Japanese Textiles & Dyeing

About this book

A museum catalogue of masterpieces behind glass — or two hundred living fabrics, dyes and weaving regions in one guide? Japanese Textiles & Dyeing covers 200 entries in a single uniform format: every entry gives the Region & Materials, the Origins, How to Recognise it in a shop, and Buying & Experience — where to buy, what to check, and how the cloth lives in use.

Tsumugi split town by town — Yuki's hand-spun softness, Oshima's mud-dyed kasuri precision, the snow country's jofu and chijimi. Indigo as a craft with regions, grades and a ladder of named shades. Yuzen in its Kyoto, Kaga, hand-drawn and stencil forms; shibori in its towns and techniques; bingata's tropical colour. The fibre crafts no machine can do — banana fibre knotted by hand, wisteria, linden, kudzu, paper thread — and forty weaving and dyeing regions as a traveller meets them, from Nishijin to Kijoka.

A front chapter teaches the four checks that authenticate any cloth — thread, weave, dye, label — and an honest section covers prints sold under woven and dyed names. No photographs: the recognition fields are written for the hand and eye instead, because slub, feathering and dye penetration are checks a photograph cannot make for you.

Companion to Japanese Traditional Crafts (the five-material survey): that book covered textiles in overview entries; this is the single-subject deep dive, every entry written fresh at weave, dye and town depth.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.