Honba kihachijo

The name Kihachijo points first to yellow, yet Honba Kihachijo is built from three colors: yellow, kabacha brown, and black. Yellow comes from Hachijo kariyasu, also called kobunagusa; kabacha comes from madami, the island name for tabunoki bark; black begins with shii bark and is deepened through mud treatment. Those colors are not applied to a finished cloth. Raw silk, tama-ito, mawata spun silk, or comparable silk yarn is dyed first, so the palette is already present when the warp and weft meet. The island boundary matters because the craft's color logic is tied to plants associated with Hachijo Island and to mud used in the black dyeing process.

Before dyeing, the silk can be scoured in boiling water with soda for about three hours, a step that removes the gum from raw silk and leaves the yarn softer and more lustrous. The yellow dye bath uses dried kobunagusa; the yarn is exposed to the hot plant liquid, left overnight, wrung out, and dried outdoors. Ash lye gives yellow and kabacha their brightness: camellia and sakaki ashes are used in the ash treatment described for the yarn. Black follows another route. Shii bark gives color first, and iron-rich island mud fixes and darkens it through mud immersion.

Honba Kihachijo color comes from returning to the same actions: soak, rest, wring, dry, and begin again. Yellow dyeing is described at about twenty dye-and-dry cycles, while black dyeing may run through thirty to fifty cycles before the mud stage. The repeated drying is part of the cloth's look, not a pause between real steps. In the black process, shii-dyed silk is dehydrated, taken outdoors, and dried again and again, so light, plant color, and later mud treatment all shape the yarn before weaving starts.

When the yarn reaches the loom, Honba Kihachijo stays within a narrow structure: yarn-dyed plain weave or twill. The weft is inserted with a hand-thrown shuttle, and present-day weaving is associated with the takahata loom. Stripes and checks carry most of the visual work. The designs stay simple enough for yellow, kabacha, and black to remain central, and the finished cloth appears in kimono fabric and obi where the line of the weave and the depth of plant dye can be seen together.

On Hachijo Island, woven cloth once stood in for field taxes. The textile also moved outward as tribute cloth, and Edo-period visibility grew when Kihachijo costume appeared in the puppet drama and kabuki world around Koi Musume Mukashi Hachijo. A more intimate object fixes the craft in 1729: the Kihachijo Amida name hanging. Woven with large characters on a kabacha-dyed ground, it measures 158.4 cm by 34.6 cm and is tied to the wife of Kikuchi Taketaka, showing the level of Hachijo dyeing and weaving in the early eighteenth century.

Today's Honba Kihachijo still has named places on the island. The Kihachijo Textile Cooperative is in Kashitate, and dye workshops have been associated with Kashitate and Nakanogo, even as the number of weavers has become a concern. The cloth continues to appear as kimono fabric and obi, and on Hachijo Island people can encounter it through loom weaving, weaving observation, dressing experiences, and small textile items. These uses keep the three-color system close to hands, shoulders, and the movement of woven silk.