Shoji

One of our favorite rooms in this house is our tatami room with rice paper windows. In most newer Japanese homes, there are mostly modern features but still a few traditional tatami rooms. These rooms are usually furnished pretty sparingly with ceremonial items and art. They are considered formal rooms and kept very nice. Our big tatami room is off of our living room and since we don't have many ceremonial or artsy items to display, we've made ours into a playroom for the kids. While this works perfectly for our family, we've realized that the rice paper window coverings, or shoji, are not meant to be used in close proximity to a young boy... or three of them!

Here are some boys playing nice and calmly in our beautiful tatami room.

Unfortunately for the windows, this isn't always the scene! While I didn't capture a picture of the windows during or after the massacre, let's just say Leo the very fierce ninja won.

The result wasn't pretty for our lovely shoji.

After a short google search, I discovered that rice paper windows get ripped all the time. Most Japanese homeowners replace there shoji once a year around New Years so they will be fresh for the beginning of a new year. If you're not wanting to replace the whole screen, there are shoji stickers that can patch the holes. They come in different shapes, and I chose the sakura, or cherry blossom, shaped ones.

The stickers did cover the rip, but they didn't look as good as I thought they might.

After another quick google search, I found out that replacing the shoji isn't very difficult. I was a little nervous to tackle the project on my own, so I had a Japanese friend come over to help me. There were rips in four of our six window panels in the room, so it was quite the job. We found all the materials at our trusty O store for less that 2000 yen or about 20 dollars.

Our first step was taking the wooden panel off.

The glue used on shoji is water based, so we sprayed the paper with water to dissolve it.

After a few minutes, we pulled the rice paper off of the panel.

Then we cleaned off the remaining glue and let the panel dry off for about ten minutes.

Next, we applied some new water based glue to every part of the wood panel,

rolled the new rice paper over the glue,

and trimmed off the excess paper.

 After about 20 minutes to make sure all the glue was dry...

Banzai! The beautiful shoji windows were back. The whole process took about three hours total to complete. It was a lot of fun learning about it and replacing the rice paper. Best of all, we had our tatami room looking good again.

You will never believe what happened the very next day.

I'll give you a hint...