Shojigami: The Art of Paper Tearing

If you hired a contractor to build you a new home and his proposal included walls, doors, and windows made of paper, you'd fire him on the spot, right? Well after you fired him, he would head over to Japan where paper architecture has been flourishing for over 2,000 years. Among the various doors and room dividers made of paper, shoji remains the most well known and is often regarded as necessary for a Japanese look. This past week, we decided to lend our guest room some of that Japanese ambiance by taking down our curtains and re-papering some shoji frames that we found in our shed.

Papering shoji turned out to be fairly simple and actually quite fun. We laid the frame down on our kitchen floor, spread glue on the wood, and then rolled shoji paper slowly over the frame as seen in this picture.


After the shoji paper was securely glued to the frame, we left it on the kitchen floor to dry. This wasn't a real brilliant move on our part, as Tyler soon put his foot through the paper. After ripping everything off and starting over, we moved the frames to a safer location and allowed them to finish drying before trimming the excess paper off the edges.

After trimming the edges, we sprayed a light mist of water on the back to shrink the paper a little and tighten it. Although this is wonderful for overall shoji aesthetics, it was also a mistake. The paper tightened so beautifully that when we were putting the doors into the window and Tyler's knee bumped against one of the panels, it ripped again. At this point Tyler was muttering things under his breath that sounded like ' . . . paper in houses . . . whose stupid idea . . . ' so we left it and went to bed.

Although I can now say that we have beautiful shoji in our guest room, I also have to wonder, as Tyler did, whose stupid idea was this? You can't say that we're just clumsy, foreign oafs because the Japanese break their shoji too. Although I've seen many fist sized or finger sized holes in shoji over the years, the best example that I've ever seen and the best case yet for not having these in the home comes from our friend's house here in Ogaki.

When their two little girls started crawling, an occasional fist or foot flew through the bottom panels. Now that the girls are walking and getting taller, they can punch the paper higher and higher and beam with pride every time their super strength tears through the doors.

And yet, despite all this, I would re-paper my shoji a thousand times for its sheer beauty, simplicity, and for the way warm sunshine filters through the paper. Shoji may not be able to withstand the playful poke of a child's finger or the gentle nudge of an adult knee, but perhaps the creation of something beautiful, yet impermanent, was what the Japanese had in mind all along.