2012 Volume 51 Issue 6 Pages 630-633
Toppan Forms Co., Ltd, an information management company, has tackled the development of application for digital printing. Finally, we started a new business to reproduce Japanese traditional picture scroll by digital printing press.
Picture scrolls comparable to national treasures or important cultural assets are kept under lock and key in museums, shrines or temples. We rarely appreciate them without special displays, nor enjoy opening and rolling them up by ourselves though it is an original way of a fan.
Nowadays there are conventional copies which versions are black and white, micro copied, brochure, or high-class luxury. We precisely re-created original ones by means of merging the newest digital technologies and Japanese traditional manufacturing techniques and are able to offer our high quality copies at a more reasonable price.
Akiyama Mitsukazu, a professor emeritus at University of Tokyo and foremost authority on researching picture scroll, cooperated with us as a supervisor. He directed re-creating color and bind. He also introduced us to commentary authors and the owners of original scrolls.
We use Bagasse in our copies to re-create Japanese paper texture. It might be easy to print only continually on roll paper even if it were 10 meters or 20 meters in length without replenishing, but we need to correct and equalize the color tone of each film we borrow from owners before we convert them into digital data. We also developed software with SANYO Electric Co., Ltd, which corrects color, distortion between right and left and bridge of each films.
