A Study in Indigo: Behind Japan’s Most Popular Hue
The next generation of indigo makers is preserving a lost art by upending centuries of tradition.
Words by Matt Gross
Photography by Carol Sachs
IN THE COOL LIGHT of a late spring Friday, the colors of Tokushima Prefecture, on Japan’s Shikoku Island, seem washed out. The seamless gray of low buildings, the rippled silver of the Yoshino River, the mottled green of the surrounding mountains. But it’s out here, in a former cow barn among a sleepy patchwork of farms and warehouses, that a collective of young people are creating Japan’s most iconic and vibrant hue: indigo.
The process that Kakuo Kaji — calm, 29, wearing multiple layers of blue clothing, his long hair pulled back, a neat mustache on his lip — and his comrades at Buaisou follow is deeply traditional. On a hectare of land, they grow the indigo plant, introduced to Japan from China nearly 1,500 years ago. They harvest the leaves (and only the leaves), first drying them indoors, then composting them to begin a fermentation process that eventually produces a substance called sukumo, the base for natural indigo dye. At Buaisou, they mix sukumo with wood lye, wheat bran, and shell lime in what they call “hell vats” — tanks in which they dip yarns and fabrics over and over to achieve the kinds of blues you can stare into for hours, often on chic, Buaisou-designed work shirts, jackets, and $3,000 custom jeans.
“It’s amazing,” says Kaji. “From these green plants I can create this deep blue.”
This is the way aizome, as it’s known, has been done since at least the early 19th century, a golden age when 2,000 sukumo producers operated in the region, and ai, or blue, became Japan’s signature color, deployed on everything from kimonos to handkerchiefs, grain sacks (indigo is said to deter pests), and patched-rag blankets. Indigo traders grew wealthy selling sukumo across Japan and erected grand houses in Tokushima. (One is now an indigo museum.) But by the beginning of the 21st century, nearly all those producers had shut down, the textile industry -having largely switched over to synthetic indigo 100 years earlier. When Kaji, who’d studied under sukumo master Osamu Nii, founded Buaisou in 2012, it brought the number of indigo operations to a whopping six.
What’s happening at Buaisou is more than the restoration of an old tradition, however. It’s a leap into new territory. Previously, each step of the aizome process was the province of a different artisan: Farmers didn’t make sukumo; sukumo makers didn’t dye; dyers didn’t design. Indeed, one of Kaji’s colleagues had to be careful not to let his hands turn blue — or his sukumo master would realize he was not merely making indigo paste but using it to dye fabric. For Kaji, though, it’s all about understanding every aspect of aizome.
“I want to start from zero,” he says. “Not just making the dye and doing the dyeing, but the design, the adjustments, the sales — I touch everything.”
Buaisou’s all-encompassing approach and youthful, try-anything style have paid off. The group’s custom-dyed fabrics are coveted by everyone from Blue Bottle Coffee, which had Buaisou hand-dip canvas tote bags, to artists like Gabriel Orozco, and Asao Tokolo, who designed the indigo — patterned logo for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Buaisou also dyes for a few select fashion brands, including the haberdasher Drake’s and the designer Mihara Yasujiro.
And then there are jeans. In the past two decades, Japanese denim has become a hot commodity, praised the world over for its lustrous colors and the meticulousness of its construction. The industry is based a few hours north of Tokushima, across the Seto Inland Sea, in the small town of Kojima, the “holy land” of denim since the 1960s. Dozens of factories and workshops operate here, producing for labels both domestic and international (Gucci, Balenciaga, Armani).
Denim adorns everything in Kojima, from vending machines to sidewalks. Convenience stores serve “denim” ice cream (it tastes like Ramune, a popular soda), and you can eat a bowl of “denim” ramen (it tastes like ramen). Betty Smith Jeans, founded in 1962, runs a museum where visitors can ogle century-old Levi’s and customize a new pair of their own. (In season, purchases come with a free tomato from the factory garden.) In the center of town, a network of alleys makes up Kojima Jeans Street, where virtually every maker has a shop, from Momotaro and Big John to Blue Record, Blue Trick, Blue Wall, Japan Blue, and Pure Blue Japan.
Bluest of all may be Yoshinori Hasuoka. Thirty years old, with a big grin, a straw hat, and an indigo outfit that extends from his shirt and jeans to his all-blue (inside and out) 1992 Volvo station wagon, Hasuoka is the director of Bitou, a factory that makes jeans in a way that’s simultaneously old-fashioned and newfangled. Like others in Kojima, Bitou relies heavily on vintage equipment, like a 90-year-old Union Special sewing machine, to give garments just the right look and feel.
But whereas the traditional Kojima model is to outsource each stage of construction to a different workshop — a belt-loop specialist, a hemmer, a -riveter — Hasuoka has brought it all under one roof, giving him Buaisou-like control over every aspect of the process, whether he’s creating a ready-to-wear line for Bryceland’s, a tailor with shops in Tokyo and Hong Kong, or producing Pallet Life Story, Hasuoka’s own label. “That’s kind of like a rare thing, a rare bird, to have the whole thing in one camp,” he says.
At the Pallet store on Kojima Jeans Street, Hasuoka singles out one garment, a heavy pullover in nubby, deep-blue sashiko fabric. It’s lovely, with a leather drawstring at the collar and a nifty hidden side zip. But then he brings out an aged sample of the same shirt — washed and worn to a beautifully irreproducible gradient of soft blues.
“The original character,” Hasuoka says, “depends on you — how often you wear, how often you wash.” It’s this unpredictable uniqueness that inspires his “passion for the fabric.” Like virtually every jeans maker in the world, Pallet uses denim dyed with synthetic indigo, which penetrates yarn more superficially, allowing the white core to be revealed as fabric ages and creating that one-of-a-kind look.
It’s tempting to see these two processes at odds with each other: the hand-wrought tradition of aizome versus the mechanized modernity of denim. But really, they’re complementary, the warp and weft of centuries of fashion expertise. The only choice you have to make is how deep and how blue you want to go.
About the author: Hungry and restless, Matt Gross has written about travel and food for everyone from the New York Times (where he was the “Frugal Traveler”) to Bon Appétit to Bloomberg Businessweek. His travel memoir, “The Turk Who Loved Apples,” was published in 2013. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their daughters.
