A Visit to Rural Japan

A visit to the current show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, "Dressed by Nature: Textiles of Japan," may bring a wide range of thoughts to mind. At least, it did to me. The title refers to the fact that the robes, vests, shoes, jackets, hats, and ornaments on display have been fashioned making use of materials harvested from the fields and forests roundabout. Then again, silk is made by worms and derived from mulberry trees. But there are no silk garments included in the show, as near as I can recall.  This suggests that we need to emphasize the close connection between environments, communities, production, and use. It is that proximity which makes the focus of interest so attractive.

The chief draw of the show is the beauty of the garments on display. But on small video screens positioned throughout the exhibit, we can watch, for example, villagers out in the woods stripping the inner bark off of elm trees. They then scrape this "bask" with various tools to separate the finest and most delicate strands, which they then nimbly tie together into long strands. (I wouldn't want to do it.) These strands are then spun into thicker, stronger, and more uniform threads before being strung up onto the looms on which a particular fabric is woven.

Well, I guess this in the way most cloth is made, in one way or another. But the absence of heavy machinery, and the fact that the people making these clothes will be wearing them in ceremonies and also out in the fields, appeals to our atavistic, 1970s, back to the land, North Woods aesthetic.

Other mini-documentaries are devoted to the production of indigo dye, and yet another depicts a sophisticated wax-resist method of dying cloth

And did I mention the variety and beauty of the fabrics and garments on display?

Years ago, and not for the first time,  I stepped into Indigo—a shop in the warehouse district of Minneapolis that traded in folk art from Africa and Asia. At the time Nodin Press was located in the same building, right across the lobby. John and Mary owned the shop. I mostly saw Mary off taking their Airedale for a walk. John was behind the counter. They used to stock utilitarian bowls from the Machiko kiln in Japan, and we bought several; they were among the few items in the shop we could afford. (I used one of those simple but elegant bowls tonight, forty years later, to make the salmon spread we're having for dinner.)

 Maybe they still do stock those bowls, though they moved their collection to NE Minneapolis when their very attractive long-term lease (signed in the darkest days of the pre-yuppy warehouse district decline) was up. They could no longer afford the rent in that location, and besides, by that time, so many of the warehouses had been converted to high-end condos that there was no longer any free parking to be had nearby.

On that bright morning I spotted a pale blue Japanese vest on a table. It looked like a small rag rug with sleeves. I was on the verge of trying it on when John, kindly as always, spoke up from behind the counter: "Er, that's a collector piece."

I knew what he meant. Something to be hung on a wall, not worn all day in a rice paddy. And more obliquely, something I probably couldn't afford. Sure. I understand. No offence taken. Because what John had said was true. Ragstock was three blocks down the street, out near the Salvation Army and the garbage burner. But I was in Indigo.

And now here I was, standing amid a large, impressive, and well-interpreted multi-room display of such garments. It was grand.

Throughout the exhibit, I found my thoughts drifting in the direction of concepts like "pattern" and "fiber." Yes, vocabulary is destiny. The origin myths of many cultures, including the Hopi and those of the Indus valley, if I'm not mistaken, are tied up with notions of spinning and weaving. We look for fiber in our diet, but do we look for it in our conduct? In our lives?

Maybe that's why young people of my generation were so enamored of jeans. One thing the exhibit makes very clear is that as far as tie-dying is concerned, the rural Japanese surpassed the hippies by light-years. 

One garment on display that appealed  to me especially carried images of a few big carp. I thought this garment might be appropriate for me to wear when I go down to Bassett Creek to measure the water clarity. There are often a few big carp swimming around just upstream from the bridge. This presents a challenge to the researcher because when the carp sees the yellow bucket being dropped into the water from the bridge, he swishes his tail in an effort to get away, thus raising a huge cloud of debris off the creek bottom, and that skews the measurement.

Another attractive aspect of the exhibit was the emphasis on islands. Japan is a nation of more than 6,000 islands, and those pockets of isolation foster native arts and regional idiosyncracy. The Ainu of Hokkaido in the north will be wearing robes made of thick leather and sturgeon skin while the denizens of Okinawa, two thousand miles to the south, are wearing airy clothing woven of wisteria reeds.   

It was just our luck that a guided tour came by while we were at the show lead by the curator Andreas Marks. His tone was bright and his anecdotes were pithy, both of the garments themselves and the adventures of the connoisseurs who had collected them. And there is something charming, and  also strangely ennobling, about listening to a man with a German accent, in the middle of the North American continent, share his knowledge of the banana-peel cloth crafted on remote islands of Japan 

After viewing the show, Hilary and I had lunch on the terrace at the Longfellow Grill. I ordered the seared, sesame-crusted yellowtail tuna salad, with spinach, mixed greens, blistered tomatoes, cucumber, green onion, ginger wasabi dressing, peanuts, and citrus unagi. You can see why.

Later, back home, I pulled a few books off the shelf: Memories of Silk and Straw: A Self-Portrait of Small-Town Japan (c. 1987) and The Kimono Mind: an Informal Guide to Japan and the Japanese, by the iconoclastic architect and cultural historian Bernard Rudofsky (c. 1965). I couldn't locate our copy of  The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty by Yanagi Muneyoshi (c. 1972).

In case this all sounds a little out-of-date, well so are the folk robes of Japan. And let me assure you that in preparation for our visit, we spent several evenings watching the cutting-edge, more than slightly vulgar and outrageous, six-part Amazon Prime series James May in Japan.