In a residential corner of Shinjuku, not far from the Kanda River, stands Fujiya Dyeing Studio. Slide open the door, and a bolt of fabric 13.5 meters long stretches straight back through the earthen-floored workshop, drawn taut from one end to the other. There is no sound of machinery. What reaches the ear is only the flow of water, and the faint whisper of a brush moving across cloth. This is a space arranged for one purpose alone: the cloth that becomes a kimono.
We spoke at length with Takatoshi Nakamura, the third generation to run this workshop. Why did hikizome — brush-dyeing, one of the techniques for dyeing kimono — develop its own distinct character in Edo rather than in Kyoto? Why did Nakamura, who studied civil engineering and once stepped away from the family trade, come back to it? How has he related to materials and tools: the silk itself, a brush made of deer hair, a bamboo shinshi? And why has a workshop that built its business entirely on B-to-B work now begun stepping forward on its own, into hands-on experience programs and collaborations?
Nakamura grew up in this building, where home and workshop are one and the same, before setting off into the world of civil engineering, moving from job site to job site across the country, and eventually returning. His own trajectory mirrors the history of the workshop itself. Through its history, its techniques, and the path of one craftsman, we trace the outline of a place called Fujiya Dyeing Studio.
Fujiya Dyeing Studio specializes in a technique called hikizome. The word may be unfamiliar to most people, but it refers to one of the ways of dyeing kimono: the fabric is stretched taut, and color is "drawn" across it with a brush — the technique's name comes directly from that motion.
Toguri: To start, could you explain simply what hikizome actually is?
Nakamura: It's one of the techniques for dyeing kimono. The culture of the kimono originally developed in Kyoto and later moved to Edo. The Edo-style hikizome we practice today isn't about the kind of brilliance you find in Kyoto — it's restrained, understated, and yet it still manages to look sharp.
There is a reason behind the 13.5-meter length of fabric hung in the workshop. A kimono is cut in straight lines rather than curves, and it takes the entire length to make a single garment. Through a process called araihari, a kimono can be unstitched, returned to a single tan — a bolt of fabric long enough for one kimono — washed, and restored to that uncut form. Once it is back in that unstitched state, it becomes possible to redye it in a different color. Because it is managed as a single length of uncut cloth before it is ever tailored, a kimono can be reborn in a new color decades later. In a sense, the very form of the kimono has the possibility of being redyed woven into its future from the start.
Toguri: What is the background behind the emergence of this distinctive technique, hikizome?
Nakamura: It's said that hikizome was developed alongside the emergence of hand-painted yūzen, out of a desire to express the ground color in ways that the older methods — dip-dyeing and shibori — simply couldn't achieve.
With dip-dyeing, the entire cloth absorbs color uniformly. Hikizome, by contrast, lets a single pass of the brush create gradation and boundaries across the fabric. The very sequence in which this history unfolded — a new dyeing technique invented to serve the delicate designs that hand-painted yūzen demanded — reveals something about how the craft came to be.
When the Tokugawa shogunate opened its seat in Edo, the brilliant aesthetic sensibilities nurtured by Kyoto's courtly culture traveled there too, carried by craftsmen. People gathered in the castle town of Nihonbashi, craftsmen from Kyoto passed on their skills, and from there Edo's own version of hikizome began to develop.
Toguri: There must have been a considerable gap between Kyoto's courtly culture and Edo's beauty of usefulness. As it flowed from Kyoto into Edo, what changes took on a character unique to Edo?
Nakamura: When the shogunate moved from Kyoto to Edo, people came to live in the castle town of Nihonbashi. There was no courier service, no telephone back then, so the people who lived there, the people who sold things, and the people who made things all lived close together. Hikizome started out with craftsmen coming from Kyoto to do the work. As Edo's own people learned the technique from the Kyoto craftsmen and kept at it, an Edo-specific version of hikizome developed. Rather than brilliance, it favored a hidden beauty — the beauty of usefulness (yō no bi) — a beauty inseparable from everyday use, not decoration for its own sake but elegance that emerges through practical wear. A culture emerged of finding complexity within a single color and taking pleasure in it. I think all of that came together and led to the word iki — a refined, understated elegance particular to Edo-period townspeople's aesthetics, a beauty that reveals itself gradually rather than announcing itself.
There were periods in the Edo era when sumptuary edicts restricted flashy dress. Within that constraint — one that looked, on the surface, like a limitation — an aesthetic sensibility was sharpened: the ability to find layer upon layer of expression within a single color. That sensibility remains at the core of the work Fujiya Dyeing Studio carries on today.
Within hikizome, what Fujiya Dyeing Studio specializes in is a job called jizome — ground-dyeing. Since the workshop was founded in 1952, it has taken on what would today be called B-to-B work: dyeing fabric for Tokyo Tegaki Yūzen (hand-painted yūzen) artists. Put another way, the job is to apply the ground color — the base an artist then paints their design onto — and hand it over.
Toguri: I'd like to ask about the background of the workshop's founding, and the history of how it developed here around Shinjuku and the Kanda River.
Nakamura: When the shogunate moved to Edo and people settled in Nihonbashi, that's where things were made. But as the peaceful era went on and the population grew, the Kanda River grew polluted with wastewater. Even so, demand for kimono kept rising. Craftsmen needed more space and clean water, so they walked upstream along the Kanda River in search of both. What they found were the places now known as Waseda, Takadanobaba, and Ochiai — here in Shinjuku.
Fujiya Dyeing Studio stands at the end of that trail — craftsmen who moved in search of water. Each time the center of kimono culture shifted, the craft was sharpened in tandem with the water of that particular land, and that history is itself the origin of this place. Shinjuku Ward still designates dyeing as one of its local industries today, and the Kanda River is, in a sense, a river carrying the land's own memory of how the trade of dyeing took root here. From Nihonbashi upstream along the Kanda River, and from Kyoto to Edo — beneath a single workshop called Fujiya Dyeing Studio flow the layered footsteps of craftsmen who moved from place to place in search of water and land.
Nakamura's path to taking over the family business was not a straight line. As a child, he says, the workshop was never an open place to him.
Toguri: As a child, how did you relate to the workshop and to kimono culture?
Nakamura: Our work wasn't selling our own products — it was receiving a customer's material, dyeing it, and handing it back. So something like a kid coming home with dirty hands and feet, or walking through the house eating ice cream, simply wasn't allowed in that environment. The house and the workshop were built as one structure, so it felt suffocating in a way, and with several craftsmen working there, the place always felt crowded and cluttered. I don't think I went into the workshop much at all.
Toguri: Was that because you chose not to, or because you weren't allowed to?
Nakamura: From before I can even remember, I was told over and over not to make things dirty, and I saw that around me constantly, so I think it just became natural for me to stay away.
The sense that he mustn't get things dirty had soaked into him naturally, from before memory even began. That feeling of suffocation shaped the path he chose after graduating high school.
Toguri: After high school, you went into an entirely different field — civil engineering site management. What led you to choose that path?
Nakamura: The simple thing was, once I finished high school, I wanted to leave home — I was determined to go to a university somewhere out in the regions. On top of that, I liked making things, so I applied to and got into a civil engineering program, where you could build roads and bridges.
Before going to university, during high school, he had done a homestay abroad. Curious to see the outside world, he wrote an essay to apply and spent about twenty days on a homestay and farmstay.
Nakamura: Once I got there, I found myself, for the first time, in a position where I had to introduce my own country as a Japanese person. In Japan, that kind of situation rarely comes up — I was still treated like a kid. But over there I was treated as an individual, and when I had to talk about myself, I'm embarrassed to say the kimono never even crossed my mind. Back then I just folded paper cranes and fudged my way through it. I still remember that as a small regret.
This small regret — not having the words to describe his own background — had not yet taken any real shape at that point. Even while studying civil engineering at university, Nakamura recalls, the kimono still felt distant to him.
Toguri: While studying civil engineering, did you ever sense any common ground with kimono-making?
Nakamura: Not at the time, no. I didn't understand kimono at all back then — what I got from civil engineering was learning about making things, from my seniors there.
After graduating, Nakamura took a job in civil engineering site management, moving every three months between road and bridge construction sites across the country. The turning point built up gradually, in the ordinary conversations he had on those sites.
Toguri: During the period you were away from the family business, how did your feelings change?
Nakamura: While I was on road construction sites, I did feel that making things was enjoyable. But as I thought about what only I could do, I was working on things built by large teams of people, and little by little I started to notice: oh, right — my family dyes kimono. Every time I met someone new, they'd ask, "Where are you from," "What does your family do," "Are you the eldest son" — and whenever I answered, the reply would always come back: "So you'll take over someday, right?" It was the same after I started working, moving every three months across the country — I heard it again and again. That accumulated, little by little, into the feeling that this — kimono — was something only I could carry on, something I had to preserve. And that's when I started feeling that I should take over.
The years of training that began once he decided to take over were not smooth going either. At the company, he had been in a position of carrying out instructions without seeing the whole picture; at the workshop, an entirely different way of learning awaited him.
Nakamura: At the company, my role was really small — it was about first getting solid at doing what I was told, without seeing the whole picture. At home, though, my father rarely taught anything directly; it was a matter of watching him and learning that way. I could see the whole picture forming, and I spent long stretches of time with my father outside of work too, so in a way, hikizome — and the whole way of living and thinking as a craftsman — settled into my body as a whole.
He was almost never taught in words, but that doesn't mean he was never corrected. Whether he could grasp the meaning behind that correction, though, depended entirely on the depth of his own observation.
Nakamura: Whether I was doing hikikiri or bokashi, we were working in the same space, so I would get corrected on things like the way I moved my hands, or how I prepared. Whenever my father was working, I made a point of stopping my own hands to watch. It looks like you're doing the same thing, but as your own sensitivity — what you notice — shifts, what you see starts to change. Realizing that, year after year, and coming to understand my father's work more and more deeply — that's been an enormous discovery for me.
When the gap in experience is too wide, you don't even know what you should be looking at. Nakamura described this feeling by way of how people react to his own demonstrations.
Nakamura: When I give a demonstration, people from the general public tend to see it as easy — "wow, that's fast," "you make it look so simple." But separate from that, as my own skill improves, I keep noticing new things about my father's work. It looks like the same thing is happening, but what you're able to see keeps changing.
Skill doesn't complete itself overnight. Just when you think you can do something, a harder job arrives and you realize you can't. Overcome that, and the next wall appears. It was only after roughly twenty years of that cycle repeating that Nakamura felt he had truly come into his own as a craftsman.
Nakamura: When I was young, there was a point where I thought, three years in, I'd already have it figured out. But just as I'd think I could do something, a hard job would come along and I'd realize I couldn't. Then I'd overcome that and think I'd finally got it — and another hard job would come, and again I couldn't. It really took about twenty years before I felt I'd come into my own as a craftsman. It wasn't that my technique became perfect. It was more that even when there's something I can't do, I can look a customer in the eye and talk it through honestly — "I can't do this yet, but with more practice I will," or "this is a bit outside what hikizome can achieve, so a different option might serve you better." Being able to take in the full range of what a customer wants, rather than fixating only on what I personally can or can't do — when I became that kind of person, that's when I felt I'd come into my own.
Nakamura adds that being able to make these kinds of suggestions owed a great deal to stepping outside the workshop and engaging with other people.
Nakamura: For a long time, I believed that not being able to do something was shameful. Working under my father, rarely going out, spending all day in this one place — whenever there was a job I couldn't do, it really got me down. Simply: I can't do this. But going outside, people started appearing who would praise what I could do. Inside our own walls, there wasn't really anyone who praised what I was already capable of. That gave me a bit of confidence, and little by little, through accumulated experience, I came to believe that even the things I couldn't do yet, I could get to through practice.
Fujiya Dyeing Studio's two signature techniques are hikikiri — laying down a single, solid color without any unevenness — and bokashi-zome, which creates gradation within a single color. Both, Nakamura says, look deceptively simple; it's precisely because of that simplicity that the difficulty only grows the deeper you go.
Toguri: Could you tell me about the difficulty and the appeal of hikikiri?
Nakamura: Laying down an entire piece in one flat color is really the hardest part. I once spoke with a plasterer at the Interior Lifestyle trade fair — he told me that even though they now deliberately rough up surfaces for certain design effects, finishing something perfectly flat is still, in truth, the hardest thing to do. It's the same for us. Talking craftsman to craftsman about the hardest part of each of our trades — that was a really enjoyable conversation.
In the world of craft, mura — unevenness in color or texture — is often prized as a source of character. It sounds almost contradictory to demand that handwork produce no unevenness at all. But the beauty hikizome aims for sits at the opposite pole from that.
Nakamura: My work is basically about having no mura at all, and being able to reproduce the same result the same way, again and again — that, I still believe, is what makes someone a craftsman. I can do more artistic work too, but I feel that's a somewhat different thing from what has been handed down here over the long term.
The other signature technique, bokashi-zome, expresses depth within a single color.
Nakamura: Rather than using many colors like a rainbow, expressing the iki of Edo means putting many colors — or rather, depth — inside a single blue, for instance. That's when I use the bokashi technique. What's difficult is anything with a seam line (aikuchi) — the point where two panels of fabric meet and must be dyed to match seamlessly. A kimono or a noren is made of separate panels of fabric placed side by side to form one design, so I have to create the same gradation on this panel and match it exactly on that one. That's the hardest part of the job.
What sustains that precision is years of practice and a set of procedures Nakamura has built up on his own. Because there's no room for failure on a customer's fabric, he practices repeatedly on cotton before ever touching the real material.
Nakamura: For about twenty years I didn't have any products of my own — only the customer's work, where failure isn't an option. So I always practice repeatedly on cotton first, then move to the real thing. Even then, jumping straight into the target color and failing is frightening, so I practice a bit at a very light shade, around a tenth of the final concentration, to get a feel for how the dye moves through this particular fabric. Fabric differs by customer, so to avoid working blind, I first get a feel for it at a tenth concentration, then raise it to about half of the target concentration and dye once. The first pass goes from this side toward that side; the second pass, at the same concentration, goes from that side back toward this side — which reverses the habits of my hand at the start, middle, and end of the stroke. The two passes cancel each other out, and the result comes out flatter, closer to a single even color. That's the image I work with.
There is careful calculation behind these two layered passes of concentration as well.
Nakamura: If we call the concentration the customer wants 100 percent, I first mix 48 percent and dye once. Whether it truly comes out at 48 percent, you can't tell from a small test swatch — a large surface looks different from a small one, so partly to confirm that, I dye once at 48, then add another 48, which brings it to 96 percent. That comes out slightly lighter than what the customer wants, but to most people, 96 percent and 100 percent look like the exact same color.
The reason he deliberately shows the customer 96 percent rather than the full 100 is that he wants to keep four percent of adjustment room in reserve. That way, if a customer says something like, "on a large surface this looks a bit too bold," he can answer, "not a problem — there's still four percent of room," and correct the color on the spot.
One technique unique to Fujiya Dyeing Studio is double-sided dyeing (ryōmen-zome) — dyeing the front and back of the fabric in two different colors. Unlike printing, where color simply sits on the surface, the distinctive feature here is that the dye itself soaks into the fabric.
Nakamura: Say this is the thickness of the white fabric — it's not like printing, where one color sits on top, another sits on the bottom, and white remains in the middle. The color from the top side actually penetrates into the fabric and emerges slightly on the other side. I dye the reverse color the same way, controlling how far the dye travels into the fabric. I control that by how much dye I load onto the brush, and also by the amount of funori — the seaweed paste has a certain viscosity, and that's what controls the speed at which the dye moves.
What sustains this precision is an understanding of silk built up over more than seventy years of dyeing it. The eight dye colors inherited from his father, Nakamura says, were refined over a long span of years so that they can be freely mixed together without the color separating or bleeding.
Nakamura: The workshop itself has a long history, so there are things I inherited from my father — tools, materials. Over the past four years or so I've started experimenting with cotton, linen, cashmere, wool, and so on, and just looking at the dyes alone, the ones I inherited from my father are genuinely, carefully refined — mixing all eight colors freely doesn't cause any separating or bleeding. But when I tried cotton on my own and bought dyes recommended by a materials supplier, the colors bled and separated — nothing worked. It's incredibly difficult. Even after more than twenty years of doing this, it was only in the last three or four years that I first noticed it. It was only by trying a different material that I really felt, for the first time, just how properly refined what I'd inherited actually was.
On the material of silk itself, Nakamura has formed his own view from years of experience. The fabric the workshop uses is woven domestically in Japan, though much of the raw silk thread comes from Brazil. The thread grade is 5A — the top rank, he's been told.
Nakamura: Silk that's gotten old, yes, is definitely harder to dye — there's an odd roughness to it, and the color doesn't penetrate as easily. Even when it looks fine on the surface, I can sense those invisible changes sometimes. But as for whether there's a difference between old silk and today's silk, honestly, no. As far as I dye it, with what I currently know, I've never really been conscious of that.
Three generations are now involved in the workshop. Nakamura and his father handle everything from mixing colors to dyeing, while his son, only about a year into training, is still at the stage of learning by watching. His mother handles customer relations, the color-fixing process called mushi — steaming — and sewing the edges of the fabric on a machine.
Toguri: Could you tell me what each of the three generations currently working here does?
Nakamura: My father and I handle everything from mixing colors to dyeing. My son has only just started his training, so he's still at the stage of watching how we work and learning. My mother deals with customers, and there's the steaming process for fixing the color, plus the machine-sewing work — she handles those.
Following the course of a single day, the work begins at the front entrance, greeting a customer. The consultation — what kind of garment, what color they want dyed — happens right there on the spot. The bolt of fabric they bring in first goes through inspection: checking for stains, checking for loose threads, before it's carried into the workshop.
Nakamura: After inspection, we bring it into this workshop and sew it on the machine. We sew the selvage, the edge of the fabric. From here to here is the customer's fabric, and this is our own fabric. On our own fabric, we clamp it directly with the harite, but for a customer's fabric, we sew the selvage on the machine so the harite never bites into it directly. After that, we pull it through the workshop in sequence, checking once more for anything off, and stretch bamboo shinshi across it.
Once the fabric is fully stretched, before any dyeing begins, comes a preparatory step called jiire — base-coating. Soaking the fabric once in funori, a paste made by boiling down seaweed, slows the speed at which dye will later enter the fabric, moving the finished result closer to perfect flatness.
Nakamura: Doing this slows the speed at which the dye enters the fabric, which lets us dye it flatter — that's why we always start with jiire. Drying the jiire also takes about six to eight hours. It's a clear liquid, but if you don't give it that same span of time, unevenness forms within the clear coating itself as it dries, and later, when color goes on top, that unevenness shows through completely. So we let the jiire dry slowly, over six to eight hours.
While waiting for the jiire to dry, mixing colors proceeds in parallel. The eight dye colors are combined, and the mixing repeated again and again until the exact specified color is reached.
Nakamura: We have the eight dye colors ready, and we mix them together to build the color. It's a process of testing and matching, over and over, until we reach the specified color. Once we feel the color looks right, we apply a small amount to the actual customer's fabric — on a kimono, there's a section that ends up folded into the seam — to confirm what the true color looks like on the real material, and if that's good, we move on to dyeing.
This entire sequence of steps has not always been carried out with the same intensity it is today. The look of the workshop, Nakamura says, has changed a great deal over time.
Toguri: Could you tell me how the atmosphere of the workshop has changed between then and now?
Nakamura: Back then we were dyeing a lot of the same color, so it didn't look nearly as colorful as it does now. There were four or five craftsmen in here, each working with two of the workshop's eight support posts to handle the dyeing, and the whole approach was much rougher than it is now — the precision demanded was different too. It was an era when anything with color on it would sell, so color-matching wasn't especially strict; a bit of unevenness was no problem at all. Even with a small mistake, you could tell a customer, "this one came out slightly off, so let us offer it at this price," and it would still sell. So there wasn't much pressure on us back then.
From an era of volume to an era where precision is demanded piece by piece: as the number of bolts dyed decreased, the standard of finish expected of each one rose. One job embodies that shift — changing the color of a kimono that has already been tailored. When a request comes in to change the color of a finished garment, the workshop most often uses a method called overdyeing (uwagaki) — dyeing over the existing color rather than stripping it out.
Nakamura: Stripping the color inevitably weakens the fabric, so we don't recommend it much here. The whole reason someone wants to change the color, in the first place, is usually something like: they've worn it for years and it now feels too bold for their age, so they'd like it more subdued, or they want it deeper. If we strip the color to address that, the fabric gets damaged. Overdyeing — taking it toward a deeper color — is work we can do.
The tools that support this process are also layered with refinements shaped by an understanding of material properties: the harite that stretches the fabric lengthwise, the bamboo shinshi that removes wrinkles crosswise, and the brush that carries the color. Nakamura's brush of choice is a five-sun brush made of deer hair.
Nakamura: The distinctive feature of deer hair is that each hair has a hollow core. Dye collects in that hollow, so with a craftsman's skill, you can load it right up to the edge of dripping without it ever getting sloppy — that raises the efficiency of the work. And if you want to leave a dry, scraped texture, you can just load less onto it. It handles many different uses, which is why I've settled on this size, this deer hair.
After use, the brush is stored in a refrigerator. A refrigerator conjures an image of keeping something fresh, but here, paradoxically, it's used as a tool for drying.
Nakamura: The hairs are held in place by a piece of wood, so before dyeing, I soak that wood in water to make it swell. That creates a condition where the hairs won't come loose, and then I start dyeing. But if the wood stays saturated all the time, it will eventually rot, so once I'm done using it, I keep it in this refrigerator so it dries out properly.
Wet it to use it, then dry it out again. This kind of quiet, patient care for a single tool is what silently sustains the daily work.
In the postwar years, Fujiya Dyeing Studio's work began with volume: thirty, forty bolts dyed in a single color at a time. As demand for kimono declined, the work gradually shifted toward one bolt, one color, made for an already-identified customer — a made-to-order commission.
Nakamura: In our history — up through my father's generation, we were never able to make a major shift in direction as a workshop in response to that changing era. It was in my own generation, about four years ago now, that it became clear this way of doing things wouldn't be sustainable going forward. There are people out there wearing kimono dyed by Fujiya, but the name Fujiya Dyeing Studio never appears anywhere. I felt that, under those conditions, we wouldn't survive going forward, so I shifted toward building our own services, making our own products, and stepping forward ourselves.
For Nakamura, who until then had completed his work entirely within the walls of the workshop, stepping outside and engaging with other people became a turning point.
Nakamura: I only ever worked inside this workshop, and I barely spoke with customers directly. The customers were professionals too, so a system existed where they'd tell my mother the dyeing method and color they wanted, and it would reach us that way. I was working here from morning to night, and when I wanted to change something, to try something new, I found I simply couldn't. That's when I started going out to exhibitions, engaging with people, and having people praise me for things. At a yūzen artist's party, the artist suddenly introduced me, saying, "This kimono is my own work, but actually, Nakamura-san dyed the ground color for me." Standing up in front of everyone to say a few words, having more and more moments like that, talking with all kinds of people — that really was a big thing.
An extension of that led to a commission to produce a Wall Art Textile for the fourth floor at Hilton Tokyo, in Shinjuku Ward.
Nakamura: The people from the construction firm told me: there's a Hilton in Shinjuku, and they wanted to place something distinctly Shinjuku there. Faced with a choice between staying in Tokyo or staying in Kyoto, they wanted guests to choose Tokyo — and within Tokyo, Shinjuku rather than Marunouchi. Given that, they wanted whatever they installed to carry a story, so they asked someone dyeing kimono in Shinjuku to create that installation. Thinking about dyeing itself, Shinjuku is connected by water and is designated as a local dyeing industry, so specifically, I designed the fabric's woven pattern around the image of a flowing river, used blue tones evoking water, and dyed it using bold bokashi gradation.
This movement beyond the workshop's walls has extended into unexpected places too. At an event organized by Keio University students, Nakamura experienced a scene where a DJ performed inside the workshop while the craftsmen kept working alongside.
Nakamura: Keio University students organized it and brought in a DJ. Since they're students with no budget, they borrowed all the equipment using a proposal document. The DJ performed, and we kept working behind them — that was the scene. That DJ turned out to have 440,000 followers, an impressive figure, and even Agence France-Presse came to cover it. At first I worried we might end up looking like clowns, but it was something young people had thought up, so I decided to just try it. It turned out to be pretty enjoyable, honestly.
Standing in front of an unfamiliar audience takes courage. And yet, taking that one step forward brings back reactions no one could have imagined. The act of stepping outside the workshop has itself become, for Nakamura, an ongoing series of discoveries.
This change has reached his relationships with other craftsmen too. In his father's generation, there was apparently a tendency to keep talk of materials and technique hidden from one another, but Nakamura has begun an effort with a young craftsman nearby: showing each other their techniques, in each other's workshops.
Nakamura: My father's generation was a generation with no technical exchange at all. There was a guild, so people talked, but everyone kept quiet about their own materials, their own dyeing methods — there was a time when all that technical talk stayed hidden. Right now, I've started something with a dyer in Toshima Ward — thirty-five years old, who began taking over from his own father about four years ago — where we dye together in my workshop, showing each other our techniques: mine, and what he's inherited from his father. My approach to methods that differ from mine is to try them first, and decide for myself afterward whether to adopt them. These days, I've gradually come to feel that none of us will survive unless we work more broadly together, so I'm starting with him here in Tokyo — and since he's still young within this industry, I'm thinking of using that youth to travel from Tokyo out to other dyeing regions for technical exchange.
The workshop currently also runs a hands-on experience program for visitors. Nakamura himself explains the workshop's history, and then participants choose a color they like, build it from scratch alongside a craftsman, practice repeatedly, and finally dye a scarf entirely their own.
Toguri: What kind of person do you hope will enjoy this experience?
Nakamura: What I've enjoyed most, working with participants so far, is being with people who open up. I share everything about myself too — what I've done, what I'm doing now, what I want to do next — and when that connects with what someone does for their own work, and we find a point where our thinking overlaps philosophically, where I can say, "I've been through that too" — those turn out to be really wonderful moments. Through the experience itself, I feel like I've built good relationships and had good conversations.
Many people visiting the workshop for the first time are surprised — by the size of the earthen floor, unimaginable from the outside; by the kimono hanging perfectly straight; by how much water is used; by the absence of any machine sound. At the moment of laying the very first stroke of the brush onto white fabric, participants, without exception, look visibly tense.
Nakamura: Since we start from white fabric, I can really feel how tense a participant is at that first stroke, the moment the color first goes on. Once they've been through that, the sensation of color soaking into this fabric — that's not something you encounter in everyday life, a completely different feeling from a colored pencil or a ballpoint pen — and it starts to become enjoyable. They want to keep going, more and more. By the time we finish, they seem completely relaxed, a little bit elevated, chatting away freely, and we can see it — it makes us happy too.
Nakamura says he wants visitors who come for the experience to understand something: that this place isn't being kept exactly as it was in the old days for its own sake — it's being kept, still today, in order to make something that people today will find valuable.
Nakamura: This space isn't maintained just to preserve the old ways as the old ways — it's maintained, even now, in order to make something that people of today will find good. I'd be glad if that comes across. It's an experience, I think, that will likely wake something up that's been sleeping inside a person, whether they're a child who will carry the future forward, an adult, or a grandparent. I'd love for all kinds of people to come, talk with me, and go through that process of opening themselves up together.
From the perspective that kimono survives today as a traditional culture precisely because it once exploded in popularity, Nakamura says that to carry it forward another hundred, two hundred years, it needs to explode again — and he wants to keep challenging himself to express what people today find genuinely appealing, in the form of kimono, apparel, and interior design.
Nakamura: The reason kimono became a traditional culture in the first place, I think, is that it exploded in popularity once, long ago — that's why it survives today as something traditional. If we want to carry it forward another hundred, two hundred years, I believe it has to explode again. To make that happen, I'm challenging myself, right now, to express something people today will look at and find cool, find beautiful — through kimono, through apparel, through interior design. If we can pull that off, I believe it leads to the next step. We'll work hard to lay down the tracks, to build a road that's easier to walk — so that anyone starting fresh, or anyone already at it, can feel safe simply focusing on sharpening their own skill.
The 13.5-meter length of fabric hangs stretched taut, quietly waiting for color. It stands, too, as proof of an unshakable steadiness — reached only after one craftsman's hands repeated the same motion for decades. The journey of craftsmen who moved from Kyoto to Edo, and then upstream along the Kanda River in search of water, quietly overlaps now with the journey of a third-generation craftsman who came back to the workshop by way of a civil engineering job site. Reproducing the same color, the same way, without unevenness, again and again. Layering 48 percent twice, canceling out the habits of the hand between the outbound and return strokes, working ever closer to a single, endlessly flat color — this work sits at the exact opposite pole from anything flashy. And yet the state of having come into one's own as a craftsman — visible only at the far end of that repetition — is what Nakamura is now trying to pass on to the next generation, even as he steps, on his own, out beyond the workshop's walls.