Uetsu shinafu

Sekikawa belongs to Tsuruoka City in Yamagata; Yamakumada and Ikazuchi belong to Murakami City in Niigata. Together, the three mountain communities give Uetsu shinafu a production area that crosses a prefectural line. The geography matters because the work is tied to mountain-grown bark, rainy-season stripping, winter weaving, and local workshop bases such as the Sekikawa Shinaori Center.

The material is bark before it is thread. Shinanoki, obabodaiju, and nojiribodaiju growing in the Uetsu mountain area provide the bast fiber. Once the usable fiber is separated, the finished cloth is known for a rough hand and a subdued surface, traits connected to the bark fiber at its core.

From thread making to weaving, the work takes about one year and can be followed through twenty-two steps. It starts with bark stripped during the rainy season, then boiling with lye, washing in a river, soaking in rice bran, splitting the fiber to about three millimeters, hand-splicing it into thread, adding twist with a spinning wheel, and weaving mainly in plain weave.

In older village households, shina cloth belonged to winter work. Families once handled the thread making and weaving through snowy months; in one Niigata village pattern, men went into the summer mountains for bark, while autumn shinaumi thread making and weaving sat with women's handwork. The takabata loom and the plain weave gave the hand-spliced thread a steady structure while keeping the bark fiber's rough character visible.

Use explains the surface. In the Uetsu area, shina cloth served as clothing, workwear, fishing nets, straining cloth, bedding, and storage bags before modern textiles narrowed demand. Activity grew again from the late Showa period, and the cloth now appears in obi cloth, noren, bags, hats, and many small daily objects. It is durable, resists water, and grows more supple with use.

At the Sekikawa Shinaori Center in Tsuruoka, the work has a visible base. Visitors can see product displays, weaving, processing, and production work, and a reservation-based coaster activity narrows the large year-long process to a small woven square. The center gives the cloth a human scale: bark, hand-spliced thread, loom, and finished object can be followed in one place.