousand dollars. The sale of fans in olden times seldom exceeded ten thousand a year for the whole country.