Dobby The Oshibori Man

[Mulboyne]

The fifth part of "Dobby the Oshibori Man" has just hit the web. The manga was created last year as a promotional effort by oshibori company Fujinami Towel Service. The same firm also runs the Museum of Modern Oshibori which includes examples of oshibori art although, sadly, not the origami version which Japanese hostesses throughout the land seem to know. Here's "Escargot":



The Flash Museum has a short video clip with a profile of Dobby (e.g. "Bloodtype: water") and you can also buy "I Love Oshibori" T-shirts which no foreigner in Japan should be without.

[Bucky]

Oshibori are always helpful after "she" has played your shakuhachi.

[Visitor K]

here is another site that shows how to make different oshibori art:
http://ameblo.jp/sasablog/theme-10000520750.html

but i still cant find directions on how to make the ever popular oshibori penis:

[Greji]

here is another site that shows how to make different oshibori art:
http://ameblo.jp/sasablog/theme-10000520750.html

but i still cant find directions on how to make the ever popular oshibori penis:

There was a time when almost every bar hostess could fold out a reasonable real looking Johnson in no time flat.

Must be a dying art, you don't see it much anymore!

[American Oyaji]

Im surprised there hasn't been a Harry Potter reference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House-elf

[succubusqueen]

I know Japan has like great museums...and a lot of crappy ones....but this Oshibori one is like the most absurd of them all.

[Mulboyne]

Asahi: Hand-towel bunnies are one thing, profits another

Now, here's something for you: a hot steaming oshibori. If you've ever been to a Japanese restaurant, then you know how refreshing these moist hand towels, given to customers as soon as they settle in, can be. You can daintily wipe your fingers or give yourself a full facial scrub (and neck rub to boot), and when drinks spill and soy sauce flies, you can use it as a sop. For 40-year-old Isamu Sasagawa, however, these diminutive towels are the stuff of art. A television scriptwriter by day, Sasagawa is to oshibori what Sen no Rikyu is to the tea ceremony. Give him a minute and he can wring a hand towel into duckling or a bunny, a sailboat or a supplicating man. Think of it as origami, only damp. All in all, he can make up to 150 different figures from a single hand towel, all of which are diagrammed in the two-volume "Cho Ukeru Oshibori-hiyoko no Tsukurikata" (How to make super-cool hand towel chicks) that he's put out by Ikeda Shoten, a publishing firm better known for its origami books. "This isn't something I can claim to have invented," Sasagawa says, looking remarkably youthful for his age. "But I've probably gone farther with hand towels than any other person."

Inspiration came to him eight years ago, when one of his television bosses invited him for dinner after work. The boss nonchalantly--after years of practice, no doubt--folded his hand towel into a rabbit before the underling's amazed eyes. It was one of the oldest forms in the towel tome, Sasagawa later learned, but at the time it left a deep impression. "It really moved me. I had to learn how to do it, and then I just started developing my own," says Sasagawa, who claims to have ended up writing for television by accident. He graduated from an art school and tried to make it as a comedian, but was eventually scouted as a writer. Now, he develops ideas and questions for a quiz show. "I tend to see creative possibilities in places that other people wouldn't," he says. "The shadow on the house across the street, for example or a fallen leaf can look like a face to me. And anytime I'm handed anything, I immediately try to figure out a way to use it that it's not intended for. I find that it's a common trait among the people I work with--perhaps that's the connection between oshibori and TV." Television may sound like a dream job, Sasagawa says, but he'd gladly throw in the towel, so to speak, if he could only turn his art into a career.

Sadly, however, Sasagawa may have chosen a medium heading to extinction, as oshibori get scarcer to come by. In the old days, explains Fujinami Towel Service Co. Director Katsuyuki Fujinami, 34, innkeepers would offer travelers a wet cloth as a show of hospitality (and as a way to get the dust off them before they came indoors). That tradition lives on today in the sanitized, scented and plastic-wrapped cotton towels that firms like Fujinami Towel Service pick up and drop off daily to restaurants and offices around Tokyo. Even a decade and a half ago, any Japanese restaurant worthy of the name featured a heated box filled with hand towels, but now the numbers have grown scarcer. In the case of Fujinami Towel Service, which ships 10,000 towels daily, its total is down 60 percent from the peak bubble economy years. "We're signing more rental contracts than ever before," explains Fujinami. "Our core clients are small- and medium-sized restaurants. The problem for us is that the new ones tend not to stay in business very long."

Walk around any Tokyo station and it's clear to see that the culinary turf is now a battleground for conglomerates, each stacking entire buildings with differently branded, but similarly run restaurants under their respective umbrellas. Price is paramount these days, and many have given up on dispensing cotton hand towels for disposable paper ones. A machine can produce 200 moist towelettes in a minute and a restaurant can keep them boxed until needed. At Fujinami, it takes an hour to wash and prepare 1,200 towels. They have to be delivered and someone has to receive them. That makes them twice as expensive for a restaurant. The cheapest towel firms have cut prices down to 3.5 yen each--yet restaurant chains are hardly biting. Fujinami Towel Service on the other hand has taken the high road, offering pricier, higher quality towels to exclusive restaurants. It can afford to do so: Twenty years ago Fujinami diversified its business into disposable towelettes and chopsticks.

An oshibori can survive 50 washings, but whether or not it's easier on the environment is a matter of debate: The fleets of trucks moving them back and forth have to be taken into the equation, after all. Still, director Fujinami says, they provide a sense of connection that disposables can't replace. "To be honest, I didn't enter this field willingly," says Fujinami, who worked for a major IT firm, before being called in by his father four years ago. "It didn't seem like a business for today, but once I got involved, I realized how important it is. "At the telecom firm I hardly felt any human contact in what we were doing. Here, I actually feel a sense of hospitality by handing someone something warm and natural. I'm lucky my generation can still experience oshibori, and I want to keep them going for another 50 years." Who knows, the art of duck wringing may live on after all.