The handle stays round. A Bōshū fan is made from a single length of bamboo, split finely along its upper portion into ribs while the lower part remains whole to serve as the grip, then opened out into the shape of a fan. Hold one and you can feel immediately that the handle and the ribs were never separate pieces that somebody joined together. The workshops are scattered along the coast rather than gathered in one place, and some of them will let you try the work yourself if you arrange it beforehand. The stage where the split ribs are woven together with thread looks entirely straightforward from a chair, and turns out, in your own hands, to produce spacing that is nowhere near even and cannot be corrected afterwards. That regularity comes only from repetition, which is the honest answer and the one nobody particularly wants to hear.

The bamboo is local and cut in a particular season for reasons that are practical rather than ceremonial. Tateyama is twenty minutes away by car and the expressway reaches Tokyo, but daily life here assumes a vehicle and does not pretend otherwise. Being this close to the sea means days when the wind is considerable and everything portable is put away.

One piece of bamboo becomes a fan by being divided rather than assembled, which is the reverse of how almost everything else is made. The bamboo here grows thin and straight, which is the specific reason this fan is made in this place and not somewhere else. The finished fans are sold plain or papered. Both versions are lighter in the hand than they look. Very few tools are built that way, and holding one is the quickest route to understanding why the shape looks as it does.