Japan's Indigo & Natural Dyeing

About this book

Blue is the only colour Japan industrialised before industry — with a leaf, a compost heap and a jar. This is the complete English guide to the dye itself: 200 entries that follow indigo from the tade-ai fields of Tokushima through the hundred days of the sukumo composting bed, the building, feeding and reading of the living fermentation vat, the towns the trade built from Aizumi to Kojima to Motobu, and the dye house's wider work on paper, leather, thread and pigment — closing with the rest of Japan's natural dye chest, material by material: madder, gromwell, safflower, persimmon tannin, camellia-ash mordants and iron.

Every entry follows the same four fields — Origin & Tradition / Material & Making / Colour & Character / Visiting, Learning & the Official Check — so a seed merchant, a vat sickness, a dye town and a dye plant can be compared side by side. The book is honest about what it is: a guide without photographs that teaches you to judge a vat by its flower and a cloth by its dips, that asserts no prices or opening hours, and that treats fading not as a defect but as the known character of colours that grow. Written and produced in Japan.