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Yambaru NP, Okinawa
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The preservation society’s guide calls weaving just 1% of bashofu-making. Its 23 steps start in a cultivated fiber-banana field, and the final “washing” stage alone includes about 12 finishing steps.
Fiber too coarse for cloth is called shīsa-ū and is ordered for lion-dance manes around Okinawa. Even the wood ash used to soften the fibers gets another life—as glaze for pottery.
Akifate is a classic Kijoka pattern whose name means “a design woven until you’re thoroughly tired of it”; no one knows who coined it. The name is wonderfully frank for a design made by hand.
A windmill motif honors Kajimayā, Okinawa’s celebration of a person’s 97th birthday; another pattern, Hachijō-hachi (“88”), turns the kanji for rice into a woven design.
Ogimi built the Bashofu Hall in 1986 to support the local industry. Today, its first floor displays products and process videos, while the second-floor workroom hosts training for bashofu makers.
After working in wartime Kurashiki, Toshiko Taira learned weaving and dyeing there, then returned to Kijoka in 1946. She rallied local women, including war widows, to bring bashofu-making back to life.
Many Kijoka shipwrights left for work in Naha, while the village’s limited farmland suited hardy fiber bananas. In the early 1900s, bashofu was encouraged as work for women who stayed in the community.
In 1895, local history credits Nakahara Nabe with introducing kasuri—the patterned style made by dyeing selected parts of the thread—when plain and striped cloth had been the norm.
A record of Ogimi’s local specialties listed 561 bolts of indigo-ground bashofu and 249 bolts of white. Most were made for household use, rather than shipped out of the village.
A cut fiber-banana pseudostem reveals more than 20 layers. Makers peel them one by one and sort them into 4 grades: softer fibers go into the weft, while firmer or colored ones are set aside for the warp.
In the Ryukyu Kingdom era, bashofu was worn by royalty and also traded or presented as tribute to China and Japan’s Tokugawa rulers. Its light, airy feel also made it everyday clothing in Okinawa’s humid climate.
Bashofu fibers dry out easily and can snap, so weavers continually mist the cloth at the loom. In that moment, the quality of earlier tasks—from joining fibers to tying the kasuri pattern—becomes clear.
