In 1970, at age 18, I was sent to a small farming village in the northern mountains of Japan as a high school exchange student, a town famous for paper-making. The methods having been handed down for 100s of years. Five years ago I connected with Susan Byrd, who had lived in the same village in 1984 and studied with the elderly paper makers. A few decades later, she completed a book detailing and recording the soon-to-be-lost-forever methods. Paper was made from many types of plants and vines, but it’s a very laborious and winter process. I was able to study how to make paper there, but I didn’t know that paper could then be made into cloth. The fabric samples in this amulet are actually cloth woven from paper THREAD. It’s true. Expand the photo and take a closer look at the subtle colors and textures. The entire process was once a necessary way to survive and clothe yourself. This is so wondrous to me. The time, skill, and experience needed is just hard to comprehend. There are but two or three people left in the world that know how to do this—and Susan is one of them. She sent me a few scraps from clothing she made from her woven paper cloth and I thought it fitting to use them for my 100th amulet. After all, Shiroishi was the beginning of my Japan experience, my home away from home, and this is the 50th anniversary of that first trip. I pretty much based my career on that experience, teaching others about Japanese culture through the vehicle of textiles. And that love surfaced in this challenge.
Amulet Day 100/100
