A chasen is cut from a single piece of bamboo — no joins, no glue, no metal. The tines are split, curled, and shaped over roughly two months, mostly by hand, in workshops that have changed very little since the sixteenth century.
Takayama, in Nara, has made whisks for the tea ceremony for over five hundred years. There are perhaps a dozen families left who still do it. Ours comes from one of them — used until the tines fray, then replaced, the way it has always been.