Use of newspaper in Japanese shells casings

As I am very interested in Japanese fireworks, here is another post about them.

Have you noticed that most of the original Japanese fireworks ball shells casings (hemispheres) are made of newspaper?

The reason is simple: although it may be also a way of recycling newspaper, it has an important effect on the explosion "perfection" due to the fact that newspaper has a moderate tensile strength and it split more uniformly during the explosion than the most used strawboard (chinese shells) and plastic (spanish, portuguese shells) casings.

Here is an example of a shell made of newspaper hemispheres:

Now imagine the lot of work that is needed to paste every piece of newspaper in so many layers to make these casings! Usually they are pasted on top of a wooden ball and then cut at the half.

That's it, there are many characteristics of Japanese fireworks that contribute to its perfection and for sure the newspaper casings are one of them.

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