In the ancient city of Kyoto, contemporary artisans and designers are using heritage techniques and traditional clothing aesthetics to reinvent wafuku (Japanese clothing, including kimono) for modern life. Japan Beyond the Kimono explores these shifts, highlighting developments in the Kyoto fashion industry such as its integration of digital weaving and printing techniques and the influence of social media on fashion distribution systems. Through case studies of designers, artisans, and retailers, Jenny Hall provides a comprehensive picture of the reasons behind the production and consumption of these rejuvenated fashion goods. She argues that conceptualisations of Japanese tradition include innovation and change, which is vital to understanding how Japanese cultural heritage is both sustained and evolving. Essential reading for students and scholars of fashion, anthropology, and Japanese studies, Jenny Hall's sensory ethnography is the first of its kind, describing the lived experiences of people in the Kyoto textiles industry, explaining the renewal of traditional techniques and styles, and placing them both within contexts such as transnational 'craftscapes' and fast or slow fashion systems.

Oceans and decades apart, two women are inextricably bound by the secrets between them. Japan, 1957. Seventeen-year-old Naoko Nakamura’s prearranged marriage to the son of her father’s business associate would secure her family’s status in their traditional Japanese community, but Naoko has fallen for another man—an American sailor, a gaijin—and to marry him would bring great shame upon her entire family. When it’s learned Naoko carries the sailor’s child, she’s cast out in disgrace and forced to make unimaginable choices with consequences that will ripple across generations. America, present day. Tori Kovac, caring for her dying father, finds a letter containing a shocking revelation—one that calls into question everything she understood about him, her family and herself. Setting out to learn the truth behind the letter, Tori’s journey leads her halfway around the world to a remote seaside village in Japan, where she must confront the demons of the past to pave a way for redemption. In breathtaking prose and inspired by true stories from a devastating and little-known era in Japanese and American history, The Woman in the White Kimono illuminates a searing portrait of one woman torn between her culture and her heart, and another woman on a journey to discover the true meaning of home.

The kimono is an iconic garment with a history as rich and colourful as the textiles from which it is crafted. Deeply associated with Japanese culture both past and present, it has often been thought of as a highly gendered, rigidly traditional and unchanging national costume. This book challenges that perception, revealing the nuanced meanings and messages behind the kimono from the point of view of its wearers and producers, many of whom – both men and women – see the garment as a vehicle for self-expression. Taking a material culture approach, The Social Life of Kimono is the first study to combine the history of the kimono as a fashionable garment with an in-depth exploration of its multifaceted role today on both the street and the catwalk. Through case studies covering historical advertising campaigns, fashion magazines, interviews with contemporary kimono designers, large scale and small craft producers, and consumers who choose to wear them, The Social Life of Kimono gives a unique insight into making and meaning of this complex garment.

"The life of Shibue Io and her family, a kind of Japanese Buddenbrooks, may be unknown in the West, but her rich and engaging story marks the intersection of a remarkable woman with a fascinating time in history."--Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha "It stands clichÈs about traditional Japan on their heads. . . .Together with the people she knew, Io lives on in this literary album of old family pictures. It is well worth looking at."--Ian Buruma, New York Times Book Review "A most engaging book. Seeing Shibue Io through the various lenses of her husband, her son, Tamotsu (from whom much information is gleaned), the novelist Ogai, and the biographer McClellan is an interesting, moving, disarming experience."--Donald Richie, Japan Times "McClellan. . . has created a lively world, populated by women of various classes, samurai, doctors, poets, merchants, juvenile delinquents, and old eccentrics. The various incidents in which these people become involved provide a vivid picture of late Tokugawa society. This is a remarkable accomplishment."--Nakai Yoshiyuki, Monumenta Nipponica "An engrossing, informative, and extremely useful book. . . . Woman in the Crested Kimono is not simply the account of one unusual Tokugawa woman. It is an evocation of a family, and through a family the entire samurai class, going from the comparative affluence of the late Tokugawa period through the turmoils of the restoration and beyond."--Susan Napier, Journal of Asian Studies Daughter of a merchant family in nineteenth-century Japan and wife of a distinguished scholar-doctor of the samurai class, Shibue Io was a woman remarkable in her own right for her exceptionally keen mind and fearless spirit. Edwin McClellan now draws on the biography of her husband, written by Mori Ogai, to tell the story of Shibue Io, her society, and her times.

The Kimono in Print: 300 Years of Japanese Design will be the first ever publication devoted to examining the kimono as a major source of inspiration, and later vehicle for experimentation, in Japanese print design and culture from the Edo period (1603-1868) to the Meiji period (1868-1912). Print artists, through the wide circulation of prints, have documented the ever-evolving trends in fashion, have popularized certain styles of dress, and have even been known to have designed kimonos. Some famous print designers also were directly involved in the kimono business as designers of kimono pattern books, such as Nishikawa Sukenobu (1671-1751) and Okumura Masanobu (1686-1764). The dialogue between fashion and print is illustrated here by approximately 70 Japanese prints and illustrated books--by Nishikawa Sukenobu, Suzuki Harunobu, Utagawa Kunisada, Kikukawa Eizan, and Kamisaka Sekka, among others. The group of five essays features new research and scholarship by an international group of leading scholars working today at the intersection of the Japanese print and kimono worlds and the social, cultural, and global significances circulated therein.

Often considered an exotic garment of "traditional Japan," the kimono is in fact a vibrant part of Japanese modernity, playing an integral role in literature and film throughout the twentieth century. Reading the Kimono in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature and Film is the first extended study to offer new ways of interpreting textual and visual narratives through "kimono language"--what these garments communicate within their literary, historical, and cultural contexts. Kimonos on the page and screen do much more than create verisimilitude or function as one-dimensional symbols. They go beyond simply indicating the wearer's age, gender, class, and taste; as eloquent, heterogeneous objects, they speak of wartime and postwar histories and shed light on everything from gender politics to censorship. By reclaiming "kimono language"--once a powerful shared vernacular--Michiko Suzuki accesses inner lives of characters, hidden plot points, intertextual meanings, resistant messages, and social commentary. Reading the Kimono examines modern Japanese literary works and their cinematic adaptations, including Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's canonical novel, The Makioka Sisters, and its film versions, one screened under the US Occupation and another directed by Ichikawa Kon in 1983. It also investigates Kōda Aya's Kimono and Flowing, as well as Naruse Mikio's 1956 film adaptation of the latter. Reading the Kimono additionally advances the study of women writers by discussing texts by Tsuboi Sakae and Miyao Tomiko, authors often overlooked in scholarship despite their award-winning, bestselling stature. Through her analysis of stories and their afterlives, Suzuki offers a fresh view of the kimono as complex "material" to be read. She asks broader questions about the act of interpretation, what it means to explore both texts and textiles as inherently dynamic objects, shaped by context and considered differently over time. Reading the Kimono is at once an engaging history of the modern kimono and its representation, and a significant study of twentieth-century Japanese literature and film.

The first major book on Japanese textile artist Itchiku Kubota, published to accompany a touring exhibition.