Soichi Hanamura's hands are blue to the wrist, and they have been for most of his sixty-two years. He stopped trying to scrub them clean somewhere in his twenties. At Shirasagi Dye Works, the workshop his grandfather founded in a farming village on the island of Shikoku, the colour gets into everything: the floorboards, the rafters, the cat that sleeps beside the vats. Even the air carries a faint sweet-sour smell, like bread dough left too long in a warm kitchen.
That smell is fermentation, and it is the heart of the process. Unlike synthetic indigo, which can be dissolved in minutes with chemical reducing agents, traditional Japanese indigo begins as composted leaves of the indigo plant, known as sukumo. The compost is mixed with wood-ash lye, wheat bran and a little sake, then left to ferment in buried clay vats for a week or more, until a coppery film blooms on the surface. Only then is the dye alive.
A living colour
Hanamura speaks of his vats as if they were livestock. Each has a temperament. Some are vigorous and give deep colour quickly; others sulk for days. He tastes the liquid to judge its alkalinity, stirs it twice daily and feeds it bran when it seems tired. A healthy vat can be used for three or four months before it is exhausted and returned to the fields as fertiliser. Nothing is wasted, and nothing is rushed.
You cannot command indigo. You can only keep it happy and wait to see what it gives you. — Soichi Hanamura
The dyeing itself is a matter of repetition. Cloth or yarn is dipped, lifted, wrung and exposed to the air, where it turns from yellow-green to blue as the dye oxidises. A pale sky blue takes a single dip; the deep, almost black shade prized by samurai may require thirty or more, spread over several days. Each layer adds depth and fastness, which is why well-made indigo fades so gracefully rather than simply washing out.
For most of the twentieth century, the workshop supplied local farmers and fishermen with work clothes. Today its customers are more likely to be designers from Tokyo, Paris and Copenhagen, who order small quantities of hand-dyed cotton and linen and wait months for delivery. Hanamura accepts only as many orders as the vats allow. When a large sportswear company once asked to buy a whole year's output, he declined in a two-line letter.
His daughter, Mei, returned to the village four years ago after working in graphic design in Osaka. She now manages orders, photographs every bolt and has introduced a small line of scarves and aprons sold directly from the workshop. She has also begun keeping written records of each vat's behaviour, something her father never did. He regards the notebooks with amusement, she says, but reads them when he thinks nobody is looking.
My season in the village ended in early autumn, as the new harvest of leaves was laid out to dry. On my last morning, Hanamura dipped a length of white cotton for me, just once, and hung it from a beam to breathe. Within a minute it had turned the pale, clear blue of a winter sky. I have it still, folded in a drawer at home, and it has not faded at all.
