Unity of purpose: moxa production in Japan

Unity of purpose: moxa production in Japan… … or how does moxa get like that?

Oran Kivity

Acupuncturist & Author: Kaohsiung, Taiwan

‘The Japanese are very good at taking somebody's idea and kind of playing with it to make it better and more functional, so instead of making a round ball of moxa, you make your moxa shape like a grain of rice, so that the contact point on the skin is much smaller… and you don't roll it hard, you roll it softly, so it burns slowly, it's moulded softly to shape, so when it burns down – yes there's a pinch of heat, but it's not the same kind of burning sensation or really, really hot sensations.’

Stephen Birch (Japanese Acupuncture and Moxibustion – What's So Unique? Oran Kivity, EJOM, 9:2)

I’ve always been curious about how moxa is made, and the relationship between the manufacturing process and the processes of applying it, as described by Stephen Birch above. In August 2018, together with my long-suffering assistant Ryo Izawa I took an overnight bus from Tokyo to Nagahama, in Shiga Prefecture. We were on our way to visit the Yamasho moxa factory, something I’d long wanted to do. The bus was unlike anything I’ve seen in the UK, equipped with seats that extended into long couches for comfortable overnight journeys, pillows and blankets included. As the bus pulled into Nagahama in the morning, I awoke from deep sleep to find my deshi looking tired and more than one curious glance from the other passengers. Apparently, Oran Sensei snored.

In a high state of excitement, I filmed every step of the day. Nagahama scene one: Oran, getting into the taxi. Nagahama scene two: Oran, in the taxi to Yamasho, saying ‘I’m on the way to Yamasho!’ Nagahama scene fourteen: Ryo, in the taxi, long face, no idea why, not sure we’ll use that scene. By the end of the day, there were many gigabytes of such material.

Sadly, or perhaps, happily, I never got around to editing these clips into anything coherent. The project was forgotten until this year, when I visited a moxa showroom in Taiwan, and I was reminded of the Yamasho trip. I decided to review that visit in this article instead.

Drying

We were greeted at the factory by Miki-san, the floor manager. With Ryo translating, I learned that the factory is not where the moxa is grown or harvested. It looks pretty much like any other industrial building, except that parts of the car park were covered in plastic sheets on which lay heaps of mugwort leaves, drying in the sun.

A collective of farms in the region harvests their mugwort leaves from May to August. After removing the stems and roots, they dry the leaves under the sun. Yamasho collects the dried leaves in late August and stores them until processing starts, usually around December. What we saw in the car park must have been some early arrivals.

December is the winter in Japan, and quite dry. Even after baking in the sun, the leaves are not yet dry enough, so they are processed further in a custommade drying room. Imagine a room with many metal shelves stacked with wire trays of leaves. Now add an industrial fan heater at one end blowing hot air at 100°F, and you get the picture.

Grades of moxa

Yamasho is a traditional manufacturer of moxa. They’ve been around since 1895 and make three general grades of moxa:

Relatively coarse • The colour is a darker green. • The floss contains impurities and many small particles of powdered leaves. • It burns at a relatively high temperature, so it is used with indirect moxa procedures such as on garlic, or in a moxa box. This is also what is used in Yamasho’s platform moxa cones.

Medium grade • This is a slightly lighter, green colour. Although there are still some impurities and leafy particulate matter, it comprises much more of the downy hairs on the underside of the leaves. • This moxa wool is easy to shape and thus can be used on the handle of the needle (kyutoshin). It still burns at a relatively high temperature, though cooler than the Chinese equivalent technique, which used segments of a moxa stick (wenzhen). This radiant heat is useful when used on the end of the needle. • It can also be used for large cone moxibustion (chinetsukyu) or Ontake warm bamboo moxibustion. • In the UK, the most well-known of these is Yamasho’s wakukusa medium grade moxa. Finest grade • The more yellow the moxa, the more refined it is. My little 100 g box of the best quality wool cost me nearly £100, but to give you some perspective, I’m still rolling tiny half-rice grain sized cones from it, four years on. • It’s so refined that there’s no part of the leaf left in there. It is composed solely of the hairs on the underside of the leaves. • It burns at a relatively low temperature, particularly if you roll your tiny cones very loosely. It’s a rookie mistake to roll them tightly.

Milling

Although Yamasho has modernised since 1895, you can see their methods are definitely traditional. All the milling machines are electric, but they still use giant millstones.

The leaves are put through a series of three mills, grinding them coarsely at first, and then progressively to the required quality. Each millstone has different patterns of grooves.

Sifting

Fascinating fact: almost none of the leaf that you see at the beginning of the process ends up in the final superpure moxa wool. What Yamasho want for that refined product is the tiny hairs at the bottom of the leaves. The stems and the spongy bits of the leaf are discarded. To do this, they use a rotary sifting machine called the nagadoshi. This is like a giant sieve.

To make Yamasho’s superpure moxa, suitable for direct moxibustion with rice grain sized cones, this floss needs to be refined even further with another machine called the tomi. After several hours of this, the sifted floss turns from green to yellow. Miki san told us that it takes 100 kg of moxa leaf to make 4 kg of pure moxa wool. That’s a lot of refinement!

In fact, all this sifting produces a lot of waste products. Previously these were discarded, but Yamasho is researching how to recycle some of the waste in various goods such as pet products, insect repellent and as fibre for various industries.

Unity of purpose: minimal stimulation at all stages

It’s always a fascinating experience to see the steps in the production of something you love. Moxibustion is so much part of our professional lives, but I had no idea how it is made or how it ends up looking the way it does. As with so many Japanese processes, much thought and refinement has gone into all its stages.

Dosage is a key component of Japanese acupuncture and moxibustion. Dr Manaka, the renowned 20th century Japanese acupuncturist, described this as getting maximum results with minimum intervention. Japanese okyu encapsulates this. The rolling method is very light, so that the moxa wool is not compressed, resulting in less heat. The base of the moxa cone is narrow, reducing its surface area to deliver less heat. As we have seen, the moxa wool is super-refined so that it burns at a lower temperature. Thus, minimal stimulation is emphasised at all stages, starting even at the manufacturing process, and continuing to the rolling technique and even the shape of the cone. Visiting Yamasho opened my eyes to this wonderful unity of purpose.

Acknowledgments

This article was based on our interviews, and also used English language material from the Yamasho website at www.moxa.net

I’m very grateful to Hiroshi Enomoto at Sankei acupuncture suppliers in Tokyo, who arranged our tour with a single phone call to Yamasho, and to Miki san, who took time out from his work to show us around and indulge my YouTube aspirations. And, of course to Ryo, who organised the transport, led me there and translated. Writing this article gave me the motivation to complete the video project. You can join me on a virtual tour of Yamasho here 〉 youtu.be/D44d9AS_Ltk

Oran Kivity trained in Europe, China, and Japan. He has been in continuous practice since 1987, specialising in Japanese acupuncture and moxibustion methods and teaching internationally. He has written four books about Ontake Warm Bamboo, a new moxibustion tool from Japan. Oran now practises, writes, coaches and teaches from the southern port town of Kaohsiung in Taiwan, where he lives happily by a river, near a lake and close to the sea.