Short Stuff: Papasan Chairs

Oh, the papasan. What a chair! But where did it come from? And what does the name mean? The answers lie within.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey there, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh,
there's Chuck, there's Jerry Man. I wish I hadn't said
it's eating up time, Chuck. This is short stuff. Oh god,
Area said that too. This is already off the rails.
Let's just start over like five years from now. Are
you going to be doing this? Yes, it's the short
stuff thing, all right. I just want to know what

(00:24):
I'm in for. Yep, buckle up, Chuck. So I heard
you talking to Jerry as I sauntered in, Yeah, saying
that you've never had a papasan or a futon. No,
neither one. Same here. Good for us, Chuck. That's really
like sticking it to the man, you know. Yeah, No,
we're anti pappa foot. We're saying tech with you, society

(00:47):
and popular culture. We're going to go our own way
and use a normal mattress and box spring combination or
a regular chair. Yeah that doesn't think it's a cereal
bowl for sex. Is that what they're for? I don't know,
but we should shout out the great, great website at
Las Obsecura. Uh. We both love that website and have

(01:10):
for years. And this is a you know, when you're
doing papas on research, look to one person and that's
John Kelly. That was obscura because he really dug into it. Dude,
he is the only person who did too. And if
you find any other article on the web, including this
how stuff works one, it's like, here's what John Kelly found. Like,
this guy did all of the legwork in the research,

(01:31):
and he really did dig in. But the beautiful part
of the whole thing is that he failed to fully
solve the mystery. It's still a mystery, which it probably
will be forever. Yeah, so there are a lot of
mysteries about the papasan. Uh. You can start by going
to papasan dot com, which will redirect to peer one imports,
which is pretty great. That is a little fishy and cool,

(01:53):
but there are a lot of like like you can't
get anything clear as to like the origin of the
name or even of the chair originally came from or
when people started selling it. Yeah, it's weird, but there
are so John Kelly did turn up some tantalizing clues.
He wasn't able to triangulate on a particular year and

(02:13):
even necessarily a particular country. But there's some there's a
lot of strong evidence that they emerged in the sixties,
probably in the Philippines. That's where I'm putting my money.
That's where the popasan chair came from. Sixties Philippines. Yeah,
and that would make sense because by nineteen sixty six
was when we finally got the name pier One as

(02:36):
a store which had been I guess what it was
previously cost Plus, Yeah, which I guess split off and
the cost Plus when I become World Market, which everybody
knows well. Cost plus World Market is still on the sign,
which I think is interesting. Yeah. But weirdly, Peer one
was cost Plus originally, and I think it was after
they divided. And then, if you really want to get
the mind boggling, it was the guys who started Radio

(02:59):
Show who originally funded the guy who founded pier One. Yes,
and the people who were Radio Check were originally the
Tandy Corporation, which I remember that name. I think. Oh,
I had a Tandy robot arm that moved left and right.
You still do. It's attached to your body, that's right.
It's a new appendage on Stellar. But Stellarc God, I

(03:21):
love just hearing that name. But nineteen sixty six Peer one.
What they're doing is they found a good market in
importing Asian goods very cheaply and then marking them up
for a profit. But here's the deal. Even marked up
in the United States, they were it was still like
cheaper than other stuff that you would get here from
America or Europe, so people bought the stuff. So Pier

(03:46):
One is basically like the the place everybody says, no,
this is where America became enamored with papasan chairs. So
people go to Pier One and say where do papasan
chairs come from? And pier One says, we don't know,
but we can tell you exactly when we started selling them.
It was the mid seventies. And you say, okay, great,

(04:06):
So papasan chairs hit the U s and the mid seventies.
But then if you talk to somebody else to Pure One,
they might tell you that no, actually pure One sold
them until the sixties. They just didn't blow up until
the seventies. So that remains a tantalizing mystery as well. Yes,
and what we do think we know is that the
reason they blew up in the United States was because

(04:27):
of the Vietnam War and Apparently Here's what happened. As
the story goes, American g I s would go to Vietnam.
They would go and serve in you know, the countries
that surround Vietnam, and they would this is where it
gets a little dodgy, perhaps visit red light districts in
these areas, perhaps as you know, single soldiers with some

(04:49):
spare change. I guess sure, and they would, uh, this
is where they would find the papasan chair. Is that
these brothels and papason this is where they think the
name comes from. Because it doesn't really make sense that
the chair would be called the papasan chair if it
comes from the Philippines, because that that's a nonsensical word

(05:09):
in the Philippines. It's actually Japanese meaning like father or
esteemed older man. Or if you're an American g I
in the Vietnam War, papasan meant pimp and mamison meant madam.
There you have it, So it's possible. According to John
Kelly's research, this is a theory. It's a pretty pretty

(05:29):
good one that American g I s started calling these
chairs papasan chairs rather than just calling them straight up
pimp chairs because that's who they'd seen lounging around in
them in brothels. That's right. Uh, I think this part
is fairly interesting. Uh. In nineteen seventy seven there was
and I guess in the surrounding years, but this is
when this issue came out. But there was, I guess

(05:51):
a magazine called MAC Flyer m a C Capital m
AC Flyer, and it was issued by the Military Airlift
Command Safety Office US, and there was a character, Major
cr Terror, who was a pilot, fictional pilot obviously, and
it was all about his crew and their antics and
stuff like that. And there was one issue in seventy

(06:13):
seven that said this, uh, and this is this is
the guy's like, doesn't know where to get his wife
for Christmas. That's the setup. So he gets her everything
and he says this, she's got that wombat skin coat.
I brought her back from Athens, the Honda Goldwing from Tokyo,
candlesticks from Bangkok, a giant brass table from Iran, two
camel saddles from Turkey, a pair of elephants from Saigon,

(06:35):
and a Papasan chair from Clark, which was Clark Air
Base in the Philippines in the Philippines, right, So at
least by the seventies in the military, and in joke
that you would assume any military guy would know, is
that that you would associate papasan chairs with the Philippines.
So that's pretty strong evidence for John Kelly's idea, right,

(06:56):
And the joke replied back in the comic was sounds
like her artman is decorated in contemporary military Should we
take a break after that burner of a joke? Yes,
all right, we'll be right back with more on the
papasan Okay, Chuck. So here's where it's possible that Pier

(07:38):
One already had popasan chairs, just no one was really
paying attention to him. Um. It was probably soldiers, American
soldiers returning from Vietnam who had seen these chairs in
brothels in the in Southeast Asia and we're like, holy cow,
there's a pimp chair right there and they're selling them.
I totally got to get one of those. Or people

(08:00):
went over to military people's houses saw them in their
houses and then also saw them at pure one and
thought these are really cool. One way or another, they
just hit just the right nerve and definitely. By the
mid seventies they were all the rage in the United
States as far as home decor is concerned. Yeah, and

(08:21):
it's occurring to me. We haven't even described one because
I just assumed papaisans were so ubiquitous. If you grew
up in the sixties, seventies or eighties, even hanging out
in the nineties, probably that you know what one is.
But you might hear it called a retan chair or
perhaps a bamboo or like a moon chair. And there

(08:41):
were different models over the year, somewhere smaller and had
four legs and like a smaller cushion the one. When
I think of a papasan, I think of the almost
comically large round saucer that is not attached to the
round base. It just you can angle it and move
it around. You can make it completely flat like a

(09:03):
bowl of cereal, or you can tilt it up if
you want to look like uh was Isaac Hayes. Yes,
although those chairs are different, and those are awesome too. Yeah,
it's like a retan woven king chair throne from like
prom pictures in Yeah, but that's what the papasan is.
And the big fish bowl one that I associate with

(09:25):
that word had a very very large cushion. A lot
of times it was uh I had like flowers on
it or palm trees or something like that. I just
reminded myself of a p. F. Tompkins bit where he
talks about how he used to work in a hat
store and they had all sorts of hats and people
would come in. They'd be like, let me try on
one of them king hats, and he would say, what's

(09:47):
the matter with you? Like, you and I both know
that that's called a crown a king hat. Why did
you just call it king hat? He does it way
better than me, but it kills, and I just called
it a king chair chair and then you corrected me rightly.
It's a throne, is what I meant. Oh, Paula Tompkins
the best, the best. So that's what I associate with
the Papason, Although, like I said, there have been other models,

(10:09):
and over the years they've evolved into like instead of bamboo,
it would be like woven string and stuff like that
as the support base. Yeah, or metal. They're like a
lot of people have said like no, no, no, you
don't have to associate it with hippies, because they were
definitely associated with hippies and um artsy chic and and
definitely kind of like that whole like, um, I don't

(10:32):
know what you call it, but the same people that
had beads in their doorway probably exactly. And you could
buy that at Pier one two. Right. But now people
are saying, well, wait a minute, if you get rid
of the base, when you replace the base with something
like with kind of thin tapered stick legs, like, it
makes it suddenly mid century modern. You know. So people
have rethought it and it's kind of made comebacks here there.
But if you ask me that popas on chair that

(10:54):
you you described, where you could move the bowl and
be the cereal yourself, um, that is that's the all
time great one. But you just have to have the
right room for it because it totally ruins everything else
in the room. If you have a theme going that's
not popasan themed, Yes, and be prepared to drink plenty
of my ties. Nothing wrong with that. And John Kelly

(11:17):
also found a bunch of people in here that he
dug up through social media and stuff that had stories.
It was kind of cool. This one lady from Malaysia
said in her native Malacca, it was a very big
thing in the seventies to shoot, uh, studio portraits of
your kids and the smaller versions of these, Yeah, which
is when they think they started introducing cushions, which means

(11:40):
people were sitting around to these things without cushions. Just
the ratan part. It sounds pretty awful, Yeah, but that's
the Yeah. So they think that by the seventies for
sure these things were commonplace in the Philippines and that
they got picked up by then. And I assume so
you can still buy these brand new, right, I mean,
I know you can get them used online virtually any

(12:01):
day of the year. Yeah, that's another You can find
trampolines and papasan chairs and the classifiedes all the time. Um.
But yeah, I think pure one like if you type
in papasan chair dot com, it takes you to peer
one papas on page and they have them. I looked,
and they're cheaper than you think. They're like fifty five
bucks I think for the highest end one. Uh no,
I'm seeing some look here, this one's one eight right, okay,

(12:24):
I mean like the just the traditional good kind that
you and I were talking about, like the wicker retan version. Yeah,
the cool kind of like the hanging basket ones as well,
those are very cool. Just make sure you hang it
on a sturdy buttress, everybody for sure. Well, since Chuck
said sturdy buttress and we don't do listener mail, then

(12:44):
that means that we are at the end of this
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