Bryan's Japanese Textiles

My blogs

About me

Gender Male
Occupation teacher craftsman
Location Fujino, Kanagawa ken, Japan
Introduction My home is in a vertical mountain village in Fujino just outside of Tokyo. It is here, in my 150 year old silk farming house I hold classes and workshops related to Japanese textiles. Our village shrine dates back 650 years. I’ve dug up dozens of 5000-year-old Jomon-era pottery shards near by. Twenty-one houses are scattered and perched on ledges along a narrow twisting road. Most of the somewhat ramshackle farmhouses designed for silk farming cling poetically to the deep shadows of afternoon. The land reached by the sun was either too steep to build on or was used to grow enough food to survive. From the front of my house I can see well-tended tea terraces ascending impossibly upward. Climb up the hillside and from the queues of tea you can survey my old farmhouse and on extra clear days even spy a self-conscious Mt Fuji.
Interests Japanese Arts, history, gardening, music, outdoors, traveling, ceramics, antique textiles, silk, indigo, vegetable dyes, weaving, sericulture, silkworms, natural dyes, shibori, katazome, japanese textiles, quilting, spinning, Japanese farmhouses, tea ceremony, thread making, pottery, looms, mingei, permaculture
Favorite Movies Anything with Brando. Japanese animation
Favorite Music Bob Dylan
Favorite Books Dostoevsky, Vonnegut, James Joyce, Kenji Miyazawa, Peanuts, Art History Books.