By Isla Quinn
Tie-dye has a reputation for being loose. Arimatsu’s version is about thread, and a great deal of it.
Arimatsu sits in the south-eastern suburbs of Nagoya, on the old TÅkaidÅ road. The Aichi Prefecture tourism page says the town was established in 1608 by the former Owari Province, and that residents took up tie-dyeing as a side occupation because they had little arable land. That is a plain, practical beginning, and the sources that follow keep to it.
The Bungo story
The Japan Traditional Crafts site, Kogei Japan, tells the origin this way. Dyeing began in the early Edo period when people from Bungo, now Åita, came to build Nagoya Castle between 1610 and 1614. A man named Shokuro Takeda settled in Arimatsu and made the first shibori towels from local cotton. In 1655, the account continues, a woman from Bungo introduced what was called Bungo shibori, which led to Miura shibori. The names Arimatsu and Narumi come from travellers buying the cloth at Narumi-juku, a TÅkaidÅ post station. The tourism page gives 1608 for the town’s founding, while Kogei Japan dates the cloth to the castle-building years a little later. Those do not conflict, since one is a town and the other a trade. Both are single-source accounts, and we have not seen the primary records.
What shibori means
Wikipedia’s article on shibori describes six main methods. Kanoko is tie-dye done by binding with thread. Miura uses a looped binding made with a hooked needle. Kumo is pleated and bound into a spider-web design. Nui is stitched and gathered. Arashi wraps cloth round a pole to make diagonal patterns. Itajime clamps cloth between shaped boards as a resist. Kogei Japan says Arimatsu and Narumi use more than a hundred kinds of tie-dyeing method, which is a far bigger number than six, and the two are not in conflict, since the article lists the main families.
For age, the Wikipedia article says the oldest surviving examples date to the mid-eighth century, around 756, among items donated to TÅdai-ji temple. The sources we read do not say whether any of those pieces were made in the Arimatsu manner, and we are not drawing that line.
The cloth and the colour
Kogei Japan gives the cloth as cotton, specifically Mikawa cotton from Aichi Prefecture, and the dye as indigo. It says a bolt is dyed more than twenty times and that taking out the thread afterwards takes three to four days per bolt. It also lists tying tools by name: ukodai, karasuguchidai, kanokodai and makiagedai. The same page says the blue comes from the Asiatic dayflower, which is an odd claim. The plant most associated with Japanese indigo is Persicaria tinctoria, which a Wikipedia article describes as a plant whose green leaves hold indigo precursors and which it calls the most important blue dye in East Asia until Indigofera arrived. We cannot reconcile the two, so we are naming the disagreement and not choosing. The dye plant is a good question for a maker.
The same page says Arimatsu and Narumi tie-dyeing is designated a traditional national craft. We have not checked the designation with the government listing.
A street that burned
The tourism page tells a second story, about the town rather than the cloth. A major fire in 1784 destroyed more than half of it. The residents rebuilt with thick plaster walls, tiled roofs, latticework windows and udatsu, rooftop load-bearing walls, as protection against the next one. The page says the Hattori Residence began operating as a shibori wholesaler in 1790. It adds that Arimatsu was Nagoya’s first Important Preservation District for Groups of Historic Buildings, in 1984, and that a later designation, in 2016, covered a stretch along the TÅkaidÅ. We have not walked the street and are repeating the page.
The Hattori Residence is a building named on the tourism page and not a recommendation, and we have not checked whether it is open to visitors.
Counting years, and symposia
Two small details help date the trade. Kogei Japan says the first International Shibori Symposium was held in 1992 and that shibori is now recognised worldwide. The bibliography of the Wikipedia shibori article cites a 2007 DVD titled as a celebration of 400 years of Arimatsu and Narumi shibori. A DVD title is not evidence, and it lines up loosely with the early seventeenth-century dates above. We mention it only because it shows how locals count the trade’s age.
A resist that stopped
Not every shibori method survived. Wikipedia says beni itajime, a clamped-board resist, was produced into the early ShÅwa period, and that the last dyeworks making it closed in 1932. We have not found a source that says whether anyone makes it now, and the article does not connect it to Arimatsu. It is a useful reminder that a technique can disappear in a few decades even when the word for it lives on.
What we could not find
None of our sources says how many workshops still work in Arimatsu, how many dyers are under the age of fifty, or which workshops sell to the public. We will not guess. The museum, the town’s tie-dyeing museum, runs demonstrations according to the tourism page, but we have not confirmed hours or current programmes.
Questions for a stall or a studio
Ask which method was used on the cloth in your hand, and how many times it was dyed. Ask what the fabric is and where it was woven. Ask what dye was used, and whether it is natural indigo or a synthetic. Ask who tied the pattern, since tying and dyeing may be done by different people. Ask how to wash it, because our sources do not say.
If the numbers above hold, this is slow work. How long a piece took is a fair question to ask.
We are not naming a workshop. We have not sourced one for this piece.
Roam first. Shop later.
If you work shibori in Arimatsu or Narumi, the process for getting listed is at /sell-with-sephari/