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Passion for our products
Kumaya Shoten Co., Ltd. mainly handles the products using exclusive Yoshino cedar.
We offer various exquisite woodworks including chopsticks.
All our products are of high quality and we offer
them to our customers with confidence.
Especially, we are proud of our chopsticks since we manufacture them with parts of wood that are normally to be disposed.
Through such efforts as effective use of resources, we are taking part in
conservation of forest resources and development of forestry.
In addition, Yoshino cedar we are using for our products is domestic ce-dar, coming from plantation forests.
That makes it possible for us to produce exquisite products that cannot be done with
commonly-used other cedars.
We would like to invite all of you to try our products.
About materials
We are using Yoshino cedar, known as precious wood, for our products. Yoshino cedar, coming from Yoshino Forestry Region in central south area of Nara prefecture, has a long history that started from Muromachi period by transplant of cedars from Miwa in Yamato and Mt. Kasuga. Currently, it is renowned as a premium brand of domestic cedar, while being famous as one of the three most beautiful forest trees in Japan together with Akita cedar and Kiso cypress. It’s durability, strength and beautiful luster have been acclaimed since early times. Another unique advantage of Yoshino cedar is that it is clear from knots. Since Yoshino cedar is grown in plantation forests, thickness of its trunk is almost same from the root to upper part with few knots thanks to annual pruning. It is so beautiful with fine and uniform annual rings and defined straight grains. Exquis-ite products including chopsticks made of carefully-grown cedar in the plantation are specialty of Kumaya Shoten.
About manufacturing process
The inner part of the cedar is normally said as not appropriate to use as a chopstick material due to its small knots, coarse grains and poor nature, so conventionally, only surface part has been used for chopsticks, finished as “disposable chopsticks made of lumber remnants.” Use of lumber remnants has led the poor yield of cedar chopstick manufacturing. At the same time, an issue typical for manufacturing of quality prod-ucts as that too much manpower is required is a fatal defect for manufacturers. In addition to these, entry of for-eign materials and alternative resources has made the use of cedars less and less. As a result, timbers from for-est thinning are left in mountains.
As an initiative aimed at preserving forestry and environment against these issues, Kumaya Shoten keeps efforts to use entire cedar including inner parts, by utilizing parts suitable for chopsticks to manu-facture chopsticks and other parts as materials for other woodworks, as our contribution to effective use of re-sources. Through collaboration with subcontract factories, we have addressed difficult challenges including con-ventional problems and emerging tasks and achieved the development of innovative manufacturing process. With this manufacturing process exclusively available with Kumaya Shoten, our products have got a fresh dimen-sion. In addition, inefficiency of Yoshino cedar chopsticks production, seen as a problem for a long time, has been improved.
Inquiry
If you have any questions or need an advice,
please feel free to contact us
by phone or filling out the inquiry form.
TEL +81-747-52-0084
FAX +81-747-52-0086