Last summer I took a trip to Nagasaki, where I learned about the history of Kawagoe Touzan, which is a fine cotton striped kimono, often woven in the Kawagoe area and very popular with townspeople at the end of the Edo era. Originally, at the end of the Muromachi period, Touzan was imported by the Portuguese and later the Dutch, from India through the port of Nagasaki. From there, it was carried overland to Kawagoe. At that time there was no cotton grown in Japan, so it was a highly prized and expensive kind of cloth. In around 1624, the cotton industry gets going in Japan, but the cotton threads were short and not very fine. At the end of the 19th Century, when Japan opened up to the west, fine cotton threads from factories in Manchester arrived in Yokohama. The Kawagoe weavers found this cotton and bought it to weave Kawagoe Touzan. This made the cloth famous as it was highly popular for looking and feeling almost as soft as silk.
This story joins up Nagasaki and Kawagoe and the UK, so I thought I would tell the story through making a new kimono fabric. In my design there are turquoise and orange stripes which represent the blue sea of Nagasaki and the foreigners who carried the original Touzan over the sea. (They are often called or depicted as having red beards). The purple and yellow stripes represent Kawagoe, which is famous for purple sweet potatoes and whose city flower is the yellow yamabuki. My favourite colour has always been lime green, so lime green represents this English woman, whose family originally comes from Manchester. The fabric is woven wide and just over 5 meters of the cloth will make one kimono. As the design is asymmetrical it can make several different kimono depending on where the green section is used. Only 200 meters of this cloth exists, so it is a very limited supply. Historically there were restrictions on wearing bright clothing, so Kawagoe Touzan is usually very dull. Now we have no restrictions, so won’t you join me in celebrating this story wearing a brightly coloured Kawagoe Touzan kimono? The cloth is available for order through this website.
Comentarios