Japanese brooms

Are you familiar with Japanese brooms?

I think they are utterly marvellous.

We have two. The first I got from Japan (via either UK eBay or UK Amazon, I forget which). It was described enchantingly as a brush for passages and porches, called a hoki. Elsewhere I've seen them called a shuro.

Then we got a second one — to have either one in Komorebi and one in the main house, or one upstairs and one downstairs.

You can choose whether to pay a huge sum of money for a broom sourced from a Japanese family of artisan brush-makers — and, oh my goodness, do the Japanese not elevate this into an art form sublime! Or, if your purse is lean and moth-eaten, you can source such a broom from eBay at a very modest price indeed — usually from China. Search on "Japanese broom".

The handles of ours are made from bamboo, the bristles from some kind of plant. Softer and more pliable than straw brooms, and having the natural slim fan shape, they go behind radiators, under cupboards, alongside the kitchen machines, and get all the dust from corners and skirting boards. They are great for the bathroom — sweeping behind the wash basin and the toilet. The bristles are fine enough and the handle short enough also to use as a dusting broom.

Unless you have fitted carpet everywhere (in which case obviously a vacuum cleaner is your friend), a hoki/shuro broom would be — in my opinion — the only duster/brush you ever needed to keep your house clean. And not a plastic handle or nylon bristle in sight (the eBay listings for the Chinese ones say the bristles are nylon but they are not; look closely at the photos to check before buying), even the thread to stitch the bristles is compostable bio-degradable string, not something that will choke wild beasts for three million years.