The first year that my wife and I moved to Japan, we started a habit of going to the Tokyo city flea market every weekend. It’s the biggest flea market in Tokyo, and even if we didn’t find any treasures it was always a fun experience to peruse tools, clothes, and junky curiosities. On one occasion I found the tabi-dansu pictured below. Tabi-dansu are really basic, simple tansu that are intended to be used to store utensils for tea ceremonies. I don’t practice tea, but I do have a soft spot for old 桐 kiri (paulownia) tansu, and when I spotted this one at the flea market, the seller only wanted ¥500 (about $5) for it. The cabinet certainly has a fair share of stains and grime, but all in all it was in good shape. ¥500! Sold!
The design and simplicity of this style of tansu is really beautiful and I thought I’d share a few more details after my last post on the cherry tansu where I talked a bit about another old cha-dansu.
Pegged Box Joints and Case Details
The joinery for the case is consistent with quite a few other tansu that I’ve seen. Large, evenly spaced box-joints pegged with bamboo nails. These joints appear to be pretty solid, and with the bamboo nails driven in from two directions they do a decent job of locking the joint together.
The actual structure is quite thin, and lightweight. The main case is made up of boards just 10 mm thick (.39 in). The door is the same thickness and the shelves are even thinner at 8mm (.314 in).
The piece glued to the side of the cabinet is meant to be used as a handle of sorts when moving the cabinet around, and there is a matching handle on the opposite side. Again super simple, just a piece of wood glued on with a few bamboo nails for added reinforcement.
From the research I’ve done these cabinet were probably originally intended to be light weight mobile cabinets, and the kanji for tabi-dansu, 旅箪笥, literally reads as “travel cabinet”. Something that you could store things in but easily pick up and grab when you need to. I’m not sure to what extent the design may have changed once becoming involved with tea ceremony practice, but certain features like the handles seem to have stuck even though there’s little likelihood anyone will regularly be moving the cabinet around. Maybe the concept of mobility has some symbolic meaning, or perhaps it’s just an implied feature.
桐 – Kiri – Paulownia
From the Wood Database:
The other Balsa. Paulownia is used in applications where a lightweight (yet proportionately strong) wood is needed. It’s widely used in Japan for construction of the koto (a stringed musical instrument), as well as other household items, where the wood is referred to as Kiri. Paulownia is one of the fastest growing trees in the world, capable of growth rates of well over seven feet per year as a seedling! But while it’s highly appreciated and cultivated in Asia, Paulownia has come to be considered an invasive species in the United States.
https://www.wood-database.com/paulownia/
Paulownia is a pretty common wood to see on old tansu, and it’s the wood I’ve seen the most on tabi-dansu. The wood itself is incredibly lightweight and soft, making it really easy to work with yet still strong enough for a furniture. For comparison sake, balsa is about half the weight of paulownia and about 1/5 the hardness. Eastern white pine is actually just a touch heavier and harder than paulownia but very close, so for those who are familiar with white pine, paulownia is very similar.
The lightweight nature of paulownia makes it a good match for tansu that were designed to be mobile. On tansu like this, the wood is almost always left natural, with no oil. The wood is also commonly used to house objects of value, and supposedly has the ability to readily absorb moisture, thereby keeping the contents free of rust and mold; important features for a hot and humid country like Japan. Quality tea ware, ceramics, kanna, etc. often come in a paulownia box. It’s also commonly used for tansu made to hold kimono and important clothing.
Tabi-dansu Door Design
The door is the most prominent feature of a tabi-dansu. As I mentioned in the cherry tansu post, the door is made up of a mitered frame with a solid panel of paulownia fit within the frame. There’s no room for expansion and contraction, instead the whole thing is glued together. You can see some cracks in the main door panel below as a result of wood movement. After looking at a few different doors with this type of construction there doesn’t seem to be any special joinery involved. Instead all the joints appear to be butt joined, glued, and sometimes reinforced with a bamboo peg or two. With such simple joinery its impressive that the joints are still holding strong. Paulownia is a very stable wood, so perhaps it’s stability allows simple joinery like this to continue to hold.
The door attaches to the cabinet with a cool piece of hardware pictured below. The bottom edge of the door sits in a shallow groove which acts as a pivot point for the door to swing open and closed.
To open the door, you just need to pull out the pin….
And the door can pivot open.
The whole door can then be removed and set aside. It’s a simple system and quite elegant I think.
Inside are a series of shelves floating on cross pieces that have been glued and pegged to the sides of the cabinet.
Design Inspiration
Perhaps this little cabinet isn’t the most exciting or glamourous piece of furniture, but after using and living with it for the past few years I’ve really grown to love it. And it’s got me re-thinking some of my older furniture designs that in comparison seems way too busy and overworked. So the past few months this little cabinet has been floating around in my head as I’ve been thinking about some tansu inspired cabinets of my own. One such design idea I have is to create a long low tansu that a set of tabi-dansu could sit on. And I’ve actually started that process already. My wife and I could really use some more storage space in our little Tokyo apartment and so I thought I’d invest some time into making this design a reality.
Below is a concept image of what I have in mind. Scale is a bit hard to discern from the following image but by western furniture standards the overall arrangement is quite small, yet for Tokyo living I think the size will be just right (overall length is a little over 1.1 m or 3.6′). I’ll post some more pictures of the build process and completed cabinet soon.
