From jutsu empiricism to kansei technology: Textile Manufacture in Japan from the
Tokugawa period to the present .
ABSTRACT
Japan’s renowned textile expertise, exquisite and creative fabric design, innovative mass
production and unparalleled advances in technology are at a turning point in the early twentyfirst century. During the past few decades, market forces such as high labor costs and
exchange rates have caused extensive outsourcing and relocation of fabrication to other
Eurasian countries, especially China, as well as increases in importation of fibers and fabrics.
This is a condition well known to other major industrialized fabric-producing countries, but the
case of Japan is particularly poignant in view of its rapid rise to preeminence and its scientific
advances in fiber, fabric, and apparel making. Recent generations of Japanese fashion
designers and fabric creators, often in collaborations, have realigned aesthetic paradigms to
wide international acclaim by showing daring new clothing construction in fabrics that
seemingly defy gravity and previous limits of performance and appearance.
A unique set of circumstances enabled the meteoric development in the textile fields during the
twentieth century, some of which were based on social and economic factors in Tokugawa
Japan (1603-1867) when proto-industries emerged, aided by scientific experimentation,
urbanization and professional support organizations. The Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (19121925) periods’ achievements in sericulture and loom technology in turn set the stage for the
accelerated and unprecedented developments in the Showa (1926-1989) era. With low labor
costs through the post-war period, Japan’s cultural mindset and social structure enabled
advances in manmade fiber manufacture, quality control, and electronic applications. In the
current Heisei (1989-) period, investment in research and new technology has continued,
slowing only recently in comparison to Japan’s competitors who lost ground earlier. In fact,
Japanese levels of automation and manufacturing speeds are so advanced that they are yet to
be implemented broadly, giving Japan future reserves of technological capital in terms of
patents and know-how.
TEXTILE INDUSTRY PREMISES
Japan’s rapid industrialization during the Meiji and Taisho periods is often called a miracle
because the country is small, over-crowded and resource-poor. Reasons for the phenomenal
upswing are attributed to Japan’s culture, closely observed social hierarchies and
religious/spiritual values that adapted well to new industries and corporate structures.
Numerous small-scale, craft-based and labor-intensive industries developed during the
Tokugawa period, particularly as complements to the agricultural cycle, taken up during slack
seasons in rice cultivation. These small enterprises were sustained and supported by local
social networks in fierce competition with rivals from other daimyo, or local overlord, domains.
With abundant supplies of labor, the Tokugawa cottage industries excelled at regional
specialties, such as textiles, ceramics, lacquer ware and sake brewing that used distinctive
local raw material with great precision and for particular, and discerning clienteles. Careful
documentation of processes was often published in volumes of research, based on empirical
observations over generations. The term jutsu, defined as “specialized human skill which
enables one to perform remarkable feats,” characterizes the Tokugawa heritage of labor skills
and social structures that helped set the stage for the subsequent and rapid mechanization of
Japan’s industries. The Meiji government oligarchy encouraged experimentation and promoted
fokuko no jutsu, “skills for a prosperous country,” especially through its Ministry of Commerce
and Industry. Its name was changed in the mid-twentieth century to the Ministry of
International Trade and Industry (MITI), an extremely influential government body that played a
significant role in Japan’s technological revolution through tax incentives, subsidies, and
benchmarking.
On the local level, numerous associations for developing production were formed during Meiji
to promote trade and manufacture by providing public demonstrations and facilitating support
from financial backers, such as the large and powerful family businesses conglomerates,
zaibatsu. Other factors specific to the time also spurred the industrial development in the
second decade of the twentieth century. One important example is the introduction of
electricity as a source of power as it became available and rapidly adopted in the 1920s. It
gave Japanese firms a jump-start vis-à-vis those in countries that had already gone through
the process. Here, they could bypass to a large extent the need to replicate the hulking waterand steam-powered devices and factory architecture of the earlier industrialization process in
the West while at the same time it maximized Japan’s limited resources. Japan also benefited
from technological support provided by international partners, especially in the chemical
industry. Recent graduates in science and engineering from Tokyo Imperial University learned
to apply concepts of “reverse engineering” as they adapted production methods developed in
Europe to conditions and materials in Japan. With ample supplies of foreign exchange from the
profitable raw silk exports, Japanese industrialists visited European industries and returned
home with new insights and equipment, while engineers and scholars were sent abroad to
study Western science, and foreign experts taught in Japanese institutions. The curiosity and
eagerness to learn were reciprocated as numbers of eager Western tastemakers and artists
arrived in Meiji Japan to be exposed to and bring back items to sustain the craze for Japanese
collectibles and further fan the popularity of Japan-inspired art in Europe and America. Their
Japanese counterparts in turn went overseas to collect designs, books and art objects to
study, adapt and assimilate into new vernacular forms. Among them was an adopted son of
the venerated Tsuwano family, Koreaki Kamei, who on two visits to Europe during the 1880s
studied art history in Germany and assembled a vast collection of Western artifacts, many of
which were exhibited and published in a five-volume catalogue in the late twentieth century.
The textile industry grew fastest and remained the largest Japanese industry until the Second
World War. As the latter half of the twentieth century unfolded, the textile industry in the West
became relatively complacent, while in Japan efforts to improve on previous achievements
continued steadily. Significant among them were advances in fiber manufacture, increases in
speed and automation in spinning, weaving, printing, and apparel making. As an example, new
benchmarks issued by MITI in the 1990s resulted in the complete automation of the
manufacture of tailored garments, utilizing robotics applied to flexible materials among several
other revolutionary fabrication concepts. Today, the mission statements of Japan’s industries
often emphasize and align their goals and objectives with kansei concepts, approaches aimed
at improving the global environment and human life and health through technological advances
with an ultimate goal to tailor products to the preferences of each consumer.
FIBERS AND THEIR PREPARATION
Four major natural fibers were used in traditional Japanese fabrics: hemp, ramie, cotton and
silk. The earliest, hemp and ramie along with other bast fibers from sources such as mulberry,
banana and wisteria, made cool, often coarse summer wear. They continue to be produced up
to the present, mostly as a rare and valued craft. Cotton’s thermal properties made it a useful
fiber for all seasons and for most Japanese people. By contrast, and through the Tokugawa
period, silk was primarily for the elite, and, in the form of raw silk fiber, became Japan’s main
export throughout the Meiji era. From the twentieth century these natural fibers have been
complemented by, and recently surpassed in terms of performance by the manmade fibers of
Japan, including microfiber developments of rayon, nylon and polyester.
Tokugawa sumptuary laws restricted commoners to hemp and ramie in their dress. Cotton was
also allowed once its cultivation was reintroduced in western Japan, first in the sixteenth, and
more full-scale in the early eighteenth century. By the 1830s, some fifty different hybrid cotton
species had been developed, another feature of the jutsu approach that characterizes the
patient and careful utilization of resources. In the Meiji period, the cotton industry was the
focus for dedicated initiatives for progress through the importation of mechanized, and
eventually power-driven spinning equipment. The mule-spinning machine, invented in England
in late eighteenth century, did not catch on in Japan for cotton spinning because it produced a
fine, too-smooth yarn and required heavy labor. Instead, Japanese cotton producers in the
1880s adopted the more recently invented ring-spinning equipment. Manually skilled, lowwage women workers operated the machines which turned out yarn similar to the strong,
coarse homespun that Japanese customers preferred for clothing and bedding. Some spinning
companies blended long-staple cotton with shorter, less expensive fibers to better replicate the
hand spuns. As elsewhere in newly industrialized regions, women were exploited, putting in
long shifts in factories run around the clock. At the same time, and in the spirit of the Meiji era,
labor-saving devices were also encouraged. A Nagano Prefecture farmer’s son, Gaun
Tokimune, invented a manually powered, wooden “rattling spindle” in the 1850s that became
popular thanks to support from local officials who arranged demonstrations and low-cost loans
for the purchase of the new technology. The spindle was in use among small-scale Nagano
cotton spinners in the 1870s, and by the 1880s, waterpower versions of Gaun’s machine were
widespread in Japan. As the industry grew, raw cotton had to be imported, particularly from the
U.S.A.
Sericulture, the production of silk fiber, is a multi-faceted process involving many steps and
considerable skills. Silk larvae of Bombyx Mori species are hatched, reared on mulberry leaves
cultivated for the purpose, and given clean air, space and quiet surroundings to create their
cocoons. The harvested cocoons are then steamed to release their continuous silk filaments
during the reeling process, producing raw silk. In a process called throwing, the silk elements
may then be twisted for greater strength and uses in fabrics like Japan’s famous chirimen
crepe types. Due to the costly process, silk in Japan, as elsewhere, was therefore the fiber of
luxury and prestige, and was reserved for the aristocracy and imperial court until the Meiji
period. In tacit or overt defiance of such sumptuary legislation, Tokugawa lower rank samurai
and affluent merchants nevertheless wore silk, especially in undergarments. Commoners could
wear tsumugi, a silk fabric that used the remnants from the reeling process, spun into yarn,
dyed and made into attractive stripe and check designs. Several small industries, some with a
history reaching back to weaving tribute cloth during the Nara period (710-794) still produce
tsumugi in distinctive styles. Nagano Prefecture, Honshu Island, was the center for sericulture,
and the processing of the cocoons through reeling and throwing were brought to a high level of
expertise. Silk farming became part of an annual, self-sustaining cycle where silk larvae waste
became fertilizer for rice cultivation and mulberry trees prevented soil erosion. Over the
Tokugawa centuries, the Nagano silk farmers engaged in a patient and cautious empirical
process of trial and error. By the mid-eighteenth century over two hundred hybrid varieties of
Bombyx Mori had been developed, an extraordinary jutsu achievement. As part of the culture
of mindful experimentation, information was shared through local associations regarding
proper temperature, feeding, hygiene and noise control; the first handbook on the topic was
published in 1702, and by1840, some one hundred works on sericulture had been published.
As a case in point, the well-to-do Tajima family of Shimamura in Gunma Prefecture invested
time and capital in their crossbreeding practices throughout most of the nineteenth century as
successive generations of the family kept detailed records of experiments and collected
samples of each hybrid type.
Local Nagano farm girls, especially those from Suwa and Okaya, were employed in great
numbers in sericulture’s labor-intensive processes. In texts they were referred to as
“guardians” and “mothers” in their around-the-clock assignations. Over the years, their
diligence and care significantly reduced the time from larvae hatching to cocoon creation which
increased the per-cocoon yield, and made possible, from the 1870s, a second breeding cycle
during the year in artificially controlled climate environments. A laborsaving reeling device,
zaguri, gear-driven and operated by foot-power, was introduced in the middle of the eighteenth
century, but due to quality concerns and a reluctance to abandon traditional methods it was
adopted only cautiously; water-powered throwing machines purchased by Nagano’s
cooperative association initially did not prove successful for the same reasons. Acceptance of
mechanical and automated devices was gradual since there was abundant and skilled manual
labor. Today, the streamlined and sophisticated technology of Japan’s sericulture ranks as the
best, and the most expensive, in the world. There was export of raw silk in limited quantities in
Tokugawa Japan before1853, but Commodore Perry’s arrival accelerated and intensified the
silk trade. It made up a third of Japan’s total export trade through the nineteenth century, due
in large part to the pébrine epidemic which during the 1850s had devastated the European
Bombyx species. The raw silk business was instrumental in several ways to Japan’s
industrialization in spite of the fact that the domestic sericulture also was affected by pébrine. It
was thanks to the highly developed breeding techniques and the many options of Bombyx
subspecies that the disease could be contained. Raw silk export was thus an important source
of foreign exchange, and enabled purchases for essentials to support the industrial
development overall. With the U.S.A. as its largest customer through the early twentieth
century, Japan’s silk exports went into decline during the world recession of the interwar years
which in turn spurred the growth of “artificial silk,” rayon. The cadres of highly skilled, low-wage
workers left jobless in the 1940s after the silk industry collapse represented centuries of
dextrous skills; the Nagano silk women would eventually find employment in the nascent
precision machinery factories, soon to become the electronics industry. Today, a few
Japanese companies still produce silk of superior quality at a price about twenty times that of
rival products from China and Brazil. Even at such cost, some still choose to use it for special
kimono and obi.
Prior to World War I, Japanese chemists and scientists were busy at the task of adapting
purchased Western patent licenses for Japanese conditions to produce a range of modern
materials, among them manmade fibers for fabrics. In 1918 the Imperial Artificial Silk
Company, later renamed the Teijin Company and one of the major fiber producers and
innovators today, successfully produced viscose rayon. By the 1920s, nearly half of Japan’s
manufacturing was devoted to textiles, employing fifty-three percent of the industrial labor force
and providing two-thirds of its total exports, most of it natural fibers. A reason for the
accelerated manmade fiber development in Japan, first rayon and later polyesters, may be
seen as more necessary here than elsewhere when one considers the considerable acreages
needed for large-scale production of cotton and silk. In postwar Japan, the shift from cotton to
synthetic fibers was encouraged and supported in a series of plans drawn up by MITI to
resuscitate the textile industry and chemical production to increase the foreign earnings.
Through the 1960s, Japan’s textile exports were profitable, although its market share was
already then beginning to suffer from lower-wage competition from Hong Kong, Korea, and
Taiwan, the so-called Newly Industrializing Economies (NIE). The acrimonious 1969-72 JapanU.S. textile negotiations were followed by steep increases in raw materials, labor, and fuel
costs, amid growing competition from the NIE. Japanese companies responded by developing
new, value-added high-technology products and equipment, and, in an inversion of events in
the beginning of the century, they entered into agreements to share their own patents and
licenses with NIE countries. Through the last quarter of the twentieth century, Japanese
companies launched innovative products embracing kansei concepts. Many have already
become commercially successful, and others are mainstays in projects for sustainable
development.
A six-year MITI-funded project that ended in 1988 and involved eight fiber producers serves to
illustrate the ambition to lower costs and improve performance of synthetic fibers. The project
was designed, among other things, to raise spinning speed of polyester beyond 6,000 meters
per minute, and involved a thorough review of the process from fiber-making elements to
equipment design. The participating companies reverse-engineered all components involved,
and rebuilt most of the equipment, including winders. The new devices include pressurized
compartments for the spinning solutions and compressed air circulation for the extrusion of
polyester fibers to which “false twist” textures may be added at wind-up speeds higher than
2,000 meters per minute. One outcome of the MITI project was the development of improved
circular airflow input at the fiber extrusion point, at right angles to the spinning direction, which
increased the speed of winding to rates between 3,000 to 8,000 meters per minute. Another
result was that production lines among the major fiber producers could now be completely
unmanned. The spinning process, once the most time-consuming step in the making of
textiles, has now become completely automated.
In the forefront of creating “smart” materials, Japan has safeguarded its inventions through
several hundred patents in this, the second age of synthetic fibers. The concept of kansei in
contemporary textiles depends on microfibers, defined as being finer than one denier -- itself is
a barely visible entity in which a gram’s worth of weight measures 9000 meters. Microfibers, or
subdenier fibers, were first launched by chemical companies in Europe and the U.S.A. in the
1940s. In the 1960s, Kuraray Company in Osaka launched its first artificial leather fabric, and
in 1970, Dr. Miyoshi Okamoto of Toray Industries created a revolutionary fiber, a polymer so
light and fine that a gram of it measured more than fifty miles in length. In the late 1980s, Teijin
Company developed a breathable high-density-polyester woven fabric that emulated the
microscopic roughness and wax-like coating of the lotus leaf and retained water resistance
after thirty washing cycles. Such properties are due to micro-encapsulation treatments applied
to microfibers and serve a range of purposes in fields such as medicine and surgery, high
performance sports, and survival in extreme climates and environments. Today, Japan’s
specialty fibers also include optical, hollow, semi-permeable, and carbon fibers made for
purposes such as electronic, environmental, structural and architectural applications.
Kansei engineering in fiber and fabrics for apparel and decoration are designed to have social
and ambient benefits, and the ability to incorporate sensory features of audible, visual,
olfactory, tactile and thermal properties offering “pleasurable” traits. Among successful
achievements in these respects, Toray Industries reported a new polyester fiber in 1985 that
mimics silk not only in luster, depth of color and soft hand but also in the audible “scroop” and
rustle sounds. The fiber, at the apex of each of three microencapsulated components, has a
microgroove side slit which acts like a tuning fork when rubbed by an adjacent fiber.
Experimentation to achieve color that shifts, changes and intensifies has been carried out at
Kuraray Company, resulting in fibers in which a tubular core is layered between an outer
sheath and an inner, higher-melting polymer. Such fibers may depend on solar light to heat a
fabric that then turns black and can absorb infrared radiation, or take its inspiration from the
shifting colors of butterfly wings, replicating the optical features of reflection, refraction and
interference through its continually changing angles. Fibers or fabric surface treatments that
contain fragrance, insect repellents and the like are popular, and the market for them continues
to grow in areas like lingerie, sportswear, health care and home furnishings. Most of these
features are still of limited durability, but garments made of them can usually withstand at least
thirty wash cycles. Some of the new fibers carry thermal properties that depend on ultra-low
density so that they retain heat by means of void-containing fibers, made by Teijin Company;
other recent fibers made by the Toray Company generate heat using electro-conductivity
through infrared radiation; still others prevent sunburn and impart cooling by embedding
ceramic oxides and dioxides in polyesters such as those of Unitika Ltd. Some of Teijin’s fibers
with wicking action create capillary forces that help absorb liquid sweat, while other
components embedded in microfibers control bacteria and odor – developments that have
promising futures.
FABRIC MANUFACTURE AND TECHNOLOGY
In Japan, evidence of fabric making in the form of imprints on ceramics goes back to the Late
Jomon (1500-200 BCE) and the earliest textile survivals date to the Asuka and Nara periods in
the seventh and eighth centuries. There are fourth- and fifth-century references in texts to
Korean weavers of the Nishiki clan active in Japan, and this family name is applied to a historic
polychrome warp-patterned silk fabric, nishiki. Strong Chinese influences reached Japan in the
early eighth century during the Tang dynasty, and from this period, fine pattern-woven multi-
colored silks were woven for the imperial court in the capital Kyoto’s Nishijin quarters and
somewhat later in Kiryû in Gunma Prefecture on karabikibata, the Chinese draw loom, or on
sorabikibata, a loom with a patterning device still used in parts of Southeast Asia. The takabata
loom, treadle-operated with two or more shafts for a range of standard weaves, arrived from
China in the late sixteenth century and was widely used in small businesses and by some
individual weavers In the putting-out system, a mainstay of the textile industry well into the
Meiji period. Prior to the introduction of power looms, however, most woven fabrics were
created on izaribata, a simple loom frame for plain-woven fabrics tensioned by the weaver’s
body that is still used by many craft weavers. This loom caused uniformity in one respect
regardless of fiber used: Japanese fabrics for commoners and elite alike were narrow, about
30-35 cm wide (c. 12”-14”), a deeply ingrained custom with significant consequences for the
early power loom period. This fabric width, due to the weaver’s reach and comfort zone, is the
premise for all traditional kimono and obi garments, as well as domestic textiles like noren
curtains for homes and shops and futon bedding, and it continued to be the standard format
well into the industrialization during the Meiji era.
The display and use of textiles for clothing and decoration have been of great social and
economic importance in Japanese culture. A textile’s fiber content once designated a person’s
place in the social hierarchy, and a fabric’s design may still today convey explicit meaning
through carefully selected color combinations and in representational and symbolic motifs. The
shape, dimensions and functions of garments and accessories also express messages to a
highly developed degree regarding the wearer’s age, gender, social rank and profession.
Gesture and demeanor further communicate subtle or apparent evidence to observers in
participatory events such as community celebrations, rites of passage, tea ceremonies, and
dramatic performances. Through the centuries, and by decree until the end of the Tokugawa
period, it can be said broadly that hemp, ramie and cotton fabrics were made for and used by
commoners whereas silk was reserved for the elite, as has been noted above. In the late
Tokugawa urban centers of Edo (Tokyo), Kyoto and Osaka, however, such strict delineations
became blurred, and wealthy merchants and samurai prized, for instance, the fine and
precious ramie from Okinawa Prefecture. In an easing of the social strata toward the end of the
period, urban fashions were of intense interest across social ranks, so that commoners’ fabric
designs incorporated sophisticated responses to Tokugawa restrictions by applying lavish,
multiple techniques and processes to humble cotton substrate. Artisans and artists applied
ingenuity and a pursuit of excellence in many regional styles and for distinct and specific
purposes that included freehand resist painting, stencil resist and refined shading of dyes.
The skill and variety in cotton cultivation during the first half of the nineteenth century
described above were matched by creative developments in the colors, designs and textures
applied to cotton fabrics. They include tie-dyeing of warp and/or weft prior to weaving, kasuri, a
technique from Southeast Asia adopted first in Okinawa. The indigo dye process, aizome, was
favored, and used in other techniques as well, such as starch-resist using stencils, katazome,
and free-hand application of paste-resist, tsutsugaki. Textiles in these techniques surviving
from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are today avidly collected for their sophisticated
designs, and are often mistakenly described as mingei, “Japanese folk art.” It is indeed true
that most of the artisans have remained anonymous, one criterion for mingei status, but these
makers were thoroughly professional, and a number of late Tokugawa kasuri producers were
women who became famous for their skills, networking and business acumen. Inoue Den
(1783-1867) in Kurume, Fukuoka Prefecture on Kyushu Island, experimented from the age of
twelve with small-dot kasuri patterns that came to be called kurume-gasuri, as well as pictorial
kasuri designs, e-gasuri. She had many students who in turn opened their own weaving shops
in the surrounding areas, making kurume-gasuri a well-known style and local marketing
specialty. Another kasuri weaver, Kagitani Kana (1782-1864) of Iyo in Shikoku helped the local
industry by creating the Iyo Woven Textiles Improvement Association in 1886 that set
standards for quality control, encouraged exchange of ideas, shared reports on dyestuffs, new
looms and techniques, as well as kogyo dotoku, industrial morality. In woodblock prints of the
late Tokugawa period, upper-class women and geisha appear in such kasuri garments, a
testimony to the upscale popularity of the genre.
In Japan’s transition to modern methods of textile production, the emphasis was on plain
cotton, shiro momen, which dominated the market well above the needs for worsted, ramie,
hemp and silk fabrics. As in the industrialization process of the fiber manufacture described
above, electric power was a great catalyst also for the transformation of the weaving
establishments from hand-loomed manufacture to mass production systems. In other respects
fabric making also followed the successful Meiji formula for progress: foreign advice was
sought through travel abroad, and imported equipment was shown at industrial exhibitions first
in the cities and then in local displays. Meiji government initiatives, competitions and prizes
stimulated and helped diffuse the new knowledge, spreading it to more remote areas.
However, the acceptance of European water-powered broad looms made of iron imported for
the cotton industry was poor. Instead, in a classic example of Japanese jutsu innovation and
adaptation, a simple, light-weight power loom was created to suit local circumstances. Sakichi
Toyoda, a carpenter from the cotton weaving center of Nagoya in Aichi Prefecture, studied the
imported iron looms at government-sponsored exhibitions in Tokyo, and successfully retooled
the concepts into a narrow-width wooden power loom in 1897. Its small size, low price, and
compliance with local fabric-making practices were attractive options for small business
owners. Individual weavers also benefited, as some were able to purchase a Toyoda power
loom with low-interest loans from local organizations so that they could increase their output
and become independent of the putting-out system. Toyoda Loom Works was established in
1906, and Toyoda continued his quest to build better weaving machines, based on assiduous
observation and experimentation. A decade later, the company produced a series of textile
machines, including a version of karabikibata, several new designs for power looms in wood
and iron, and an automatic loom, patented in 1916. The company soon expanded into the
cotton spinning business in both Japan and China with support from the powerful Mitsui
zaibatsu, creating further profits. Son Kiichirô Toyoda was sent to study engineering at Tokyo
University and on his return to Nagoya, he applied systematic research principles to loom
building in the family’s experimental factory established in 1924. Dozens of prototypes were
made of the next loom model, and over two years the workings were closely observed and
tested by many users. Failures and shortcomings were analyzed and corrected, and improved
versions built in production runs of a few hundreds were again subjected to lengthy test runs
and refinements before the new Toyoda loom was deemed ready for mass production. Ten
years later, the company began making automobiles in addition to textile machines, and in
1937 the Toyota Motor Company was founded. Its success in automobile design can also be
ascribed to jutsu.
The silk industry, a category that in Japan includes several different specialties, took a
somewhat different path toward high technology than did the cotton mills. It had a long and
cherished history of privilege and refinement, foremost in the historic imperial capital of Kyoto,
in the city’s Nishijin district. Here, the powerful weaving guilds jealously guarded the secret
technology that produced the elaborately patterned compound nishiki weaves on the
karabikibata looms. Auxiliary enterprises manufactured simpler silks in yardages, some
destined for elaborate, subsequent design applications in shibori textures as well as painted
and embroidered decoration. During the eighteenth century, some enterprising Kyoto silk
weavers sought outcomes elsewhere and left for the prefectures of Ishikawa, Fukui and
Daishõji to escape the restrictions of Kyoto’s guild system. Silk weaving had historically been
practiced in the region of Kiryû in Gunma Prefecture, and the town soon emerged as an
important silk weaving center and competitor to Nishijin.
The weaving of multi-colored patterned compound weaves, kara ori and nishiki, remained the
pride of master silk weavers using hand-operated looms in Nishijin and Kiryû through the Meiji,
Taisho and most of the Showa periods, and a very few still practice this exacting art,
particularly for obi fabrics and Noh drama costumes. An interim development occurred in the
late Meiji with the adoption of a French invention that replaced the karabikibata draw loom
apparatus that required two workers, the weaver and his assistant, with a patterning device so
that a single hand weaver could control the entire process. This mechanism had been in
development throughout the eighteenth century in France, and the ultimate credit for its
perfection was given to a Lyon weaver, Joseph Marie Jacquard, in the early nineteenth
century. Among the Kyoto silk producers, the need to update the technology and reinvent
Nishijin’s silk weaving preeminence was keenly felt after the fall of the Tokugawa and the Meiji
establishment of the new capital in Tokyo. In 1872, the mayor of Kyoto therefore sent three
men to Lyon to become acquainted with French silk weaving methods and to acquire weaving
machinery, the Kyoto silk merchants Sakura Tsuneshichi and Yoshida Chushichi and a
weaver, Inoue Ihei. While Chushichi perished at sea, the others returned the following year
with one Jacquard device and a model of Kay’s fly shuttle. The equipment was studied and
adapted to suit Japanese looms, shown in exhibitions and demonstrated in workshops. By the
1890s, the new technology was in widespread use among Japan’s silk weavers and the use of
the karabikibata loom was gradually abandoned. While power looms and automation of most
weaving equipment took place during the course of the twentieth century, production of the
most elaborate and luxurious silks for one-of-a-kind kimono and obi was still done by hand on
Jacquard-equipped looms in Kyoto’s and Kiryû’s specialty workshops. Some Nishijin silk
producers now outsource the weaving of kara ori and nishiki to skilled hand weavers in China,
and claim that the only difference is possibly detectable only in the quality of the silk. Even so,
the price for these products is now so high that most of the surviving Nishijin and Kiryû silk
specialists are finding other niche markets.
Simple silks, such as hira ori, plain-weave habutai and satin, were no more difficult to adapt to
water and steam-power weaving than plain cotton, whereas crepe, chirimen, continued to be
woven on manual looms well into the twentieth century. As was the case for cotton fabrics, it
was a local adaptation that ushered in the power loom era for basic silk textiles. Yonejiro
Tsuda, a carpenter’s son in Kanasawa, Kaga province, built a power loom designed for silk
weaving in 1895, and as in the case of the Toyoda looms, it was less expensive and more
versatile than the imported ones. In silk-producing regions, trade associations extended loans
to weavers for the purchase of these power looms. In the case of Kyoto’s Nishijin, for instance,
there were sixty such silk manufacturing organizations and twice that many trade associations
in 1931 that supported the capitalization to power looms. One reason for the ready acceptance
was the need for responsible oversight and quality control, and it was the introduction of power
looms that helped achieve the uniformity of standard fabric production. Like Toyota, the
Tsudakoma Corporation is today a large and diversified company specializing in a range of
textile machines and related products. Over the course of the twentieth century, the textile
equipment of the technologically advanced countries made great progress by inventing, at midcentury, high-speed looms that dispensed with the age-old shuttles for weft insertion in favor of
devices such as rapiers, air jets and water jets to propel the wefts into place in the fabrics.
Loom operation was continually improved upon and made faster, quieter and more effective as
they produced wider and longer yardages. Patterned and multi-colored textiles that once
implied elite status due to the costs in time and expert labor are today only marginally more
costly, by comparison, than those of simpler design. At computer-aided design stations in
weaving mills today, scanned imagery is prepared for loom implementation in one design
process, that of designating weave structures and weft color sequences, while only a
generation ago, trained artists painted designs on point-paper, craftsmen created a unique set
of coded cards for the loom, and mill hands mounted chains of cards on the loom in a process
that took weeks prior to the actual weaving. The high-index looms of today make repeated
designs across the width of the fabric an option, but not a necessity as in the past, because
each of the well over 10,000 warp threads can be individually programmed. In highly
industrialized textile industries in Japan and elsewhere, weaving is today completely
automated using robotic labor to assist electronic looms.
In the areas of electronic textile production by means other than weaving, Japan also excels in
making machines for high-speed three-dimensional knitting, multi-head embroidery, digital inkjet fabric printing, and non-woven fabrics. An early triumph was the 1970 creation of a
trademarked fabric, Ultrasuede, made possible by the invention of the new microfibers
described above by Toray Company. This non-woven, high-density fabric has pleasing tactile
and remarkable performance features that spurred fashion designers to exploit its suppleness
and easy care. Efforts to make fabrics with enhanced aesthetic and tactile surface
characteristics have received exceptional attention in Japan. Here, finishing treatments have
moved from artisanal specialties, such as the many variations of shibori resist techniques, to a
science in which topical and mechanical applications provide successful simulations of silk,
cotton, and wool aesthetics while using polyesters, polyamides, and acrylics. Designers such
as Jun’ichi Arai, Yoshiki Hishinuma, Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, and Reiko Sudo have
successfully explored them in fabrics and fashions. These creators frequently state in press
releases and runway statements that the novel characteristics and visual appeal of the
innovative fabrics they use directly evoke and continue traditional Japanese art and design
features. Many of these elaborate surface treatments indeed bring to mind the excellence of
the legendary tsujigahana, “flowers at the crossing” decoration on crisp silk of the Muromachi
(1333-1568) and Momoyama (1568-1600) periods that included a variety of shibori techniques,
embroidery in silk and metal thread, and applied gold leaf. Many of the forms and designs of
these long-ago periods are today applied to fabrics by means of digitally produced images and
new dye technology. At the same time, a small, inexorably dwindling cadre of master
craftspeople at their looms, dye vats and workshops all across Japan’s islands still proudly turn
out their regions’ characteristic textiles. In a similar, perhaps quixotic vision, a few Japanese
fabric companies today are comprehensive in a sense that surpasses the notion of a “vertical”
company, once common in the West, in which all stages in the fabric-making process occur
within one company entity. One outstanding example is the Kawashima Textile Manufacturers
Ltd., founded in 1843 in Kyoto. Today it encompasses a museum, two schools, and a textile
research institute founded in 1990 in addition to its multifaceted fabric production. Among its
wide range of plain and patterned textiles are doncho, monumental hand-woven tapestries
made by large teams of weavers for the Kabuki stage on a scale no longer attempted
elsewhere in the world.