Kyoto Artists Keeping Textile Traditions Alive

Although Tokyo is only two hours away by bullet train, it seems centuries removed. Sitting on a tatami mat, drinking green tea in the wood house of Kenichi Utsuki, it is easy to visualize generations of his family practicing the art of indigo dying ( aizome ) .

Utsuki, 42, belongs to a small but dedicated group of craftspeople who are keeping Japanese folk arts alive by following their elders into trades born 20 generations ago.

Traditional methods of dying and weaving fabric also are being embraced by Kyoto textile designers weary of contemporary, mass-produced fashion.

In this former imperial city, kimono-clad women clack-clacking down narrow streets on wooden geta are a common sight. For men, the happi coat, a worker’s jacket, often replaces the sober blue-and-gray suits one sees in Tokyo’s concrete canyons.

Kyoto really is a trip to another time, with its warrens of winding back streets and unpretentious homes, inns and eateries, often bisected by neat canals that make Venice seem unkempt and seedy by comparison.

Peer into some of the garden courtyards that grace these homes and you can glimpse one lone bonsai tree pruned to heartbreaking perfection, a strategically placed boulder that imbues the space around it with the majesty of Mt. Fuji or the finely grained wood that glazes most surfaces.

While many of the back-street shops have a distinctly homespun feel, tourists are welcomed and greeted with discreet but knowledgeable courtesy that is virtually a national practice. Many shopkeepers speak English, and most take credit cards that include Visa and MasterCard.

Utsuki’s shop, Aizen Kobo, sits on a narrow back street in Nishijin, the old textile district. It doubles as the front room of his 120-year-old house, complete with sliding wood doors that tall visitors must duck to enter. But the enforced bow is worth it: Aizen Kobo offers hand-woven and hand-dyed fabrics from ramie to cotton to silk in a selection of pastels and vibrantly hued natural colors.

When a visitor arrives, Utsuki pulls out bolts of cloth and carefully unrolls the fabric with hands stained permanently blue from immersion in dye. Prices run from $400 to $600 for the approximately 12 meters (13.1 yards) required for a kimono.

Aizen Kobo is at Omiya Nishi-iru, Nakasuji-dori, Kamigyo-ku, Kyoto, Japan. In Kyoto, telephone 441-0355. Tourists are welcome and Utsuki speaks English well.

Often handed down over generations, kimonos grace many closets in Japan but one rarely sees them in Tokyo today, except at religious shrines and among a few older women visiting the capital from the countryside.

On Kyoto streets, however, it’s possible to see the kimono in all of its delicate variations.

For more than 100 years, members of the Utsuki family have been master craftsmen, producing kimonos and practicing tsuzure-ori , a weaving technique that results in the complicated relief brocade patterns in gold and silver thread seen in the finest obi , or kimono sashes, once worn exclusively by royalty and now relegated mainly to museums, private collections and pricey antique shops.

Today, Aizen Kobo maintains a selection of antique and contemporary fabrics as well as a selection of new fashions that range from a tie-dye indigo scarf at $35 to more expensive pillows, cloth purses and shirts, to a samu-e , the loose-fitting, two-piece garment worn by Zen priests and local craftsmen, which sells for about $400.

There also are happi coats, which can cost as much as $500, monpe (farmer’s pants) and other contemporary clothes and accessories, all smelling of honai --the pungent indigo dye that Japanese farmers concocted from fermented weeds to ward off insects. Synthetic dyes are less intensely blue and lack the distinctive odor of natural indigo, Utsuki says.

Across town in north Kyoto, in a former monastery now divided into theater and design studios, another traditional crafts artist, 43-year-old Mihoko Ogino, turns out handmade shirts, cloth handbags, kimonos and noren , decorative Japanese doorway hangings that announce shop names in delicate calligraphy. The pieces are produced using katazome --a stencil dye process that incorporates vegetable dyes and rice paste.

Unfurling across her natural cotton fabrics are classical Japanese cranes, parrots and fish. As Ogino outlines the totemic forms on a stretched canvas, a gentle rain falls and Kabuki actors next door sing mournful folk songs.

Her handiwork runs from $15 to about $300 and is fashioned in a more simple, workman style than the garments of Utsuki. Ogino sells her work around Japan at flea markets and shops that specialize in folklore. Occasionally, she takes on private students and gives design workshops.

Mihoko Ogino’s studio is at 935-1 Kashiwakiyomori-Cho, Teranouchi Senbon, Nishi-Iru, Kamigyo-ku, Kyoto; telephone 222-0153.

Ogino, who taught herself katazome by trial and error from old books, uses colors made of such exotica as persimmon juice, mimosa, acacia, ocher and tree bark, to yield the earthy yellows, greens, browns, russet and burnt orange colors that grace her fabrics.

“Business-oriented people go to Tokyo,” says Ogino. “Artists come here.”