Roving Japan

Day 72 Photoset

Yasunobu is a successful tailor with his own shop in Nagoya. He designs and makes all his clothes in his studio room in his apartment. His wife Machiko makes handmade silver jewelry which she sells in their shop as well. Since Yasunobu is into fashion design and fabrics, he took us to a cool area in Nagoya called Arimatsu.

Hippies like to tie up some cloth and dump it in a bucket of dye, soak it, untie it, and call it good. Whatever random patterns emerge, its acceptable. Things are a little different in Arimatsu.

The people in Arimatsu have been making a specialize and precision form of tied-ye for hundreds of years. Their methods are detailed and extremely time consuming, but they produce really amazing patterns.

Yasunobu took us to the Arimatsu tie-dye museum where we got to watch some volunteers demonstrate the knot tieing. We also got to see a lot of examples of the different patterns they can produce with different knots.

I never knew that tiedye could be so precise. They aren’t making random designs, everything has been planned beforehand. The blank fabric is layed out on a table, and the pattern designer makes a dot wherever he wants a knot tied. The knot tiers then go about tieing the hundreds, or thousands of knots by hand. It’s amazing.

Yasunobu has two daughters, Saho and Miki. Saho is a fashion designer like her father. She is also a part time English teacher so I can talk with her without needing a lot of translation. This afternoon, Risa and I went with Saho to checkout downtown Nagoya.

Our first stop was Nagoya castle. This castle is pretty big, but it’s not an original. Inside they have the standard castle museum stuff. Samurai suits, and historical artifacts from the original castle and the surrounding area. However, they also had a few things that stuck out. The first was a fun “castle construction” simulator. You basically had to pretend to help pull large stones to be used in the castle wall. There was a gauge on the side that told you how strong you were. It was fun, and I’m proud to say that Risa and I were both stronger than the guy who went before us! Haha!

It was also interesting to learn that when the castle was originally built, the various subjected areas around Nagoya would donate stone to use in the construction. The lords of those smaller areas would stamp the stones with their symbol so that the main lord in Nagoya would know who donated what. We didn’t notice these markings when we got to the castle, but sure enough, as we left we could see the old markings on the stones from a bunch of different lords.

The castle is right next to the main Nagoya stadium. Right now the famous “Nagoya Sumo Basho” is going on. This is one of the main 4 sumo tournaments in Japan. We saw some sumo guys walking around, and Risa and I are trying to decide if we should splurge and buy a ticket! We didn’t have time to go today, but maybe tomorrow? It sure would be cool!

While we were out with Saho, Risa and I wanted to go see the store that sells Saho’s clothes. So we jumped on a train and went to Nagoya’s shopping arcade. This arcade is much like the covered arcade in Osaka, only with about 25% the number of people. Of course, just because they don’t have as many people, doesn’t mean they don’t have a few crazy’s. While Risa was in the bathroom, one old man in a cowboy hat was particularly interested in me. He kept saying “Hallo! America? HI!” I talked back to him in Japanese, and he talked back in broken English. He asked where I was from in America, and I told him Oregon. “Colorado!” “No… Oregon” “Oh! OK!” He had a pen and paper with him, so I drew a map of America and showed him where Oregon is. The best part was when I was getting my picture taken with him, Risa came out of the bathroom and was like, “Um… who’s that guy?”

We eventually made it to Saho’s store, and Risa finally got a chance to wear something other than her hiking clothes. She tried on one of Saho’s dresses, and really liked it. Too bad for us, it was kind of expensive! Good for Saho, bad for us! It was a nice dress though!

We wandered around the shopping arcade for a while, ate some ice cream, then left to go to the Nagoya port where we could watch the summer fireworks show.

We didn’t quite make it all the way to the main viewing area, but we did manage to get some cool seats. We climbed up a ladder and sat on a tall cement wall that gave us a clear view of the show. As a cool bonus, we also had the giant ferris wheel in view, so we could see the fireworks and the lights of the ferris wheel together. It was really fun!

For dinner, Machiko made us her famous spring rolls. Yasunobu explained that it was THIS dish that made him want to marry her, and after tasting it, we don’t blame him!