A Life in One Color: Japanese 97-year-old grandmother writes about life in dyeing and weaving, named a national treasure on earth

Shimura Fukumi: A lifetime of dyeing a single color

In January 2021, the publication of "A lifetime of one color" brushed the screen,

Douban rating as high as 9.2,

Those who read it were amazed at the book's "broken beauty,"

More impressed is the author of the Shimura Fukumi The legendary and inspiring life of Fumi Shimura:

At thirty-two, divorced with two small children,

Started dyeing and weaving in order to earn a living,

At forty, held her first exhibition of her works,

At sixty-six, recognized as Japan's "National Treasure of the World"

At ninety, received the "Japanese Nobel Prize".

At the age of ninety, she was awarded the Kyoto Prize, which is known as "Japan's Nobel Prize."

Yasunari Kawabata said of her works:

"In the elegant and subtle color scheme,

there is a humble and honest heart for nature."

Woven with plant-dyed silk threads of various colors, Split

A Life in One Color is a book written by Fukumi Shimura when she was 58 years old,

which looks back at the first half of her life

and her thoughts on plants, nature, and life in general.

Nearly four decades later, the book has finally been translated into Chinese,

and we took the opportunity to interview the 97-year-old grandmother, Fumi Shimura,

as well as her daughter and grandson,

and visit the workshop and art school she founded in Kyoto,

where she wrote, "For 900 years we have been dyeing the same way,

and we've been doing it in the same way,

but it's not the same way. dyeing in the same way,

dyeing thread, spinning it, weaving it, making it into clothes,

and decorating ourselves with such clothes,

carrying very different emotions than buying them, I guess."

Autobiography | Fukumi Shimura Shoji Shimura

Writing | Yu Xuan Editorial Shi Ming

One Color, One Life is a collection of autobiographical essays by the Japanese dyer and weaver Fukumi Shimura, which was published in 1982, and won the Daihojiro Prize (one of the highest literary prizes in Japan) the following year. From then until now, this small book of more than 100,000 words has been a bestseller in Japan for more than 30 years.

The book records how she made dyeing solutions from roots, stems, flowers, fruits, and branches of different plants, how she made blue dye, how she wove fabrics, and all the thoughts she gained from dyeing and weaving, which are about colors, plants, nature, and life.

For example, "Color is not just mere color, it is the essence of grass and trees." "Sufang is the color of a woman's heart, and is likened to red tears. In this crimson world dwells the holy women and the harlots, who have the same deep feelings of a woman." Beautifully written and poetic.

From top to bottom are: "Cherry Blossom Attack" 1976, "Gardenia Ironing Eye" 1970, "Hook Orchid" 1987, "Pine Wind" 2003, all created by Shimura Fukumi, and collected by her personal collection and by the Shiga Prefectural Museum of Modern Art respectively

Shimura Fukumi has had a number of friendships with a number of masters of the folk art of Japan, and Yanagi Sogetsu, Tomimoto Kenkichi, Kawai Kanjiro, Inagaki Minoru Jiro, etc. have given her guidance. Jiro Kawai, Minoru Inagaki and others have given her guidance. She was also inspired by Goethe's Theory of Color, Steiner's The Nature of Color, and Mondrian's works. Even though she started dyeing and weaving in her middle age, Fumi Shimura has been actively engaged in her work with a strong talent for color and a spirit of hands-on experimentation.

She used the most common Japanese folk weaving technique, "? The small cracks (pieces of cloth) she makes with the most common Japanese folk "weaving" are so subtle in color that they are hard to imitate: blue and yellow intertwined, like the echo of the sky and the earth, black and white mixed weaving, like a village covered with snow, horizontal checkerboard, meter pattern, parallel lines ...... are not just patterns, but also like a wonderful painting.

Note: ? (chóu) weaving", Japanese vocabulary, the silk threads twisted by hand to intersect horizontally and vertically to weave.

Fumi Shimura at the 2014 Kyoto Prize Ceremony

Fumi Shimura has long been recognized for her achievements in Japanese craft and literary circles. As early as 1990, she was honored as a "National Treasure of Humanity," and in 2014, she was awarded the Kyoto Prize, known as Japan's Nobel Prize, for her "insistence on plant-dyed silk threads as her visionary work at a time when chemical dyes are flourishing. dyed silk threads as her visual language, and then weaving a thousand variations of her work, merging man and nature in textiles." In 2015, she was awarded the Order of Culture, Japan's highest national honor.

She also opened Arts Shimura, an art school dedicated to promoting the art of dyeing and weaving. Here, students dye, weave, and cut their own clothes, and many of them say that the experience of wearing such handmade clothes is completely different from that of buying them!

In January of this year, the Chinese version of One Color, One Life was finally translated and published after five years. We took this opportunity to connect with 97-year-old Grandma Shimura. Because of the epidemic, Grandma Shimura is currently living in a sanatorium in the suburbs of Kyoto. Through the video, we can see that she is thin and old, with white hair like snow, but only the perseverance revealed in her expression is similar to that of her youth.

She told us that "one color" is not limited to the blue dye that she has spent her life working on, "every color is a treasure for me to cherish in my life".

Here is Fumi Shimura in her own words:

Halfway through her career as a dyer

Fumi Shimura as a young woman

When I was 32 years old, I was divorced, with two children, and didn't know what to do. At that time, I happened to be communicating with Ryu Soetsu, the founder of the folk art, and he said to me, "Your mother can weave, so you should go and weave, too." So I decided to return to Konoha and make a living by dyeing and weaving.

This decision was strongly opposed by my mother. It was a time when chemical dyes were flourishing, and grass-dyed, handmade fabrics represented poverty, backwardness, and endangerment. She slipped over a ticket back to Tokyo and told me never to return. I left in despair, but as if pulled by an invisible thread, I returned to my mother again.

Cracks woven with plant-dyed silk threads

Once I got into it, I was mesmerized, and what unfolded in front of my eyes was a wonderful world that I could never have done in my entire life. I was like Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole, peeking into a magical land:

The coral color that can be dyed on the plum branches in early spring is like a blush on the cheeks of a young girl.

Blue-dyed urns, water shallow onions, cyan and other different degrees of blue, as the ocean and sky.

In early winter, boiled and ripe gardenia fruit, get warm and dazzling golden color.

There is also the reddish color dyed with sufon, the cherry color that is as beautiful as a cloudy haze, and so on.

When I was so poor that I couldn't afford to buy a tablecloth, I had to put my children in the home of their foster parents in Tokyo, and learn the basics in the dyeing and weaving workshops in Omi. I wanted to have an income so that I could at least afford to buy silk thread, and I also wanted to bring my child to me as soon as possible.

My mother suggested that I visit a woodworker, Tatsuaki Kuroda, a man who, she said, would never compromise on his work, no matter what kind of poverty he endured. "Work sometimes seems like hell, and life is hard, so I can't advise you to take that path. But if you decide you have no choice, then do it. Start by weaving the clothes you want to wear, and you can put the future out of your mind for a while and just focus on the work in front of you." Mr. Kuroda said to me.

Hearing these words, I made up my mind that I would go down this path no matter what. It seems very natural for a woman to stay by her husband and children, cooking, washing, and doing housework. For the woman herself who goes with the flow and lives on smoothly and comfortably, today I would look at it in a different light. I have to paddle against the current, alone.

My mother said:

You will never make anything better than this

Part of "Square Tattoo," 1957

By Fumi Shimura

My first work, "Square Tattoo," which I made with the encouragement of Mr. Kuroishi, was selected for the Fourth Japanese Traditional Crafts Exhibition.

That night, I quietly took silk thread from my mother's basket and wove an obi. I knitted almost obliviously, and by the time the obi was finished, it was early in the morning the next day. When my mother, who was bedridden at the time, saw the belt, she said happily, "It's worth it to make it this far, even if you lose the election. You did your best."

"Autumn Kasumi," a masterpiece by Fukumi Shimura

Awarded a prize at the Fifth Japanese Traditional Crafts Exhibition

My first award-winning kimono was "Autumn Kasumi". This kimono was made by joining together leftover threads from a common peasant woman's home.

In the past, Japanese peasant women used to weave leftover threads together, which was called "kisen". This kimono is simple, but I think it's very modern, with green, blue, and cyan, and white threads in between.

When I first made it, I showed it to my mother, and she said, "You'll never make anything better than this." And sure enough, it was. Looking back on it now, there's nothing outside of "Autumn Haze" that can top it.

After this, I created a series of works such as "Bell Bugs", "Tanabata", "Fog", and "Moon". Sitting in front of a loom and casting the shuttle to guide the weft, I would inadvertently feel like plucking a harp. The warp threads set a certain tone, and the yarns are the part that can be improvised. If I can find the right color, the threads will be sucked in as if they were sucked in, and snapped into the weaving pattern steadily, and this is the charm of weaving. The charm of weaving.

Bellbugs 1959, Tanabata 1960, Ashigara 1961

Fumi Shimura, Shiga Prefectural Museum of Art Collection

One day in 1982, I received a strange phone call from an unknown person, who reported that an old alder in front of his house had been damaged. [The other end of the line "reported" that an old alder tree in front of my house had been felled, and the wood chips spilled out onto the ground, coloring the ground red like blood flowing from the tree, and asked me if I could use it to dye cloth.

Hanging up the phone, I immediately prepared a car and went out. After arriving at the scene, I saw that around the huge stump, the land had been dyed tea-red, which was dyed by the sap stored in the hundreds of years old ancient alder trees. I immediately recognized that this is the wood can be used to make dyes, so do not dare to delay, hastily peeled off the bark into a bag, down the mountain.

A cauldron was set up to boil the bark, and the liquid in the cauldron turned a transparent golden-tea color as it heated. Then the silk threads were put into the filtered dyeing liquid and dyed repeatedly, and finally the color was fixed with wood ash water, and the silk threads became reddish copper color. That was the color of the alder's essence. I felt that the alder had come back to life.

Snowy Lake Biwa in Fukumi Shimura's hometown (left)

Split of "Snowy Lake Biwa" (right)

Later, I wrote down this story in "A Life in One Color," and I wanted to say that what I had obtained from these plants was no longer just color, but that the life of the plants behind them was being revealed to me through color. It was the plants talking with their own bodies. So when taking color, we must respect the plants and cherish them.

Doing plant dyeing is like raising a child gradually

Looking back now, I feel and experience plant dyeing stronger than weaving. From the point of view of craftsmanship, obtaining quality materials is the first thing, the foundation.

When I first began to dye and weave, I used to hang my chemically dyed silk threads and my mother's plant-dyed threads together. In comparison, my mother's threads dyed more than ten years ago were soft, shiny, and full of life, while my own threads were dull. Then the dye craftsman Serizawa-suke reminded me, "Throw the plant-dyed fabric into the wilderness, and the two will blend together." After that, I resolved to do only vegetable dyeing.

When it comes to plants, we assume that green is the easiest to dye, but incredibly, there is no separate green dye; it needs to be a mixture of yellow and blue to get it. Yellow is dyed with Phellodendron Bark, Green Cottonwood, Gardenia, and Fuchsia, and then blended with blue to get green.

I have also tried to make the dye by pouring large red rose petals into a large pot. As soon as it was heated, the petals immediately oozed a thick carmine-colored juice, which then turned to a light red. I thought it could be dyed, but it turned out not to be red. The truth of color is like a parable that tells the meaning of "color is emptiness".

I had the good fortune to have a piece of silk thread dyed by Shigeisuke Fukami in 1901, and I was attracted to the color at first sight. At first sight, I was attracted by the color. In a trance it was no longer a bundle of threads, but a scroll of sutras.

The thread is red with a slight yellowish tinge, similar to a burning flame. This deep Xi dyeing, dyeing a consistent thread to use a hundred Guan Xi root, taking a year and a half, and then to alternately dip in the dye and wood ash water one hundred and seventy times in order to be dyed, and if in the one hundred and sixty-ninth missed, the previous work is over. So dyeing is like cultivation, as Mr. Liu Zongyue said, "Dyeing is dyeing the heart."

"Water Glaze" is in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

As I recall, my mother always loved to wear blue-dyed clothes. "There is no better dress for a Japanese woman than Blue Dye!" This is what my mother used to say.

Bluegrass is fundamentally different from other plant dyes. Almost all plants are dyed with the dye solution after boiling, except for blue dye, where we need to get indigo from a professional bluemaster and then ferment it with bran water.

Blue dyeing is the longest and most complex type of plant dyeing used by mankind. In Japan, blue dyeing is divided into three steps: building the blue, guarding the urn and dyeing.

After moving to Saga, my dream of building blue was put into practice. Keeping in mind the teaching that "blue dyeing is like raising a child," I try to hold on to and nurture the life of the blue. Each urn contains the life of the blue, which changes subtly from day to day.

Blue Dye Vat and Blue Thread

When you open the lid of the urn in the morning, an indigo flower (or blue color) made of dark purple bubbles blooms in the middle of the dye. You can tell the mood of the blue by looking at its color.

To the blazing blue gas dispersal, blue adolescence can let the pure white silk thread in a flash of jade-colored light, and quickly changed to misty color; after a calm glazed blue after the prime of life, the blue component gradually faded, when the silk thread was dyed such as water washed with water pale onion color, is the soul of the blue has been aged.

It took me a long time to realize that this color is called "urn service". The so-called urn wait, refers to the dye urn with a little light water color, that is the last color of the blue late years.

The natural blue in the blue dye, as well as the wood ash water, will be mixed with some impurities, so the blue dye will not be as strong as the artificial blue. Blue dye will be dyed a variety of shades of blue, stare at them, as if the natural world of the door opened, a variety of tones in the ear noise.

I remember the potter Kenkichi Tomimoto, when he painted on ceramics, he also liked to use inferior natural dyes, and the more impure the dye, the more the blue burned out, the more different changes, with a heavy flavor.

Interestingly, when working in the workshop of blue dyeing, the craftsmen would wear white clothing, which is said to remind them to be calm in their movements and peaceful in their minds.

Dyeing and weaving, my destiny

Shimura Fukumi, 18

I was separated from my mother when I was two years old, and spent more than 10 years as an adopted daughter in my uncle's house. That's why I called my biological parents aunt and uncle. For a long time, this event and its repercussions cast a complicated shadow over my feelings for my mother, but today I think it was all fate.

During the summer of my sophomore year in a girls' high school, I returned to Omi from Tokyo for the first time on my own. My "uncle" was a doctor, and there were visitors to the house from time to time, so I hardly ever met my "aunt". After a while, she suddenly came to me, put down some Van Gogh books, and then hurriedly returned to the inner room. At that time I vaguely realized that there is a kind of flesh and blood connection.

Two years later, my second brother was seriously ill, and I returned to my hometown to recognize my parents and siblings. We sat around a warm table and talked openly and honestly all night. My mother talked about how when she sent me away, she was determined to pretend that I was not alive. She did not think that the daughter she had sent away would come back to recognize her.

In the dark utility room at home, a loom caught my attention, and I chased after my mother to ask a lot of questions, and then she assembled the loom for me, and strapped on the blue-dyed silk thread. It may be a wonderful fate that I met the loom at the same time that I recognized my mother.

"Sufang Duan Halo Dyeing" is in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

My mother, Yutaka Ono, and Ryu Soetsu were acquainted with each other, and I respected him greatly. In Japan, Yanagi's thoughts on Buddhist aesthetics have had a deep influence, and some of Yanagi's thoughts on Buddhist aesthetics have been incorporated into my work. For example, "Dyeing is dyeing the mind, weaving, and the need to get to know the true state of things." These are the most fundamental things that Mr. Liu taught me.

The day before I left Tokyo to devote myself to dyeing and weaving, I visited Ms. Ichie Tomimoto, the wife of Mr. Kenkichi Tomimoto, who was a friend of my mother's and a famous artist. For more than thirty years, she has been caught between her career and her family, and has had her share of frustrations.

She said to me, "It is impossible for a woman to live in her family or in her career. You have to recognize one and devote yourself to it wholeheartedly. In Japan today, there is still a strong resistance to women having a career. But over the decades, I've met a lot of women who have lived their lives in their careers. Some of them gave up their families for a while, but eventually they got their careers back together. In short, be thorough. It's a sin to be half-hearted, unfortunate for your husband, your children and yourself. I'm not going to be able to do it without a fight."

At that time, I was suffering from insomnia and frustration, and I was in a dark place, so I couldn't bear to give up my family. But Ms. Ichie's words cut my worries clean away. It was as if I could see a path in front of the overgrown grass.

Whenever I was blocked in my work, I would go to Mr. Minorujiro Inagaki (a dyer). Mr. Inagaki seldom commented on my works, but he would encourage me: "Cézanne studied all the way, and finally arrived at nature. Nature has a magical power, and capturing it as it is and expressing the truth of it accurately is the true foundation of the work."

I once made an Eiwa style kimono with the theme of "Autumn Haze". woven kimono. A teacher said to me that the first thing that is not recognized as the use of ? Weaving is not recognized. At that time, weaving kimonos were commonly used for everyday casual wear. At that time, weaving kimonos was commonly used for everyday casual wear, and it was rare for a whole painting to be woven like mine. I had doubts about my own creation. Then Mr. Minujiro Inagaki's remark awakened me: "Wouldn't it be nice to make a garment, not for a real woman, but for a woman in fantasy?"

From then on, I was determined to make kimonos for women in my fantasies, too.

Shimura Fukumi in the first grade of elementary school

When I was a child, I lived in China for a while, and I visited Shanghai, and I have a variety of memories there. Chinese culture is the origin of Japanese culture, and Buddhism came from China, so I have great respect for China. I think the best Chinese art is calligraphy. People like Yan Zhenqing and Wang Xizhi are very great in my opinion.

Whether it's Western art or Chinese art, I'm always attracted to it, and what amazes me the most is the beauty of plants. It is a gift of nature, not something we can acquire by taking the trouble to blend it.

At one time, I thought it would take ten years to make a color; today, I think it will take a lifetime.

The following is a quote from Shoji Shimura (grandson):

The time has come to rethink the relationship between human beings and nature

Although my grandmother and mother were engaged in dyeing and weaving, I wasn't interested in it at first, and I majored in philosophy in college.

Fukumi Shimura in front of a loom at the workshop

Photographs by Alessandra Maria Bonanotte

In 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred, and the whole of Japan was plunged into a social crisis. In particular, the Fukushima nuclear power plant leak had a big impact. I heard from someone who worked in Tohoku dyeing grass that if there was a nuclear leak, I would no longer be able to do that work. I then felt that the time had come to rethink the relationship between humans and nature. Since then, I have been involved in dyeing.

The traditional craft of dyeing and weaving has been passed down from the Heian period. The production method is the same, and the dyeing has been done in the same way since about 800 or 900 years ago, so in this sense, the dyeing process in Japan is uninterrupted.

In our family, there are two steps, dyeing and weaving. The first is dyeing with plants. It's spring now, so we dye it with branches of plum trees, cherry blossom trees, and so on. After dyeing, we would save the dyed silk threads and would not use them all at once. Grandma sometimes can't bear to use the beautiful threads. The next step is to process the thread, which usually takes two or three months. It starts early in the morning and ends at five or six o'clock in the evening, and that's how the whole day goes.

The warp threads on the loom

My grandmother's favorite dye, indigo, is a memory from my childhood. Indigo is not like other plant dyes, it is raised. Sakura-dye and plum-dye are made by taking twigs and boiling them to make a dye solution, and then going to the dye. Indigo dye, on the other hand, needs to be fermented, foamed, and left for two or three weeks before dyeing. We start preparing from the new moon to the full moon and begin dyeing, which is in step with the workings of the universe.

Mother and Grandmother took blue dyeing very seriously. We were moved by every dyeing. But what Grandmother influenced me most was the way of thinking. She started dyeing under the influence of Ryu Jong-yue. I think one of the most important points in Ryu Jong-yeol's folk art thinking is the way of thinking about discovering beauty in everyday life. Therefore, it is also important for us to learn the beautiful way of life and think about the relationship between human and nature in our handicrafts.

After dyeing, you have to weave. Weaving is not difficult, just time-consuming. A common pattern will take months to weave. Exactly how long it takes still depends on its design. By the way, on the loom, there are twelve hundred warp threads, and the weft threads are woven about forty thousand times, so that the shuttle is "thumped" around, and then "beaten" to do it.

If you consider weaving as a job, you will feel very hard, but if you consider it as your interest, you will feel happy in the process of weaving. Craftsmanship is about enjoying the process of making.

My grandmother later opened an art school, Arts Shimura. At Arts Shimura, students dye and weave their own clothes, and make them by hand from the beginning to the end. The feeling of wrapping a garment made in this way is completely different from buying a garment.

"Cyanotype Lattice" is in the collection of the Shiga Prefectural Museum of Modern Art

How can we remain confident in the present, which we are facing as an era of efficiency, and where craftsmanship can take an extraordinary amount of time? What can be left behind? I think this is a subject that was not present in the era in which my grandmother lived. For me, the most important thing at the moment is to use traditional crafts in education, so that more people can understand this matter.

Some information from Fukumi Shimura's books:

A Life in One Color, Shanghai People's Publishing House, January 2021

Playing with Colors, Shanghai People's Publishing House, forthcoming

My Little Split Post, Shanghai People's Publishing House, forthcoming