Yesterday, I wrote a story about some Japanese people who are preserving cool old North American cultural creations. Here’s a story about a North American who is preserving a cool old Japanese cultural tradition.
When I was in Japan, I read an article by Eriko Arita in The Japan Times about a 46-year-old Canadian fellow named Bryan Whitehead who practices old school silk making in Japan.
He does every step himself:
1. Each spring, Whitehead plants the indigo seeds to grow the plants to dye the silk. In the summer, he picks the leaves, dries the leaves, wraps the leaves in straw matting to ferment them for three months, and makes “aidama (raw indigo pigment shaped into balls).”
2. In late summer or early fall he breeds his silkworm moths. He stores the eggs in the refrigerator. In the spring he lets the eggs hatch and raises 5,000 worms.
3. 5,000 silkworms eat “a small truck full of mulberry leaves each day,” he says (30 kilograms of leaves). Fortunately Whitehead owns 300 mulberry trees about 15-minutes from his house/shop.
4. After the worms spin their cocoons, Whitehead kills them before they have the chance to chew their way out of the cocoon (and thus ruining the silk threads). The worms are killed by “boiling or drying or salting.”
5. He then spins and weaves the silk into fabric. 5,000 cocoons produce enough silk for just one kimono.
Whitehead learned about making silk from Minako Kato, “who was then 65 and one of the area’s few remaining silk farmers and craftspeople.” He says:
“I knew it was the last chance for me to be able to learn the technique from her. She is a treasure,” Whitehead said.
Although Kato had stopped raising silkworms 20 years before, she and her husband were happy to share their lifetime of experience with Whitehead, he said — adding that he also learned from other old people in the same village.
“I was lucky to submerse myself in a village of old folks who had lived self-sufficiently and knew the techniques of silk production and weaving, and who also embodied the lifestyle that was the source of the aesthetics I found so intriguing.”
From grubs to kimono: Canadian makes silk in the traditional way | See also: Canadian finds his own silk road
Photo by cathyse97. Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.
