Kitayama Masatsumu Tawashi Brush

The Kitayama Masatsumu Tawashi Brush is a palm fiber kitchen scrubbing brush built to handle the cleaning tasks a sponge struggles with — stuck-on food, baked-on grease, and stubborn residue on pots and pans. Palm fiber (shuro) is soft enough that it won't scratch fluorine-coated, ceramic, or seasoned iron surfaces, yet dense and resilient enough to scrub effectively. It works equally well on stainless steel and cast iron.

The brush head is angled diagonally, which lets it reach the flat interior of a pan or the curved wall of a pot without awkward positioning. A hole through the natural wood handle allows it to hang from a hook or air dry on a string between uses — palm fiber sheds water quickly and doesn't hold odor the way synthetic sponges do. The frame enclosing the palm head is 1.6mm thick stainless steel, chosen for durability and corrosion resistance under daily kitchen use.

Tawashi — the Japanese palm fiber scrubber — has existed in Japanese kitchens for roughly 100 years. As manufacturing industrialized, handmade tawashi became increasingly rare.

Kitayama Masatsumu was founded in 1969 in Kinokawa City, Wakayama Prefecture, by Masazumi Kitayama, who has spent over 50 years making tawashi by hand. Each brush is made individually — fibers are sorted by feel, wound and densified by hand, and assessed for shape and density throughout the process. These are steps that cannot be replicated by machine. This brush was developed in collaboration with Kyoto Katsugu, the kitchen tools development team of Okmura Co., a Kyoto-based kitchen supplier with over 300 years in the trade.

• Brand: Kitayama Masatsumu
• Brush material: Palm (shuro) fiber
• Handle material: Natural wood
• Frame material: Stainless steel
• Dimensions: 190 × 70 × 30 mm (about 7.5 × 2.75 × 1.2 in)
• Made in Japan