We may associate working clothes as something that can be easily worn-out or not necessarily clean: They are not meant to be casual or fashionable. However, for people in farming villages back in time, working clothes were not merely for “solitary” working. They also wore their working clothes around the social/public workplaces. From today’s points of view, it would be comparable to the office lady’s clothes or the suit of a business man.

Especially for women, since they worked on the fields together with men, working clothes were not just for dirty conditions. Although it was, of course, not of party wear quality, but still they tried all the possible means to create sensible beauty in it.

Of course there were cases where working clothes were made out of festive wear that was used for many years. In these cases, a lot of patches were added onto the festive wear to cover up worn-out spots, which had led to a new style of art in working wear. Also, frayed sleeves were cut off for making a room vest called “Sode-Nashi.” The detached sleeves were again used as patching cloths and ragged threads were used in the rag looming to give birth to another set of new clothing.

Indigo dyes were essential for working clothes for fabric strength, color longevity, insect repellent, and detoxification. Up until the early 1940’s, farmers in villages were all attracted to the indigo dyed clothes of various shades.
Even for the skilled women who did the whole process of cloth-making, it was still a very rigorous work to dye indigo; they often had to pay in order to have it done.

Indigos were considered luxurious. Approx. from 1912~1940’s, when 60 kilos of rice cost 5 yen, indigo dyeing of a bolt of cloth (34cm in width x 10m in length) cost no less than 0.6 yen. Luxurious indigo dyeing was surely a burden in a household. If the clothes were brought to the indigo dyers’ in winter, people had to pay together with the crops that had been harvested in the previous fall. The process to have it dyed in indigo also took quite long: the fastest would be 10 days but the longest was more than a month.

Therefore it was not so realistic to go to the dyers’ so often in their poor life settings. That is why they did it at home. Unlike the professional dyers’ places equipped with necessities, people could not yield good enough results right away. They had to keep trying at home to reach their preferable indigo shades. Whenever stains or spots became visible, they re-dyed over and over. This task, long and weary, was all on the women in the households.

We can observe the intrinsic cultural attributes on the variations of indigo dyeing. For instance, it was the Tsugaru district of Aomori prefecture where people dyed deeper indigo, whereas in the Nanbu district facing the Pacific Ocean, people preferred lighter indigo. What was still common in both styles was that people created the great intricate embroideries on the indigo dyed hemp clothes for the purposes of reinforcement, heat retention, and decoration in the long-snowy winter of Aomori.

Whether used as room wears or field wears, their beautiful “working clothes” were left to us today.

It was not so long ago. When Japan was experiencing the material poverty, people still contrived to satisfy their pouring wishes for beauty with the best of what they could get. These are not the jobs done by the professionals in Edo or Kyoto, but we simply hope you see and feel by many nameless country women’s sincere efforts, skills, and hopes that were quietly but proudly reflected in each piece of these working wear.