Hello again from Michino Eki Aso …….
I hope you were interested in the wooden entrance ticket in my previous blog about Kurokawa Onsen. Today’s blog will be about the processes of making that wooden ticket. I was so lucky to learn about the details of its processes and make it by myself. Unfortunately, tourists can’t experience this one by themselves. Thanks to our school project, I got that chance. But what I’m thinking about is that if you know how hard the processes are to make it, you’ll be more delighted to keep it.
So, let’s start with the cutting tree. For this wooden ticket, they use the trees called Hinoki and Sugi, cypress and cedar in english. You can see them in the following picture.
You may wonder if that trees are cut a lot, how its subsequences would be? I had the same thought and when I ask them, the reason was that they have to cut the old trees so that they can grow the new ones. So, I think making the wooden tickets by cutting Hinoki and Sugi is actually a win-win situation. Obviously , I didn’t do cutting trees cause I don’t have licence for it.
Ok, let’s get next step. After cutting Hinoki and Sugi, we have to boil them so that we can easily take its skin. I did from this step and this is my favourite step.
Here’s why, when you boil Hinoki, its smell is getting stronger and make you feel addicted to it. Here’s another reason, taking its skin was such a mind blowing process and you can see how fast they were in following linked video. They can easily do it from 6 seconds to 8 seconds. For me, it took over 20 seconds though I was trying so hard.
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Let’s move on another step. After taking the skins, we need to make them to be as smooth as possible. So, we made it smooth by brushing machine. Check it in the following linked video.
Honestly, it was so heavy for me but I tried my best to finish one log. Although it was not that easy to make it smooth, it was worthy to touch when it became smooth.
For next step, we have to cut the log into the round form. You have to cut it exactly not to be too thin or too thick.
And then we have to brush both surfaces to be smooth. For this one, I did not use any machine but by hand. It was really fun. You can see how much my friends had fun to do it.
After all these steps, I wrote my memories on it with laser pen. I wrote my memo date and my own name. You can also see my name in Burmese 🙂
So, this is how the unique wooden tickets came to your hand. I don’t want this work to disappear. I really want it to exist forever.
Ok….so, that is for today and I hope you’ll enjoy my little blog…
Keep warm and don’t forget to read our blogs in many languages….
I’ll be back with another blog about stunning view in Aso.
Min Min
