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By　Hiroshi YOSHIDA Managing Director of Maruyoshi Corporation

This Home Page started in June 2000,　I started this home page from my own experience in getting to know the super power of CHIKUTAN.(Bamboo charcoal)

I want to offer a lot of useful information on Chikutan in this homepage. Especially how to use Chikutan to have a healthy life.

Also, sometimes I intend to provide volunteers with charged-free trial of out new products to get feed back. We expect this will make it possible for us to make sure what the consumer’s demands are and get information to improve our products quality.

My dream is that the products which are born from consumer’s opinions will grow in the market. I would also be very happy if our products can please many people and become very useful in their healthy lives.

The profile of My Company

Now, Let me introduce my company.　Our company was　founded by my father 45 years ago. Our company provides wooden products such as chopsticks, toothpicks, and other wooden house ware goods.
(The parts of painted black in this image are used for wooden chopsticks.)

I live in a city called Gojo which is located near the Yoshino Mountain District (also very famous for beautiful cherry blossoms in spring)where many chambers have been planted and cut down to be used for the material of housing and furniture over many generations.

The rest of the chamber after cutting into square for housing is useless and should be disposed.
But our ancestors began to use it as a material for chopsticks about a hundred years ago. This is the origin of wooden chopsticks.
We Japanese have a spirit to use things with much care and not to waste.

Wooden Chopsticks is one of the most wonderful tools Japanese have ever invented. Even now, we provide these wooden chopsticks made of disposable wood all over the Japan.

The chopsticks and environmental-related issue.

 We sometimes hear that wooden chopsticks cause the destruction of forests.There is a criticism that we Japanese destroy forests by using a lot of chopsticks.

You can see there is a misunderstanding in this criticism from reading the previous information. But you may say “you import a lot of wooden chopsticks from East-Asia
and China. Isn’t it a destruction of wooden resources?” I will now respond to this question.

We use disposable and useless wooden resources effectively as chopsticks

Yes it is true that we import a lot of chopsticks from abroad. For example, we import chopsticks from Indonesia. These chopsticks are made from disposable wood after the pine oil has been taken. The pine wood is planted to get pine oil under forestation plans..

We also import chopsticks from China, but in fact the materials (Birch, Aspen etc) which are used as chopsticks are useless for housing and furniture.

Because they　rot and infect insects easily, the average life span of these 　trees  are about 30 years. If We don’t use them and leave them in a forest, they will die down and prevent a forest from growth of other useful trees .

After cutting the trees down for chopsticks, they soon start to grow leafs again from the roots. So we can use them as chopsticks in the future again.

We also have used a lot of bamboo chopsticks these days. It takes bamboo only 3 years to grow. We can say Bamboo is an exhaustless resource.

At last I would like to add one more important thing.

Chopsticks are an important industry for East-Asia and gives Chinese people job security and a good living..

I am very happy if you can know the truth of wooden Chopsticks after reading this text.Thank you very much for reading my text.

Write to Hiroshi YOSHIDA  at yoshi_bat@e-chikutan.com

Updated February 2, 2004

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