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If you read Japanese comic books or watch Japanese movies often, Kendo should not be a strange thing to you. Kendo is known by many as one of the traditional Japanese cultures; but, few know that a lot of Japanese bamboo swords come from Taiwan. Since the technique of making bamboo swords was brought into Taiwan in the late 1960s, Taiwan’s bamboo swords made of quality makino bamboo with outstanding handcraft, which featured better skill than in China and South Asia who produced at low cost and cheap materials, have till this date been Japanese’ number one choice. That is attributable to the old artisans in Zhushan Township, Nantou County, a town in the mountains once with 70 percent of its population lived on bamboo. Zhushan is not only the cradle of Japanese bamboo swords but also the hometown of Taiwan’s bamboo industry.
Taiwan’s bamboo industry and the development of bamboo arts that stemmed from Zhushan became to be among the efforts of the International Cooperation and Development Fund, Taiwan in aiding Taiwan’s friend nations in Latin American in 1980 and promoted in the countries like Haiti, Guatemala and Ecuador. The project began with aiming at simply “helping the poor”, assisting the local people in increasing their incomes and meeting their everyday needs, and was upgraded to building a complete industrial chain of bamboo, which comprised incubation of bamboo seedling, fabrication and design, and marketing planning. Taiwan’s robust makino bamboo is designated by Japan as the only material for bamboo swords.
Bamboos grow fast to an extent that they become usable in just three years, such that they are called as poor man’s wood. Bamboo was an important traditional industry in Taiwan, involving two major species, makino bamboo and mao bamboo. Taiwan’s bamboo industry started in the era of Japanese colonization, when the Japanese brought bamboo weaving arts into Taiwan. When Chinese Nationalist Government came to Taiwan, it promoted the bamboo industry hard, giving counsel in establishing bamboo fabrication factories and providing loans on machinery. In Zhushan Township, which is rich in bamboo resources, many fabrication factories were founded; the firms further developed state-of-the-art automatic chopsticks making machines, upgrading the making of bamboo chopsticks from conventional hand splitting to industrialization, and facilitating export to China, Japan, among other nations.
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