“Purity” is the word that comes to mind when thinking about the shape of a broom, a folk tool.

The university I attended once had a department for learning Shinto, and there was a small shrine on campus for the purpose of training students.
On campus, I often came across students dressed in white practicing at the shrine, sweeping the area clean with bamboo brooms.
When visiting a Shinto shrine, we sometimes use the phrase “exorcise me, purify me”. In Shinto, sweeping and cleaning, equal to maintaining cleanliness, is considered an important practice to bring us closer to god.

Unlike the monotheistic religions of the other parts of the world, Shintoism, which arose spontaneously in the Japanese archipelago, has always existed as an extension of people’s lives.
In other words, the sacred and the secular have coexisted like twins in these islands, and if we look at the details of each Shinto ritual, we can see the folk customs of the past.
The fact that “maintaining cleanliness” is one of the tenets of Shinto is testament to how deeply rooted the practice of sweeping has been in our lives in the hot and humid chain of islands since ancient times.

When they first appeared, brooms must have been simple bundles of plants. It is perhaps quite likely that they were almost disposable, as long as they were functional.
However, as time went on, handcrafts usually become more and more intricate in their detail.
Brooms, too, were woven to be durable and, through the ingenuity and aesthetic sense of the maker, came to hold what is considered “beauty of utility”.
In addition, the brooms were made from a wide range of materials, such as broom corn, Migo (rice stalks), palm, and Japanese pampas grass, depending on which region they were made in, and the sense of form has been refined with diversity and regional characteristics.

Now, although the broom has gained an essential position as a daily necessities over a long history, in modern times, many people might not use – or do not have – a broom.
It is true that using an electric cleaner saves time and energy and is a more rational way of doing housework. Yet, for small areas such as table tops and computer areas, there is always the active option of using a small broom to sweep.
Folk tools for achieving “cleanliness” have long been at the heart of Japanese people’s everyday lives. I would like us to take a moment to look at the beauty and simplicity of the forms of these tools.