Snow Country Like Japan © Donlon 2006

We had been visiting Suziki Bokushi’s snow country; the region in present Niigata Prefecture which receives the moist Siberian current’s wind and, when slid up the spine of jagged mountains, converts it to snow—a dozen or more feet of it. Bokushi’s charming narrative of the local’s stories and means of living in this white world, Hokuetsu Seppu, was translated as “Snow Country Tales” (and was source material for Yasunari Kawabata’s much more widely known novel, “Snow country,” which mostly uses the folk lore as back drop for intrigue and a love story.

Now, the roads are modern, with rows of disks down the center to squirt snow removing warm water in the winter and the farmer’s once prized oxen have given way to squat, tough tractors. But the small, carefully cultivated stepped paddies still produce rice reputed to be “the best in the world.” In the old days, the tiny fields were repeatedly flooded to keep the snow off. So, as the adjacent areas were layered, again and again with snowfall, the farmers could be seen going to work with ladders, necessary to climb down ten or 12 or 14 feet to the prepared seed beds below.

Long winter months fostered indoor craft, as you might imagine. While in the prefecture, we spent some time examining the design and setting of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples—shrines are always Shinto and temples are always Buddhist. The shrines we visited were also usually smaller, simpler, set in a copse of trees, through a dignified usually red post & lintel “gate,” or torii with an arrow-straight approach—none of this “meandering curves to increase visual interest” stuff for these folks. Our hosts for our holiday, friends and colleagues with a “cottage” in the mountains, noticed our interest. We are all interested in what the Japanese call “mingae” or folk crafts.

Jocelyn and I had described earlier work we’d done, reporting on Louisiana’s program to collect alligator eggs, distribute them to commercial ‘gator farms, and monitor the eventual release of a portion of the healthy young back into the wild. This work guarantees a better fit with the optimum carry capacity of available habitat and supports the regional economy, since the skin is a valuable export product. We “followed” a Louisiana alligator skin through the process to a tannery in rural France, an international sales fair in gay Paree, distribution depots in a couple of places in Italy and then, perhaps most interesting for us, to a wonderful fine craft cottage industry shoe maker who brought into being the designs of Manolo Blahnik.

Prior to that experience, even watching Sarah’s gams on “Sex In The City”—as Carrie Bradshaw-- it was hard to see how a shoe—each shoe—could be worth $500 (or a grand a pair). Blahnik, from Santa de La Palma in the Canary Islands, makes a solid line of dependables, a little less avant guard, for $300 a pair, too. He does it all, from sketching the idea in swift strokes of his Tombo Japanese Brush pen (a favorite of Manga artists) to cutting the heel.

However, driving with Geraldo, a suave skin merchant in North Italy to the “shoe town” near by and hearing about the level of craftsmanship and the cost at each step, so to speak, and then watching the torturous process as each tiny bit of alligator hide was gently persuaded, tapped, glued, bradded, stitched, or caressed into its place—all without surface blemish--made us believers.

In Japan, we’d seen beautiful kimono, often displayed on a wood rod after the fashion of fine art. They can be very expensive; finely tailored and created in elegant fabric. Suzuki Bokushi’s home town has also been known for making silk kimono textiles. (In Kawabata’s novel the woman about to become a geisha lives in a former silkworm loft when she is having the fatal affair.) Like the superb luxury of fine alligator shoes, once you appreciate the enormous complexity of the process of creating a traditional silk kimono, the asking price no longer seems remarkable—a thing to remark upon.

Just a few blocks from a fine little museum which celebrates the scribe’s life we stopped to visit a silk weaving center. On one table at the silk kimono cottage factory, as examples, we saw a plate of marshmallow-sized silk bolls, spun by that unique caterpillar, specially fed on mulberry leaves; a bug whose husbandry goes back into dim antiquity. Best known for fine fashion wear today, silk was widely used as early armor (a feature unmentioned at the cottage factory). The fibers are so tough that “stand off weapons” such as arrows, darts, or fleshetts, would push the tightly woven cloth into the wound rather than cut through. This fact made it much easier to remove the projectile and very much reduced infection. The only “slings and arrows” most of us face now are of mere outrageous fortune of dumb luck, and neither fine silk nor ice-cream colored polyester leisure suits guarantee much protection.

The hair-tiny worm filaments are combed into threads, and threads twisted into yarn. In the small factory, we could watch a row of “spools” (paper rolls about as big as one’s calf wrapped with yarn) being uncoiled onto a long wooden frame. The yarn mistress placed a tea saucer on top of each spool, very much like the bail of a spinning reel, to control and “open” its loops as the stuff came off the roll. Back and fourth she walked, to bundle the gathered bunch collected from 20 or so spools, each managed by its own saucer, the thread sliding gracefully around the slick, glossy edge.

The weaving of the textile is done with a machine having the same attributes of a hand loom but, if you imagine, for example, the Turkish kilim loom (or other rug looms) being massively built, squarish, tall and reminiscent of an upright piano (though, of course, bigger), the Japanese silk kimono loom is much more lightly constructed, narrow and long, reminiscent of the bowling game in an arcade---it has a very long bed. As is typically the case, a bullet-shaped cock is shot one way and then back as the long yarns or threads are raised and lowered, usually with a foot treadle; it trails the horizontal threads in its wake.

In short, this is a great deal of hand work, by skilled, attentive crafts folk, exactly as was the case with the production of the luxury goods we saw in Italy. Indeed, chatting with a designer handbag maker in Milan he showed us a loom there perhaps 10% the size of the silk kimono fabric one: it created the special gold material for his purses. There is essentially no way to reduce the process or simplify the procedure and maintain the integrity of the creative moment of these truly luxurious goods.

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