I can no longer hide my love for Japanese Incenses! There’s just so much I would like to talk aboout Japanese incense sticks that I’ve been enjoying and I just feel this need to express myself! As such, I’ll be regularly writing reviews on different Japanese incenses as I go along my daily burn. These… [Read More…]
Impressions of the Ranjatai
Several incense houses in Japan have been known to create blended incense sticks based on their impression of the Ranjatai through Mon-koh. Small fragments of the Ranjatai are known to be in possession of descendants of kodo masters and big incense companies, from which they draw inspiration into crafting a representative incense based on the… [Read More…]
Milling your own agarwood powder
Most of the agarwood powders on the market are generally made from ground up post-distilled agarwood chips, thus missing a large and important proportion of olfactory notes that could have existed in the non-distilled agarwood chips. As decent quality agarwood chips are expensive, powders made from these chips are just as expensive, if… [Read More…]
Pressed Incense Tablets
Pressed Incense Tablets 印香 is a subset of Incense Printing / 香篆 and it dates back to the same period/era where incense printing was popular both in China and in Japan around the Song Dynasty / Hei-an period. The earliest evidence of the existence of incense tablets comes from the Ying Xian wooden pagoda in… [Read More…]
Buying Japanese incense from Rakuten Global
To follow up on my previous post, buying incense from various shops on Rakuten Global is also an alternative, although many may neither be as well stocked nor as organized as Kohgen. There are at least three shops that I would recommend here, and there is some convenience with the checkout process as it is… [Read More…]
How to Buy Incense from Japan – KohGen
I’ve been getting my incenses and stuff from Japan directly for quite a while, and KohGen’s one of my most favourite online shops. They have a very large product range, a reasonably easy to use checkout page, and very fast processing of your orders. I had also arranged for gifts to be sent to friends,… [Read More…]
Perspectives on the Rikkoku Gomi
The Rikkoku Gomi set was first assembled around the 15th Century with the establishment of a formalized “way/art” of the Incense by founder Sanjonishi Sanetaka (1455-1537 AD), a noble under the Muromachi Shogunate of Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. Without the benefits of modern logistics, and being more isolated from the rest of the world, agarwood import… [Read More…]
Mukasa-no-Takimono – The Six Kneaded Incenses of the Hei-an Period
Kneaded incense was thought to be brought into Japan by Buddhist Monk, Gan-Jin around 750 AD. From its introduction in the midst of the Nara Period (710 AD to 794 AD) to the Hei-an Period (794-1185), kneaded incense gained immense popularity and it was the norm for the rich and noble to take part… [Read More…]
Japanese Incense types
Japanese Incense types can be classified into two main categories, 熏香 (heating incense), or 焚香 (burning incense). A smaller third category exists, where incense or fragrant materials are not heated nor burnt at all, with the fragrance appreciated in the raw form. In the category of heating incense, a piece of red hot charcoal… [Read More…]
Enjoying Kyara through Mon-Koh
Mon-Koh is loosely translated as “listening to incense” from the Japanese language. Kyara is best enjoyed using Japanese “mon-koh” methods, where a red hot coal is buried under ash in a ceramic cup, with a small ventilation hole prodded to provide air to the coal, and a slice of clean mica place on top before… [Read More…]