Experiencing Shibori Tie-Dyeing with Suzusan: Traditional Textiles Made Modern

It was a sunny day in early spring, the sky blue and bright. The last breath of winter chill was steadily receding from the air. As Team Musubi stepped off the train in the Arimatsu district of Nagoya, the atmosphere of a busy industrial city soon faded away, replaced by the traditional architecture of dark wooden beams and clay-tiled roofs along quiet streets.

Fabric noren hung from the eaves and swayed in the breeze. Each declared “Arimatsu” in assured calligraphy—painstakingly picked out in shibori tie-dye. We had arrived at our destination: a famous Japanese tie-dyeing village with a 400-year history.

Here, we would soon try shibori dyeing ourselves at a workshop led by Murase Hiroyuki, CEO and Creative Director of modern shibori fashion brand Suzusan. Their hand-dyed textiles are part of efforts to sustain the craft amidst the pressures of mechanization and globalization, while remaining relevant for younger generations. As we explored the town and learned from expert artisans, we witnessed the beauty of this traditional craft up close.

At Suzusan’s modish storefront, outfitted in boldly dyed textiles and shibori-textured lampshades that cast a soft light over the scene, the tour started with a story.

“People worked out of their homes. I grew up to the tap-tap-tap of pattern engraving,” said Murase Hiroyuki, Suzusan’s CEO and Creative Director. His father, Murase Hiroshi, specializes in creating stencils for the tie-dyeing artisans to follow. “It was just a part of everyday life. When I was little, I’d go around with my father as he delivered his work. All the old ladies would give me candies,” he recalled with a laugh.

Shibori developed here in the early 1600s thanks to Arimatsu’s location on the Tokaido Road. With Kyoto to the west, Edo (modern-day Tokyo) to the east, and cotton production in the surrounding area, it was perfectly positioned to cater to the thoroughfare’s large volume of travelers. Those passing through Arimatsu bought shibori-dyed tenugui hand towels and yukata robes as souvenirs. This, along with the local feudal lord giving the village exclusive sales rights to shibori-dyed textiles, cemented Arimatsu’s position as the Japanese center of tie-dyeing craft.

As we walked through town, we could see this history on display. Stone pillars reading “Tokaido” marked the street. “The buildings are relatively short because daimyo would pass down this road, and you weren’t allowed to look down on a great lord,” Murase said.

The elderly proprietor of the neighborhood rice shop called out to say hello, and Murase stopped to chat. The locals all seemed to know each other, and the gentle atmosphere of a community where people care about one another hung in the air.

At one point, there were over 10,000 craftspeople in Arimatsu. But Japanese lifestyles changed in the twentieth century, with fewer kimonos worn in everyday life. Commerce changed, too. The start of the Meiji Period (1868–1912 CE) removed the feudal monopoly, and in the latter half of the twentieth century, certain parts of production were sent abroad to cut down on costs. The number of craftspeople dramatically decreased in a matter of just a few decades. The younger generation stopped inheriting the craft. It got to the point where Murase’s father, in his fifties, was the youngest craftsperson in town.

Elderly craftspeople—and now the young artisans at Suzusan, too—help keep the craft alive.

We met one of those long-time craftspeople at our next stop, the Arimatsu-Narumi Tie-Dyeing Museum. There, we watched an elderly woman, Fujiwara Sumie, demonstrate tying techniques.

She greeted Murase with a “You’ve gotten so big!” even though he surely hasn’t grown in about twenty years. It seems it’s just the line of grandmothers everywhere.

“I’ve been doing this since I was eight,” she told us. Now ninety years old, that makes it eighty-two years of tying shibori patterns.

Using a repurposed bicycle hook attached to a fifty-year-old bamboo pole, Fujiwara quickly and steadily wrapped thread after thread around dots marked on a piece of cloth. The dots are made using an engraved pattern transferred to the cloth with water-soluble dye, which easily washes out without getting in the way of the final pigment. Arimatsu families tend to specialize in a particular technique. Murase told us that Fujiwara is the only person able to do this specific pattern.

Displayed in the museum are dozens of examples of these closely-guarded tying patterns. They have evocative names like “storm shibori” (arashi shibori) and “spiderwebs in the willow shibori” (kumoire yanagi shibori). Dazzled by the beauty and variety of the blue and white fabric, we couldn’t wait to learn the basics ourselves.

We arrived at Suzusan’s workshop space, whose classic wooden facade and sliding doors matched the traditional feel of the rest of the street. There, we did the shibori dyeing process in miniature on floaty squares of silk.

First came planning our patterns. Murase demonstrated two: tegumo shibori, which creates angular circles like spiderwebs, and tesuji shibori, which creates charmingly organic stripes.

Each workstation came equipped with a metal stand with a clamp that attached to the table. “Think of this as your third hand,” said Murase. “This is what Fujiwara-san was using before,” only hers was bamboo. “Because humans only have two hands, we use these to hold the fabric in place.”

Tegumo shibori uses a hook to grip the fabric, just like the hook we saw Fujiwara use—only ours were not made out of a seventy-year-old bike part.Murase attached his hook to where he wanted the center of the pattern, then deftly wrapped thread from top to bottom, pulling the cloth taut with his other hand.

Then it was our turn. Excited to start, I didn’t attach the hook properly and it kept falling out. There were several variations of the pattern to choose from, each with different amounts of white remaining after the dye. My coworker Minyi and I tried three. Not knowing how it would look until after it was dyed added to the anticipation.

As we worked, Suzusan staff pulled out a several–meters-long cloth to show us what tegumo shibori looks like before and after the stitches are taken out. It was amazing how narrow the bolt of cloth looked with the stitches, compared to how wide it was without. The thought of doing so many hundreds of perfect ties by hand was mind-boggling.

“There’s a way to get the pattern lined up in even rows,” Murase said. “It’s actually wrapped freehand, without a stencil, just done by feel. A person named Honma-san did it this way. He passed away at ninety-eight, but he taught me his technique.”

The next bolt of cloth had an altogether different feel. “Silk will lie flat again if you iron it,” explained a staff member. “But if you add heat and pressure to this fabric, which is polyester, traces of the shibori remain.”

Suddenly, Suzusan’s sculptural lampshades made sense. So this, too, is inherited from shibori craft. A fan of DIY, I found myself already plotting new home projects for my uncovered bulbs.

Next was tesuji shibori. Instead of a hook, the cloth is held in place with a loop of string. “First, gather pleats,” Murase said. “They can be a bit random, but try to make them even.” Keeping tension in the thread with one hand, the other hand reaches from below to catch the spool, then passes it back up over and over, spiraling the thread down the cloth. “If you wrap while leaving wide gaps between the threads, the cloth will puff out. If you wrap with narrow gaps, less dye will enter. It’s interesting to play around with different widths.”

I tied my own design very tightly, the thread creasing my fingers. It must take real skill to wrap the thread evenly all day long.

The next step took us to a covered outdoor workspace equipped with big sinks, pots bubbling atop portable stoves, and shelves lined with cartons of powdered dye. Tucking our socked feet into rubber sandals, we stepped down onto weathered wooden boards. The sweet smell of sun-warmed grass filled my nose.

First, we soaked our tied-up silks in a bucket of water for a couple of minutes, then plunged them in a pot containing hot water and dye. The vinegary scent of the dye filled the air as Murase stirred with a whisk to encourage the pigment to soak into the whole cloth.

“Shibori is interesting in that you really don’t know how it will come out,” said Murase as we waited the few minutes it took for the dye to set in. “Sometimes even I go ‘whoa!’”

When the timer beeped, we pulled out our fabric and dunked it into cold water. Then it was time to remove the threads we had tied.

Even with a seam ripper to make the job easier, it took a long time to undo the ties. We had to be careful so as not to pierce the fabric. Just imagine undoing hundreds of ties instead of five! As everyone opened up their squares of silk, the room was filled with exclamations of “How nice!” and “Cool!”

Just as Murase had hinted, the final result wasn’t as I expected. There was more white space in my pleats than I intended—perhaps wrapped too tightly to let the dye in—and I couldn’t tell which circular tegumo design was supposed to be which. Yet the colors came out bright and cheerful, with an interesting watercolor feel where green met blue.

My colleagues’ shibori, however, were really well-defined. Minyi’s and Hanako’s bright yellow perfectly outlined different tegumo patterns, while Takahashi’s diagonal stripes beautifully framed a single starburst at the center.

As soon as I had finished ironing mine and the fabric was mostly dry, I tied it at a jaunty angle around my neck. Minyi threaded hers through her belt loops as a pop of color against her jeans. Though it takes years to acquire the skills for Arimatsu-level professional shibori, it was satisfying that even amateurs like us were able to make something interesting.

“Culture isn’t just about museums,” Murase said in his closing remarks. “Culture has an economic dimension, and economics has a cultural dimension. I hope we can successfully bring these two together to build toward the future.”

This is something I think about often as a writer for MUSUBI KILN. Dedicated, hardworking craftspeople all across Japan are making incredible work, but they can’t remain in business and continue creating without a market and demand for their products. Supporting those artisans so their traditions can continue is a big part of why MUSUBI KILN exists. It’s a shared goal between us and Suzusan.

“The fact that shibori has continued for 400 years means there were people who continued to use it for 400 years. If it stops being used, it stops being made, and the need to make it disappears. All of you using shibori in your daily life leads to our future, so I would like to thank you again,” Murase continued.

“My father said in 2008 that this industry would be gone in another fifteen years, but now eighteen years have passed, young people in the industry have increased, and a new future my father hadn't imagined has emerged.”