A tour of Japan's Warring States Period

Kodaira made the first one from persimmon glue, the second one from wood wax, and the third one from tea leaves. He suddenly thought of a tuba that is famous in the Japanese stationery world.

Kuretake!

Founded in the 35th year of Meiji (1902), it still maintains the tradition of hand-made ink. Known as Narajo Inkko Japan, Kuretake Pine Inkko Nara.

Nowadays, due to the development of science and technology, artificial ink is cheap and available, and there are fewer and fewer occasions to use pen and ink. Japan's strip ink market is shrinking very fast, and it has reached the point where the strip ink produced in just one city of Nara accounts for nearly 100% of the national output.

And the ink produced by Kuretake accounts for the majority of Nara ink. It can already be called a representative of Japanese ink, and even a national treasure.

After all, if you do something repeatedly for more than a hundred years, let alone do it seriously. The things he makes are definitely as good as his.

Although Wu Zhumo has now begun to introduce certain machinery when baking rosin, it is not like the purely manual method in the past.

The ancient ink-making technology will not be described in detail here, and there is no need to write thousands of words about it. Books including "Tiangong Kaiwu" and other books all have detailed processes, which are not difficult to say. (I really don’t know how to use Baidu to learn about the ancient ink-making process?)

Glue must be used when making ink. Although isinglass is cheap, it has a strong smell and is not suitable for use in ink. Boiling beef tendons into glue is naturally good, but only six ounces of tendons can be obtained from a bullock. Beef tendon glue is too expensive and not suitable for bulk glue production.

But persimmon glue is different. Persimmon glue is free and is a by-product of persimmon lacquer, or handicraft waste.

Persimmon gum has a fruity aroma and is sufficiently sticky. The words "high quality and low price" are fully reflected in the persimmon glue, which is simply the perfect ink-making glue.

Next is tea. The tea required for making ink is different from the matcha and green tea that are relatively popular in Japan at this time. It is best to use black tea!

Where is black tea used? Used to flush out soot when mixing ink.

The soot produced by roasting rosin is actually the most basic raw material for ink. But soot looks like ash, but in terms of physical state, it is actually granular objects of different sizes.

If the collected soot is directly used to make ink, then after grinding the ink, the ink will not be smooth enough and will have a stagnant feeling, which will not allow the writer to write smoothly.

This effect will definitely make customers dissatisfied, so the soot needs to be sieved. How can the dust be filtered directly? Therefore, it is necessary to use good black tea to help sieve.

Use boiling water to brew black tea and enjoy the rich aroma of the tea. Mix the tea soup with soot, grind and sift carefully with a fine sieve and brush. Keep the larger particles in the soot to ensure that the size of the soot particles after screening is appropriate.

As for the scalding black tea, the aroma of the tea will also stick to the ash. Coupled with the fruity aroma of persimmon gum, it is really wonderful.

Wu Zhu's founders at that time really had some ideas and skills, and they figured out this method of preparing ink. The ink produced was widely praised and sold all over the country.

It is really different from the cheap ink that we have now that costs ten yuan a bottle, has a strange smell when you open it, and even makes you feel sick after smelling it for a long time.

In winter, if you use warm water to dissolve the ink sticks of Kurezhu ink, you will be able to smell a faint fragrance of tea and fruit. Not only does it make the user who writes the calligraphy and writing feel happy, but the painting that goes along with the calligraphy and painting can also make the user happy.

But, unfortunately, times have changed.

Nowadays, Kuretake uses ordinary industrial glue, and the sieve is washed with ordinary warm water. If we continue to use the best materials as we did a hundred years ago, regardless of cost, then this ink will really not be sold.

That is to say, in the current era, there is no need to worry about the market for ink. Since there are no cheap industrial inks to hit the market, the market is huge enough. What's more, there is an almost bottomless pit-like huge consumer market on the other side, and the demand for Mexico is simply endless.

Xiaoping Tai is not prepared to take any high-end route. That kind of luxury goods is still possible in Ming Dynasty, but there is absolutely no chance in Japan. There are so many poor people, so the daimyo samurai has no time to worry about whether the ink is good or not. He can also use smelly ink.

Just restore the original ink-making process of Wu Zhumo to ensure that the quality of the ink is above the passing line.

It's funny to say that ordinary ink in this era would have been a rare treasure in the world in 9102.

Times are moving forward, but it is unclear whether it is progress or regression.

So Kodaita blackmailed Sukezaemon into dozens of pieces of pine wood from all over the country. After all, they are both pine trees, but there is a big difference between pine and pine. The best softwood pine has a rosin content of up to 30%, while some hardwood pine has a minimum of 8%.

The quality of rosin also varies, and it is impossible to determine which pine is best without practical consideration.

No practice, no voice.

Xiao Pingtai agreed with this sentence very much, and grilled them all to see which one can bake longer and scrape out the most soot. You can even see if the soot produced by different pine trees can be mixed together to see if it can have any miraculous effect.

This is also the reason why when Koheita asked Sukezaemon for pine wood, every kind of pine wood was required to be ten-dan.

Do comparative experiments, the more samples the better.

In Shinano Province, where the mountain itself is located, pine trees also grow, and there are quite a lot of them. Uesugi Teruhora's Echigo country also has many pine trees.

You have to say that in this era, Japan lacks everything except wood. More than half of the country's land area is covered by mountains and forests. If you want wood, just go up to the mountains and cut it.

Moreover, if the Yamauchi family does this business and uses pine from Shinano in their own country, the first pine tree will be free of charge. All the mountains and forests belong to Taro Yamauchi, and it costs a shitty amount of money to cut down his own forest.

Persimmon glue is free, the cost is included in the persimmon paint, and it doesn’t cost a dime all year round.

Tea is still the same. When Yamauchi Yoshinori and the Asahina clan negotiated peace, the condition was that the Asahina clan ceded the 5,000-kan tea forest under the city. Now the tea forest belongs to Taro Yamauchi, and part of it is used to make black tea, still free of charge.

It’s so easy to do business without capital.

Just go to Echigo's old uncle's Naoetsu job market and buy some workers. Anyway, Teruhora Uesugi caught a lot of babies in Echu. Maybe the price would be very cheap if we go now.

Craftsmen are also easy to find. As one of the necessities of daily life, ink is still a marketable industry in this era. Unlike in 9102, the last few ink makers in Japan were concentrated in Nara.

Thinking of this, Xiaoping felt relieved. Oda Nobunaga and Uesugi Terutora, one from the five counties of Northern Ise and the other from Echichu Shimonkan. It expands so fast that it is impossible to catch up.

It would be better to revitalize the handicraft industry and use the sales revenue of the handicraft industry to make up for the depletion of financial resources caused by the inability to expand. Use new projects to increase income, which can then be converted into military strength.