Japanese Craftsmen

Japanese craftsmen produce many kinds of traditional artifacts and crafts. Not only foreign people, but also we, Japanese, are moved by their elaborate works.

“Kyo-yuzen (yuzen dyed-fabrics)” is one of the traditional artifacts that those craftsmen produce. This is a famous, traditional way of dying for fabrics in Kyoto. The making of “Kyo-yuzen” is divided into several parts such as sketching, dying, drawing pictures, etc. And, each process has its own professional craftsman.

These pictures are the scenes of drawing pictures. The cloth is so big that it is used to make a kimono.  The craftsmen keep sitting for a long time to draw complicated pictures. The position where the pictures are drawn is fixed in advance, and it takes two or three weeks to complete a cloth. The whole process needs great concentration and patience.

It also takes very long time to be a true expert of the first rank. Those who want to be a real craftsman are required to start working as apprentice in their youth. Tough and hard studying, working and supporting their masters for years, they will gradually become real craftsmen.

However, because of the diversification of job varieties, less and less young people want to be craftsmen; further, considering the reducing population, the numbers are and will be reducing rapidly in Japan. In the mean time, those craftsmen are getting old, and they are facing serious successor problems everywhere in the crafts industry. It is a true tragedy if those techniques are not succeeded in the next generation and simply lost…

“Convey those precious and a wealth of Japanese traditional culture all over the world” - this is Focus Japan’s role and what we are aiming for.

Written by Yabuuchi