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Bundle of incense sticks by Baba Watermill.
Courtesy Baba Watermill

A Storied Japanese Watermill Produces the Primary Ingredient in This All-Natural Incense

Cynthia Rosenfeld

April 24, 2021
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In the early 20th century, locals from Yame, a small city in Fukuoka Prefecture on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, dug a canal and built a watermill that served traditional businesses such as paper-making and rice-milling. At its peak, the region boasted 40 watermills that manufactured cedar-leaf powder, a central ingredient of incense—until electric-powered factories began replacing them in the 1970s to meet the needs of mass production. Baba Watermill is the only mill still producing the raw material. It’s owned by 73-year-old Takeshi Baba, who inherited the business from his father and feels a profound responsibility to continue the century-old practice. As artificial fragrances, colors, and chemicals came onto the market, Takeshi grew increasingly frustrated that the fruits of his labor kept ending up in a garish rainbow of inferior commercial incense. So in 2000, he started making his own.

These days, Takeshi and his wife, Chieko, trek into the surrounding forest in the early mornings to gather cedar branches while the leaves are still fresh and green. They use the branches to make a fire to dry the leaves, and shovel them under 15 pestles powered by the water wheel, which pound the leaves to the consistency of powdered sugar. The material is then mixed with Takeshi’s finely honed recipe of water, leaves, and sap from the local tabunoki tree, which act as a natural binder. After kneading the resulting dough, they feed it into a pressing machine and cut it into skinny, five-inch-long sticks that dry for three days in a temperature- and humidity-controlled room.

The final product is placed in pared-down packaging, a crowd-sourced effort by the Yame community to promote the area’s handmade, cedar-scented heritage. Meanwhile, Baba Watermill has become something of a cultural attraction for young people looking to reconnect with nature and history. For those who can’t immediately decamp to Takeshi’s base, his long-lasting incense offers a serene, distinctly satisfying olfactory escape.

# Asia# Fragrance# History

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It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

culture

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.