[VILLAGE Report vol.47] The final village is Ainu handwork | Hokkaido

This is the 47th. Hokkaido's nationally designated items are Nibutani Ita trays and Nibutani Attus textiles the 2 items.

Both have been passed down mainly in Nibutani, Biratori Town, Ainu crafts in total. They were designated as national traditional craft products in 2013.

Weaving cloth from tree bark

Attus is, The inner-bark fiber of ohyo, a tree in the elm family, woven into cloth.

A tree is felled, the bark is peeled, soaked in a marsh or hot spring to separate the layers, then split finely into thread. It takes months before it becomes a single piece of cloth.

In this series, we have looked several times at cloth made with fibers from tree bark and grasses.

• Uetsu shinafu (Yamagata and Niigata) -- linden bark
• Oku-Aizu Showa karamushi weaving (Fukushima)—ramie
• bashofu (Okinawa, vol.09)—basho fiber
• Attus (Hokkaido) -- ohyo bark

At the northern and southern ends of the Japanese archipelago, people are doing the same thing. In places without cotton or silk, people made cloth from trees and grasses.

Meaningful Patterns on Trays

Ita means “tray” in the Ainu language. It is made by carving boards of katsura or walnut.

The carved patterns have names.

• Moreu -- a spiral
• Aiwushi -- a pointed shape
• Ramramnoka —scale shapes

These are decorative, and at the same time, forms with meaning as well. Traditionally, carving was considered men’s work, while weaving was considered women’s work.

Arimatsu shibori in Aichi (vol.25) and Kagawa’s fans (vol.14) were made to be sold.

Ita and attus were originally things people made for their own use. They did not begin as products.

That is a different starting point from most of the crafts we have seen in this series.

We Went Around All 47

We began in Yamaguchi and ended in Hokkaido.

As I wrote, I found myself thinking the same thing again and again.

Strong production regions do not share one common formula.

• Places that won by volume (Kagawa’s fans, 90%)
• Places that secured an irreplaceable use (Kochi’s washi paper)
• Places that did something difficult (Fukui’s titanium)
• Places that chose to be able to make anything (Gifu’s Mino ware)
• Places that made the labor itself a value (Aomori’s Tsugaru lacquerware)
• Places that kept making things for themselves (Nibutani in Hokkaido)

It seems there is no need to make any one of them the correct answer.

One more thing. In every prefecture, what remains remains because someone did not stop. It was not the system that protected them; people continued them. Official designation is the record that came afterward.

Value Village did not begin this series in order to sell products. It was to understand where we ourselves stand.

This journey has come full circle here, but it is not over. Next, we move into the specialties, souvenirs, foods, and places to visit in each prefecture one by one.

Search by Region (List of 47 Prefectures)

References: Hokkaido, Biratori Town, The Foundation for Ainu Culture, The Association for the Promotion of Traditional Craft Industries

—The Value Village Editorial Team