Not fancy nor dressy, nor made for special occasions but with a certain something that calls on you to use it every day.The passage of time and loving use bring forth comments on how much character it has gained.
Our bags are made by craftsmen using specially woven high-quality canvas. We still continue to produce quality bags at our Kyoto Higashiyama workshop based on our philosophy of "To go to any expense". This philosophy has remained unchanged for over 100 years.
Our best effort goes into even bags that have been used for many years as we would like our customers to be able to enjoy their bags for as long as possible. When repairs are necessary, we do so without destroying the unique "feel" of the bags so that they can be returned without harm to the very personal sense of attachment and memories that each carry with them.
Our workshop motto is “Make in Kyoto, Sell in Kyoto”. As such, we take pride in making and directly providing bags to our customers so that the essence of the craftspeople can be tangibly felt. We listen closely to all kinds of requests from our customers and adapt their wishes into our bags. This spirit of making items that embody customers' wishes has not changed since our company’s founding.
We have three lines of products with each having a different brand name label. The Chinese characters for both “Shinzaburo Hanpu” and “Shinzaburo Kaban” were written and chosen by the current owner, Shinzaburo Ichizawa, himself. The characters were written hundreds of times and after great deliberation, the two were chosen. The third is the original dating back to a hundred years ago and is used for the original products.
Shinzaburo Hanpu
This label is for our plain, unprinted cotton bags which make up the majority of our sales.
Shinzaburo Kaban
This label is used for our linen products as well as some cotton canvas products which have been printed with our original patterns.
Ichizawa Hanpu
This label is used for the original products of Ichizawa Hanpu which are specially made bags for craftspeople and workers.
When Ichizawa Shinzaburo Hanpu opened its doors, there was no Japanese character for “cloth bag”. The only one was 鞄, which was made from combining the two characters for 革 (leather) and 包(wrapping). Since our bags were made from cloth, not leather, we did not feel that this character was a true representation of our products. Further research, however, led to the discovery that the character for “鞄” was invented by a leather bag shop in Tokyo in the Meiji period (1868-1912). We therefore decided to take poetic license and created 布包 by combining the characters 布(cloth) with 包 (wrapping). We sincerely hope that our character for kaban will find a place within the pages of the Japanese dictionary perhaps a hundred years from now.