鳥取の民藝と吉田璋也Discovering Mingei in Tottori: The Living Legacy of Shoya Yoshida

Mingei, the “folk craft” that Soetsu Yanagi (1889–1961) once proposed. As the Mingei movement spread across the country, people appeared in many places who, in contact with Yanagi, collected the Mingei of their own hometowns. Mingei is basically craft born from the historical life of people in rural settlements, and there was much Mingei that someone like Yanagi, working in Tokyo, could not reach.

The region I would recommend to anyone interested in Mingei is Tottori Prefecture. The large Mingei museum today is the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo, but sadly there you can only look at the exhibits and cannot actually use them. Mingei developed uniquely under the influence of the climate and nature of the land where people live, and it is only when you actually use it that you can understand its essence.

In the midst of the Mingei movement, Shoya Yoshida (1898–1972), a physician born in Tottori, left great achievements. Yoshida took up the movement in sympathy with Yanagi's Mingei movement as a medical student, and tried by trial and error to bring the beauty of Mingei into everyday life. He made his own clinic a space full of the Mingei he had collected, but his important achievement was that he ran about to create three occasions for people to meet Mingei: “appreciation, purchase and use.” Building that environment took thirty years.

In 1932 he opened the “Tottori Takumi Craft Store” for “purchase.” In 1949 he opened the “Tottori Folk Craft Museum” for “appreciation” across from his clinic, and in 1962 the “Takumi Kappo restaurant” for “use,” where one can enjoy dishes of Tottori wagyu served on Mingei tableware.

Through Yoshida's efforts in building this wonderful environment in which many Japanese could actually touch Mingei, a unique place where one can truly enjoy Mingei still today was born in Tottori City, the only one in Japan. Several facilities exhibit Mingei around the country, but there is no environment that lets you enjoy it so ambitiously, and it gives a wonderful experience.

Mingei covers craft used in daily life as a whole, and one thing counted among Tottori's outstanding Mingei is kasuri (絣). Kasuri tends to be thought of as a kimono even in Japan, but it is in fact one of the “techniques of weaving.” Its feature is a special technique of making patterns by weaving with warp threads, weft threads, or both, dyed in advance.

When pre-dyed kasuri thread is used for the warp it is called tate-gasuri, for the weft yoko-gasuri, and for both tate-yoko-gasuri. That is, cloth dyed after weaving is not kasuri. The materials are mainly silk, cotton and hemp, depending on the producing region.

The technique itself has spread around the world, but it demands considerable skill: when dyeing the threads, one must imagine the pattern that will result and keep the places one does not want dyed from taking dye. Whether to dye or not is decided according to the design, and it is so delicate a technique that the pattern collapses if even one thread goes wrong in the weave.

Because mass production of kasuri was encouraged in many places in the late Edo period, it is said that more than 100 kinds exist across Japan. Most producing regions, however, are found in western Japan. The most famous are Ehime's Iyo-gasuri, Fukuoka's Kurume-gasuri and Hiroshima's Bingo-gasuri, and there are also Gunma's Isesaki-gasuri, Aichi's Sasa-gasuri, Kagoshima's Satsuma-gasuri, Tokyo's Musashi-gasuri, Okinawa's Ryukyu-gasuri, Nara's Yamato-gasuri, Shiga's Omi-gasuri and others.

The reason thought to explain this concentration in western Japan is the route by which kasuri reached Japan. The established view today is that kasuri originated in India, came by a southern route through Southeast Asia, including Thailand and Laos, to Okinawa, then reached Kurume in Kyushu, where it developed greatly, and spread from there across Japan.

Yet it is known that a prototype of kasuri existed in ancient Japan. The name kasuri took hold only from the Edo period, but because strict clothing regulation was in force in the Edo period, people in many places devised ways to heighten the beauty of kasuri.

In Tottori two kasuri are known, Yumihama-gasuri and Kurayoshi-gasuri, and in neighboring Shimane there is Hirose-gasuri. On this trip I saw Yumihama-gasuri and Hirose-gasuri; Yumihama-gasuri peaked in production from the mid-Edo period to the early Meiji era, and its survival is now in doubt because the number of makers has fallen sharply.

The Yumihama area, where Yumihama-gasuri is made, has long been known as a source of high-quality cotton and indigo, and the two together formed a superb kasuri culture. Before production expanded, it is thought that farm women basically wove it for their families.

More than a hundred years have passed since Yanagi's Mingei movement began, and as a reaction to an overly industrialized society grows among the Japanese too, a life with Mingei is beginning to be reappraised. Without people like Yanagi and Yoshida, the Mingei of the whole country would long since have been lost. I cannot help feeling that Mingei now teaches us the importance of the life we have lost.