Shoji Door Re-Papering

For the most part, taking care of a Japanese apartment is the same as any other.  Clean things that get dirty, wonder how they get so dirty so fast, dust, vacuum, rinse and repeat.  One household task that is largely unique to Japan, however, is the replacement of the paper in shoji doors.

Shoji are the old-Japanese-style interior doors.  We have one set of two shoji-style doors in our apartment, between the sun room (for drying clothes - many/most Japanese households do not have a dryer) and the office. The reason that these doors need maintenance every now and again is that they're principally made out of paper, and if you open and close the doors enough times, eventually you'll slip and put an elbow through one, or kick it by accident.

You can imagine how long the paper was pristine in our apartment, given that we've never had to be careful around paper doors before.  Actually, when we arrived, there was already a (supposed to be cute) flower patch on a hole in one of them.  We promptly ripped the other door too, sometime in the first month.  We managed to hide the flower patch in the above picture; it's on the back door, second rectangle up from the bottom behind the front door.

We finally got annoyed by the rips, figured we hadn't damaged the doors in a while, and decided to put up new paper.    First, you have to strip the old paper and glue, which isn't that difficult.  Just wet a washcloth and run it over all the wooden parts of the frame and the glue will melt and the paper can be peeled off.

Then, once the frame is dry, you have to attach the new paper.  We chose iron-on paper rather than futzing with glue and paper at the same time.  I wanted the pretty pink papers with the maple leaves on them (obviously a fall product - are housewives really that bored that they change shoji by the season?) but they wouldn't have gone with other things in the apartment and Lee probably would have set fire to them.  We spread out the paper over the frame.

While ironing it on,we followed the instructions on the package exactly, and found that following the instructions does not seem to produce the result they show.  You're supposed to tack the four corners, then work outward from the center, before sealing the four edges.  This we did, but ended up with fairly obvious crinkles and stress patterns.  I think next time I'd pin the whole thing taut and in place, then tack a million small places with the iron before pulling the pins and doing the rest.  That idea is not likely to come in handy as we're not planning on replacing the papers again unless we have to.

Ours papers not terribly straight.  They have enough wrinkles that you could in fact consider the wrinkles to have character or be a design feature or something.  So that's what they are; we have wavy modern art shoji papers for a discount.  That's the story and I'm sticking to it!

 

They don't look right, but they don't look bad either.