Rice paste, Japanese

In the past when I have had a textile too fragile to withstand a needle, I have pasted a very light silk lining to it, using Japanese rice paste, which is harmless and easily reversible. This method had the advantage of preserving a piece which was otherwise hopeless, but it... 

Today, instead of the Japanese rice past method, I am using the vacuum hot table (2) with a heat-activated adhesive, which is also harmless and reversible. I am stressing here the use of the vacuum hot table in the treatment of textiles as it is a fairly recent technique for us. The vacuum hot table was designed for painting conservators and used by them in re-lining old paintings. The first published account I know of in the use of this table for textiles is by Sheila Landi (3) of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Another reference is by Kathryn Scott... 

Tears are repaired with Japanese tissue, missing areas are filled in with paper similar to the artifact. Repair paper of specific caliper and tone is made in the leaf caster. Adhesives vary methyl cellulose, wheat paste, or a mixture of polyvinyl alcohol with rice paste. The mixture is most useful because it permits use of a warm tacking iron to hasten the drying process. Where missing areas have been patched, the restorer reconstructs only those lines and colors that are already discernable, lest the work be called an attempt at falsification. 

The Chinese counterpart for the word koji is qu, meaning bloom of mold. Made by growing molds on rice, barley, wheat, soybeans, or a combination, koji contains a great variety of enzymes that digest the starch, protein, and lipid components in raw materials. It is an intermediate product for making various fermented products such as fermented soy paste, soy sauce, soy nu ets, and Japanese sake. 

The filamentous fungtts Aspergillus oryzae has been exterrsively used for traditional Japanese fermerrtation products, such as sake (rice wine), shoyou (soy sauce), and miso (soybean paste), for more than 1000 years [88]. This fungus could grow under culture... 

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR), which is a nondestructive analytical technique, has been employed for the simultaneous prediction of the concentrations of several substrates, products, and constituents in the mixture sampled from fermentation process. In this chapter, applications of NIR to monitoring of the various fermentation processes are introduced. The fermentation processes mentioned here are wine, beer, Japanese sake, miso (soybean paste), soy sauce, rice vinegar, alcohol, lactic acid, glutamic acid, mushroom, enzymatic saccharification, biosurfactant, penicillin, and compost. The analysis of molasses, which is a raw material of fermentation, with NIR is also introduced. These studies indicate that NIR is a useful method for monitoring and control of fermentation process. 

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