The fading of the Japanese kimono

For many people, there is no more potent symbol of Japanese culture than the kimono.  It has been immortalized in the popular imagination, and in numerous movies and books, such as Memoirs of a Geisha.  However, there is now a story in the Washington Post about the declining importance of the kimono in modern Japanese culture.

Few garments are as tied to a nation as the kimono is to Japan. In a society that values the unspoken, its colors and patterns have for centuries served as an alternative form of speech. … the kimono long remained the vanity garment of choice for major events in Japanese life. But now, the country’s own demographics are working against it.

Fewer Japanese are marrying today than ever, and those who do largely shun traditional white wedding kimonos in favor of Western-style dresses. A declining birthrate, meanwhile, has meant fewer babies, which in turn has meant fewer sales of kimonos for children’s coming-of-age rites. Nationwide, kimono sales have more than halved in the past decade.

The article is an interesting read.  It provides a look into how the Japanese culture is changing, and it also provides a glimpse into the fading art of kimono weaving.

His fingers muscled from almost a century of weaving, Yasujiro Yamaguchi worked the humming loom in his private workshop. Patiently lacing golden threads through a warp of auburn silk, he fashioned a bolt of kimono fabric blooming with an autumn garden in shades of tea green, ginger and plum.

But Yamaguchi, like Japan’s signature kimono, is slipping into winter. At 102, he is among the last master weavers of Nishijin, the country’s most celebrated kimono district, and his pace has slowed. He rubbed the morning chill from his knuckles, fitted his hunched shoulders deeper inside his indigo jacket and resolutely pushed on.

This kimono — for the role of a willowy beauty in a classical Noh play, withering from the loss of her lover — will take him a full year to make.  If Yamaguchi doesn’t finish it, there are few weavers left in Japan skilled enough to take over.

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