We bought our house second-hand, and the discolored fusuma (Japanese paper sliding doors) had been bothering me since we moved in.
I finally got around to re-papering them — or rather, overlay-papering: gluing fresh fusuma paper directly over the old, yellowed paper.
The result wasn’t perfect — I ended up with some wrinkles on the larger panels — but the room is so much brighter now that I’m calling it a win.
It was my first time, and there are spots where it shows — but I’ve left those bits in too, in case it’s useful for anyone else who’s thinking of trying this themselves.
Cultural note: what is fusuma?
For readers outside Japan: fusuma are opaque sliding panel doors used between Japanese-style rooms. The face is usually a thick, opaque paper stretched over a wooden lattice frame — visually similar to shoji, but solid (no light passes through). Like wallpaper, the paper yellows and stains over time. Replacing it is a routine bit of household maintenance.
The yellowed fusuma
Here are the panels — presumably white when new, but very much not white now.
Rather than peel the old paper off and start fresh, I’m using the kind of fusuma paper that’s designed to go directly over the existing paper — sold at home centers in Japan.
The overlay paper I used
Lintec “Za Fusuma-gami.”
This is the stamp-style version — the back has dry glue that you reactivate with water, just like a postage stamp. There’s also a peel-and-stick (double-sided tape) version. ~1,000 yen for two sheets.
Applying the overlay paper
Removing the finger pulls
First, remove the hikite (finger pulls) recessed into each panel.
The pulls are held in by small brad nails. The internet’s advice was: lift the pull a bit and rock it side to side, and the nails should walk themselves out. But these pulls are plastic — rocking them did nothing, and pushing harder just deformed the plastic.
OK, no chance of reusing these pulls. I yanked them out with pliers.
I pulled the leftover brad nails with the tool in the photo.
It’s a little fusuma-puller I’d bought at a home center for ~200 yen, picturing myself swapping pulls in a slick, professional way. In reality you can do this with regular pliers — but I wanted to give the niche tool a chance to earn its keep, so I used it here.
Brad nails out.
Masking the black frame
Next, mask the black wooden frame around the panel with painter’s tape. This keeps the new fusuma paper from sticking to the frame.
Applying the overlay paper
I laid the panel on the new paper, then rough-cut it to the panel’s outline plus a few centimeters of margin all around.
The back has stamp-style dry glue that gets reactivated with water. I used a kitchen sponge to wet the back evenly.
Lay the wet-back paper flat on the floor, glue side up, then tip the panel face-down onto it.
When I flipped the panel right-side-up, the paper was already buckling.
So I peeled the paper back up and re-laid it section by section, smoothing it down with a towel as I went to push the wrinkles out toward the edges. (…or so the plan went. In practice, I couldn’t get rid of every wrinkle. On the smaller panel the wrinkles relaxed and largely disappeared as the glue dried, but on the bigger panel they didn’t.)
Onward. Next is the trim cut: run a putty knife along the inside of the frame to crease the paper, then slice the excess off along the crease with a utility knife.
Excess paper trimmed. The smaller of the two panels actually came out pretty well, I’d say.
On to the bigger panel. Same process — overlay the paper, smooth out wrinkles with a towel.
The bigger panel was much harder to recover — more surface area, and any imperfection has further to travel before it reaches the edge. I held out faint hope that the wrinkles would tighten up as the glue dried, but as you can see in the next photo, they stayed.
Overlay-papering done.
Now to fit new finger pulls.
Fitting new finger pulls
I’m replacing the pulls with new ones.
The mortise opening measured 48 mm across, so I went to the home center and looked for a finger pull to match.
Pulls were 327 yen each, brad nails 162 yen for a packet.
Test-fitting, the new pull was a hair too big to slip in. I trimmed the wood inside the mortise a bit with a utility knife.
A few light taps with a hammer and the pull seated.
Pin the pull in place with brad nails.
I had a random metal rod in my shed I used as a punch to drive the brads home with a hammer. (There’s actually a purpose-made fusuma punch sold at home centers for ~300 yen if you want the proper tool.)
Done!
Done!
The room feels noticeably brighter.
I went with the water-activated glue type this time, but they also make a peel-and-stick (double-sided tape) version. The double-sided version might wrinkle less, since it doesn’t introduce moisture and the paper doesn’t expand when you apply it.
I say this because I recently patched a section of toilet wallpaper using a peel-and-stick wallpaper, and it was very easy to work with even as a first-timer. That said, the patch was a small area, so part of the “easy” might just have been the smaller scale.
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