History of Japanese bast fiber textile: thread making

The paper studies the stages of traditional handmade bast fiber textile production development: its technological characteristics, the reasons for the decay of home weaving traditions, as well as its transformation into a decorative art, part of intangible national cultural heritage, and a national identity marker. The aim of the article is to introduce little-studied traditional Japanese textile techniques to readers. Bast fiber textile production started approximately 9000 years ago as women’s household chore, and until the Edo period bast fiber was the main cloth material for the commoners. It lost its leading position to cotton by the XVII century, and remained an auxiliary production in the remote areas until the XX century, when westernization and globalization with the cheap mass market cloths rendered homemade textile economically impractical. The textile, however, survived, not least because of the persistent efforts of the Mingei folk art movement, as elite, high quality, and eco-friendly textile, and became part of Japanese intangible cultural heritage. The article also describes the properties of various bast fibers in relation to cloth making, as well as the traditional stages of thread making - from collecting raw materials to extracting fibers and connecting them into continuous thread via ply-joining. The very cell structure of plant emphasizes the importance of fibers direction and dictates the methods of fiber processing. Ply-joining is the best way of dealing with bast fibers, and since it cannot be mechanized, it became a capstone for all Japanese traditional crafts using bast fiber.