An indigo workshop in Tokushima that grows the plant, ferments the leaves and dyes the cloth, all three. The dye is not just natural, it is alive, and it has to be fed every morning.
From the workshop
The workshop
Buaisou was founded in 2012 by Kenta Watanabe and Kakuo Kaji, both former office workers who apprenticed under Osamu Nii, one of the last active sukumo masters in Tokushima Prefecture. They are among a small number of workshops that both grow the Polygonum tinctorium plant and produce the sukumo themselves, merging two crafts that were historically practised separately. The name pairs the Japanese for indigo and plant, with a second reading that means clumsy appearance, a nod to work that looks nothing like what it produces.
The living dye
The plants are seeded in spring and the leaves dried in summer, then piled into the nedoko, the sleeping place, and fermented with only water and air for 120 days, turned and watered throughout. The interior reaches 70 degrees. The result is sukumo, the raw material of Japanese natural indigo. The vat is built by dissolving it in a heated lye of wood ash with shell lime and wheat bran, kept above 20 degrees and stirred daily. The dyer reads the surface for ai no hana, the indigo flowers, a violet foam whose colour and smell say whether the bacteria are vigorous or tired. A live vat lasts months or years, and its colour shifts with temperature and age, so cloth dyed on a cold November morning is a different blue from cloth dyed in July. Both are correct. The variation is the record.
The reach
Buaisou have dyed for Jimmy Choo, Tory Burch, Nike, Artek and Uniqlo, and have run a studio in Brooklyn alongside the Tokushima base, taking the vat offshore without changing the process. The collaborations are secondary. What matters is that the core practice, grow then ferment then dye, continues at a scale that keeps it viable without industrialising it.
At a glance
The TGC view
We send guests with collector intent to Tokushima for the rare case of a craft still practised in its original geography, by people who chose it rather than inherited it. TGC arranges the workshop visit, the introduction, and the wider Shikoku route around it.
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