How to (Not) Ruin Your Kid's Calligraphy Brush

    The other day I took over washing my kid's school-issued calligraphy brushes just to be nice. I had seen my husband get very particular about the fact that the brushes must be washed the day they come home to ensure that the ink doesn't cause any problems. I have experience with paint brushes of course, but I know these are different and more expensive. 

    Cleaning a large brush was much like cleaning any other kind of paint brush though it is recommended that you have treated a little bit more carefully than you would in average 100 yen store paintbrush. The websites I have seen since recommend running cold water directly over the inky portion of the brush while slowly moving it across the palm of your hand, which is basically what I had done. That one wasn't so hard to do and came through all right. Hang with the brush side down but not touching anything to dry.

Big inky jerk, but not actually hard to clean. Better i 

    Then I saw a smaller brush. The tip of this one was also ink coated and clearly needing a wash. I assumed that when my husband said the brushes needed to be washed, he must have meant it in the plural and this was the only other one with ink on it.

    I honestly don't know these brushes well enough to know what I'm supposed to do, but I took the little brush to task, scrubbing it until all of the ink and some filmy gunk were completely off of the hairs. I thought I'd done a great job until my daughter saw it and freaked out.

    Apparently the little brush with super long hairs in the very middle is not meant to be cleaned at all. It is meant to maintain its small glue-coated shape forever. Only after I had scrapped all of that glue off of the strangely pointed brush did I realize that that glue had some sort of importance.

    I asked my kid to ask her teacher what we should do and where we could order a new one, which she forgot to do. My husband was off-put by the realization that the brush in question was beyond fixing, and after a short family discussion regarding who is meant to wash the brushes in the first place (the kid who knows which ones need to be washed), he then went about finding a new brush online.

    I tried this myself a few times and found it overly daunting. Most of this is because I wasn't even sure what to call that specific brush. When it came down to it, I didn't even have a name of the subject correct. I thought this was calligraphy, (書道, shodō), a reasonable assumption given the brushes. Really, this is a related but different subject (習字 shūji) and it's more focused on penmanship and writing tiny letters than it is the overall artistic expression of the characters on paper. Needless to say, I could not find the brush we were looking for.

     Replacing the brush I ruined wasn't actually that expensive, but it did take some leg work because the brush sets that my daughter's school uses are specifically made just for that school. It is easier I suppose if your kids go to a school that uses brushes that are available at your local stationary or DIY shop.

    If you're a parent like me in Japan, watching your kid learn stuff that you still don't really know about, make sure to ask questions and make sure that the kid actually does their work as it is very easy to mess up something that isn't always obvious or easy to fix.