Kokura-ori is a special product of Buzen Kokura (present-day Kitakyushu City), and is a thick, durable cotton fabric with an attractive three-dimensional vertical stripes of varying shades of color. During the Edo period, it was used as a samurai's hakama and obi, and in the early Showa period, the 350-year-old tradition was said to have ended. It was restored in 1984 by Noriko Tsuki, a local dyer and weaver who is Yao Tsuki's aunt. ``Shimajima'' by Yao Tsukijo is a wide cloth that inherits the characteristics of traditional Kokura-ori. ``Shimajima SHIMA-SHIMA'' is a brand that has started a new history by taking advantage of the durable and beautiful vertical stripes that are characteristic of Kokura-ori and by making use of modern designs.

Written by Yao Tsukijo

I was born and raised in Kokura, Kitakyushu City, Fukuoka Prefecture, and it has been 12 years since I started working with Kokura Ori, a traditional textile of the region. Cloth has always been something familiar to me. My mother ran a textile brand franchise called ``NUNO'' in Roppongi, Tokyo, and my aunt was a dyer and weaver, and the ``tapping'' sound of weaving was a natural sound in our daily lives. But there was me, a teenager, who was mostly uninterested.

During my university years, I studied abroad and ended up living in Taiwan. By interacting with international students from all over the world, I became aware of cultural differences for the first time and became conscious of my own country. This happened when I was invited by a friend I met in Taiwan who was from an indigenous tribe to spend the night in eastern Taiwan, where the indigenous people live. The sun sinks below the horizon in the midst of nature, with no tall buildings in sight. Native friends and their companions wear colorful ethnic costumes and sing ethnic songs with smiles on their faces. I still vividly remember the time when he picked a famous fruit called Shakadou from a branch and handed it directly to me.

For the first time, I realized the importance of something that can only be found there. In Taiwan, I learned about the unique traditions and culture of the land, and at the same time, I became more interested in Japanese culture and the textiles that were familiar to me.

"Ogura-ori" is a thick, durable, smooth cotton fabric with distinctive vertical stripes. It was used by samurai as a hakama, and during the Meiji period it became popular as a school uniform for boys, but it disappeared in the early Showa period. After a gap of about 50 years, in 1984, my aunt, Noriko Tsukijo, a dyer and weaver, restored and revived the textile by hand and exhibited it at the Japanese Traditional Crafts Exhibition. In 2007, her mother and I launched the machine-woven Kokura-ori brand "Ogura Shima-jima." While the 140cm wide cloth continues its tradition, it is also becoming a more modern general-purpose item, and its use is expanding to other fields such as fashion and interior design.

We want the new era of Kokura-ori to be accepted not only in Japan but also around the world, so we have started exhibiting at trade fairs in Europe and have also made connections in Asia. Through communication with shops and agents in countries such as Italy, France, Taiwan, and Singapore, the path that Kokura Ori would take gradually became clearer. In Singapore, in collaboration with Yusuke Shibata of HULS Co., Ltd., we developed Kokura-ori fabric that was inspired by the local Peranakan culture, and were able to communicate the traditions of both countries from a new perspective of cultural fusion.

In July 2019, Kokura Textile Manufacturing Co., Ltd. was established. We were able to restore the foundation of the manufacturing industry in Kokura. Due to its high density, Kokura-ori only has a striped pattern, and it is a stubborn fabric that requires a lot of force to weave, but as time passes, new values ​​are added and Kokura-ori continues to evolve.

Although I am not a maker myself, I would like to work to support manufacturing through the management of craft production. Now, as a mother of a one-and-a-half-year-old boy, I am taught the meaning of life through an experience far beyond my imagination.

Threads are spun from cotton, and the warp and weft intersect to create textiles, and this tradition has been nurtured. I, too, live in the present and am a thread heading toward the future. It may be a thin thread, but I just hope that we will not forget our gratitude to our predecessors, and that we will use the many encounters we have as weft to vividly weave a new path forward.