The Bag People Wanted Was the One Carrying Her Work
When her husband’s farming family sent her rice, Masako Kubo flattened the empty sacks and sent them back. Three layers of kraft paper had carried 30 kilograms of rice—about 66 pounds. Surely the sacks would be used again.
“We always throw them away,” a family member told her in Tosa dialect.
“What? What a waste.”
Kubo, who also works under the name Ringo Jōsan, had another job in mind for the paper.
At the time, she was making handmade dress-up dolls and small objects and taking them to craft markets. She needed a bag that was light and roomy but strong enough to carry a substantial load. An empty rice sack was close at hand. The first bag took shape beside the sewing machine in her home, not as a planned product but as a tool for her own work.
The carrier becomes the work
Sewing had long been part of Ringo Jōsan’s life at home. As a child, she watched her mother make clothes for the family. When she later became a mother, she sewed for her own children. The rice sack offered another available material and a different construction problem.
At craft markets, that carrier began competing for attention with what it held. Visitors noticed the paper bag she used to carry the dolls. “That’s nice,” some would say. Then came the practical question: “Can I buy this bag?”
During the period when she began making and showing the rice-bag tote in Kochi Prefecture, she mainly worked under the name Masako Kubo. She used Ringo Jōsan for her dolls and other work, and it remains the name of her broader making practice. The tote acquired its own name after a friend told her, “Your mother must be happy too.” The word ofukuro can refer to one’s mother; that overlap connected “Ofukuro-san” with her late mother.
In 2014, the full Japanese name 「米袋バッグ・お袋さん」—the Rice-Bag Tote Ofukuro-san—was registered as a trademark, no. 5663911. Yet protecting the name did not mean keeping the method secret. Ringo Jōsan funded the production of a color instruction booklet with photographs so people who had rice sacks could try making their own bags.
The boundary she describes is specific. Attribution matters, and so does safe construction: a poorly attached handle or torn seam can fail when the bag is heavily loaded. She draws a line at commercial use and does not want imitation goods or for-profit sales made under the Ofukuro-san name. She protects the name while sharing the method with people who want to try making a bag from a rice sack of their own.
A strong material, with limits
The original printing is never treated as something to cover. Red 「土佐米」 characters, a rice shop’s name, a handshake mark, or a large animal may land on the front or run into a handle. Creases and abrasions remain part of the composition. The bag starts with the sack’s former working life plainly visible.
Three-layer kraft paper is designed to resist tearing and abrasion while bearing weight in transit. Ringo Jōsan once conducted an informal load test using six 2-liter plastic bottles, 12 kilograms (about 26 pounds) in all. It was an experiment, not a certification or maximum load rating.
For bags made for sale, she uses a home sewing machine and thick topstitching thread of a type also used for denim. A gusset gives the base depth. Woodworking glue joins parts of the paper, while kraft band forms the handles; folded paper can add reinforcement. Because every pass of a needle leaves permanent holes, seam placement and the way weight spreads through the bag must be considered before sewing begins.
A second construction method began with a request from her son, then in elementary school: “I want to try making one too.” The accessible version requires no sewing machine. The base is folded and joined with woodworking glue, then reinforced from inside with another sheet of kraft paper. At the opening, all three layers are glued together. Pieces cut from discarded clear plastic document folders sit beneath the handles as reinforcement; the handles are stapled in place, the staple legs are flattened with a hammer, and the opening is folded inward so the metal is enclosed by paper.
That method made the bag easier to teach in workshops, including sessions at schools and facilities serving older adults. Care is similarly practical: dirt can be wiped away, with a damp cloth or an eraser used when needed.
Used sacks—and sacks never used
No two collected sacks arrive with the same history. Their shop stamps, worn printing, creases, and softened areas differ, as does the placement of a graphic once the paper is cut. Ringo Jōsan does not try to make them visually uniform. Komeya, a rice shop in Kochi, gave her permission to remake its used 「土佐米」 sacks, allowing the original shop print to remain present in the next object.
Her material supply later widened beyond emptied rice sacks. Misprinted new sacks and surplus-printed but unused sacks joined fertilizer, feed, barley, and lime sacks. She calls this mixed group “loss sacks.” The term matters because not every sack in it has been used; what they share is that they are no longer destined to serve as packaging. Horses, cows, pigs, and industrial lettering then become the bag’s pattern rather than packaging to be disguised.
A surface that changes—and a bag that returns to use
Some Ofukuro-san works are coated with kakishibu, a natural finish made by fermenting persimmons and historically used in Japan on paper, wood, and tools. Ringo Jōsan brushes three coats over the rice-sack surface. As the coating is absorbed, the paper becomes tauter; in her account, it can also contribute to water repellence and resistance to rot and mold. These are material effects she works with, not product guarantees.
Fresh kakishibu is reddish brown. Sunlight and handling gradually deepen it, and a long-used surface can become dark brown with a leather-like sheen. The surface records continued contact with the bag.
Ringo Jōsan also makes pieces she describes as ikkanbari-inspired. Traditional ikkanbari layers washi over a woven bamboo base and finishes it with kakishibu. Her process does not reproduce that method exactly. Instead, it borrows layering, pasting, and coating, combining rice sacks with coarse-salt sacks, Hokkaido starch sacks, and paper sacks for imported flour, sometimes pasting one area and machine-sewing another.
One long-used Ofukuro-san gave that approach a particular purpose. Its owner had carried it while raising a child, then kept it for the memories attached to it after it became too damaged to use. Ringo Jōsan layered paper over the weakened areas and applied kakishibu, returning the bag to use. The piece became Sodateru Bag—a title that suggests something developed through use and care. In 2019, the work—credited to Ringo Jōsan—received the Heiwa Shigyo Award at the 29th Kamiwaza Taishō, a Japanese competition for works of paper art.
The original sack can also meet another maker’s hand without disappearing. In Kochi-based visual artist Kayoko Takahashi’s KOME TOTE series, cats, dogs, chickens, rice balls, bread, and other motifs are painted individually onto Ofukuro-san bags. The original packaging print remains visible—even inside the bag—and each combination is different.
A method meant to travel
The work predates Japan’s 2020 introduction of charges for single-use plastic shopping bags. It received an excellence award in a Kochi Prefecture competition in 2013; the trademark followed in 2014; and around 2016 Ringo Jōsan produced How to Make a Rice-Bag Tote. Media coverage, including ITmedia Nlab, later brought it to a wider audience. Workshops gave people a way to try it themselves.
Her phrase for the work is “Making things to be used and loved.” Carrying purchases and vegetables is one part of that; repairing damaged areas is another. Teaching the no-sew version extends the invitation to people without specialized sewing skills.
The answer is deliberately shareable. Anyone with a rice sack can try the method, though she does not want it used for imitation goods or for-profit sales under the Ofukuro-san name. Ringo Jōsan has another phrase for that balance: “Choose to enjoy the trouble.” The folding, hammering, gluing, sewing, and mending are part of the effort she invites others to enjoy.
Taiwan: when flour sacks became clothing
There is a distinct earlier history across the water. During the period of US aid to Taiwan, from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, large quantities of wheat arrived in cotton flour sacks. Some were printed with 「中美合作」 (Sino-American Cooperation), a handshake, flags, and wording such as 「淨重二十二公斤」—net weight: 22 kilograms (about 49 pounds).
When cloth was scarce, households washed the sacks, opened them, and cut the cotton into shorts, underwear, everyday clothes, and children’s garments. The resulting clothing was later jokingly nicknamed 「中美牌大內褲」—approximately, “Sino-American brand big underpants.” Many makers’ names were never recorded, but their cutting and print-placement choices remain visible in the surviving garments.
One pair of flour-sack shorts held by the National Museum of Taiwan History was assembled from four pieces cut from two sacks. Printed text and the handshake image were placed at the front; relatively plain white cloth was used at the back. In another children’s one-piece design, a roughly trapezoidal panel ran from chest to legs, while the back and seat remained open and ties allowed the fit to be adjusted.
These drawstring shorts were cut and sewn from two flour sacks in a four-panel construction. The waistband was folded inward and machine-stitched to form a hollow casing, then threaded with a cord for tying. The front is covered with the original sack printing: 「中美合作」 (“Sino-American Cooperation”); the manufacturer markings 「國豐麵粉股份有限公司公司製」 and 「嘉和麵粉廠股份有限公司公司製」; wording for the standard 22-kilogram size; and a double-coin trademark. The lettering and graphics appear on the front panels, while the back is plain white, creating a clear visual contrast. Text and image: National Museum of Taiwan History. Image made available under CC0.
The two practices arose independently, under different conditions: scarce cloth in postwar Taiwan, discarded paper packaging in Ringo Jōsan’s case. What makes them worth considering together is the judgment involved. A printed sack does not become clothing or a tote merely because someone keeps it. Someone has to decide where to cut, what to reinforce, and where the old lettering will land.
Carrying, again
Heavy-duty kraft-paper sacks have their own long transport history in Japan. Industrial paper sacks were introduced from the United States in 1923; among their early applications was transport for Chichibu Cement. They later spread as packaging for bulk goods. Polyethylene and other synthetic-resin packaging became widespread from the 1970s, but paper rice sacks remained in use in some rice shops and agricultural distribution.
The industrial lettering stays. So do the creases. Kakishibu darkens as the bag is handled; a worn patch can be covered and strengthened. The sack Kubo once flattened to send back has become something its next owner may want to keep—and, when it wears out, bring back for repair.
See the Ofukuro-san collection