Everyone knows that the Japanese use hemp rope, right?

Unfortunately, everybody is wrong. It’s become increasingly clear over the last few years that most of the real Japanese experts (“Nawashi”) actually use jute rope.

So why the big thing about hemp?

I think this is because the hemp rope industry was very big in the Western world until quite recent times, and “hemp” became the general name for all sorts of natural fibres. These days “hemp” has become a very fuzzy word - it can mean rope made from any of several varieties of the cannabis plant (but not the bits that produce THC, the active component of marijuana, so you can forget all about that...), or just about any natural fibre rope including jute and flax, or even modern synthetic fibres like MFP (multi-filament polypropylene) that makes synthetic “hemp” ropes with names like Hempex and Promilla. When you find something described as “hemp rope” you may find it’s really made of almost anything!

Where does flax come into the story? It’s not, as far as we know, a traditional rope-making fibre in Japan, but it has been well-known for a long time to a few people in the West as an excellent substitute. The secret’s been out for two or three years now but there are very few suppliers of flax rope.