Kyoto Backstreets: My Adventures in Ancient Craftsmanship in Japan

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Kyoto Backstreets: My Adventures in Ancient Craftsmanship in Japan

I just got back from the back alleys of Kyoto where I met wonderful people and got a chance to take an inside look on some of the best and most ancient craftsmanship the world has to offer.

A family-run dye workshop that does all the hand dying for Issey Miyake. They use natural root vegetables, charcoal, coffee, and various indigenous plants, layering color on pre-worn and original fabrics to varied effect. He also employs ancient fabric cutting techniques mixing new technology with the ancient craft used for centuries. We sweat and fanned ourselves in a Kyoto workshop tucked away in one of the many back roads of Kyoto among rows of wood and clay houses. His daughter presided over boiling blue dye and his son’s voice could be heard from the back room. He told us his wife was also an artist. The reed thin, passionate, and kindly man took treated us as though we were the most important people in the world. We sipped iced coffee and poured over his portfolio books of sketches, fabric samples, ink drawings as the fan whirred offering us moments of cool air before oscillating around the room again. (In America, this would never happen. The person would be so protective of his work fearing imitation.)
A young cobbler trained in ancient techniques with a store and workshop in a leafy residential neighborhood. He hand stitches an updated version of the Geta shoe (the thong slippers Geisha wear with socks, usually made of wood with blocks at the heel and toe to raise the height). His are a layering of visible structural materials on leather. I bought a pair he had in the workshop already. He makes only 30 pair a month because of the time it takes to cut the leather, to dye it with vegetable dyes, and to hand stitch the shoe.
Tale of the Genji scrolls by Yamaguchi (a story originally written by a woman, Murasaki Shikibu 1000 A.D.)

I love Japan. I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like a love affair you can’t forget and you are sure you will be right back. Well, maybe I won’t be right back – instead I’m headed to the Normandy coast and then probably London waiting for my next project to start. But I’ll be back. More on Japan later.