Honba Yuki tsumugi

The production area sits around Yuki, Oyama, and nearby communities, with the Kinugawa once remembered through the name Kinu-gawa. On the Tochigi side, Kinu-mura and Kuwa-mura connect silk, mulberry, and place names in the same landscape. Oyama still treats Honba Yuki-tsumugi as local work in its 2023-2032 plan, where Oyama-grown cocoons are named as part of the future material base. The name points first to a map and a set of hands: mawata spinning, kasuri tying, and jibata weaving around Yuki and Oyama.

The work starts with cocoons. They are softened in hot water with baking soda, then five or six cocoons are opened and layered in warm water to make one sheet of mawata silk floss. That sheet is wrapped around a tool called a tsukushi, and the spinner draws thread by hand into a vessel called an oboke. The later softness of the cloth begins in this wet layer of silk floss before the thread is dyed, marked, or woven.

The hand-spun thread is counted in bocchi. One bocchi is about ninety-four grams, or roughly fifty sheets of mawata; one tan of Honba Yuki-tsumugi takes about seven bocchi. Spinning enough thread for that single bolt takes about two to three months. The loom is still waiting at this point, while fingers, tsukushi, mawata, and oboke slowly prepare the length of cloth.

After the thread is wound into skeins, it is dyed in planned colors, strengthened with wheat-flour starch, and arranged on a nobedai so the length and thread count line up. Threads for kasuri are marked with ink, then the pattern areas are tied tightly with cotton thread so dye cannot enter those points; depending on the pattern, this tying can take months. The tied thread then moves into final dyeing and tataki-zome. Within the pattern language that moved from plain cloth and stripes toward kasuri, kikko and cross-kasuri sit among the named bases.

On the jibata loom, the earlier thread work and kasuri preparation meet in the cloth. Producer-side descriptions link the untwisted, bulky hand-spun yarn with warmth, reduced wrinkling, and a surface close to the feel of mawata; wearing descriptions also emphasize lightness, warmth, and stability when dressed. Those qualities stay tied to material and process: softened cocoon, opened silk floss, hand-drawn thread, and careful weaving on a floor loom.

Oyama's present challenge has a hard number attached to it: inspected production fell from 31,288 pieces in 1980 to 565 in 2022, and the number of weaving businesses also declined sharply. The 2023-2032 work focuses on successors, shared workspaces, Oyama-grown cocoons, school learning, mawata-making and jibata-weaving experiences, and more occasions to wear the kimono. The figures are severe, but the response stays concrete: cocoons, hands, looms, classrooms, and places where the cloth is worn.