Aimoriyama

Aimoriyama is a Kurume Kasuri workshop in Hirokawa, Yame County, Fukuoka Prefecture, tracing its founding to Ansei 5 — 1858, in the closing years of the Edo period — and currently led by Torao Moriyama. Kurume Kasuri is an ikat-patterned cotton weaving tradition, and Aimoriyama presents itself as one of the few remaining workshops that still carries out the full process by hand, from thread-binding through dyeing to weaving, rather than outsourcing any stage.

The workshop dyes with natural sukumo fermented using sake, hardwood-ash lye, and shell ash rather than synthetic dye, and uses organic cotton throughout. Before dyeing, threads are hand-bound with hemp bark to create the resist pattern that becomes the finished ikat design once woven; the bound threads are then dipped and beaten through a cycle repeated, by the workshop's own account, thirty to forty times to build the pattern's color.

Aimoriyama offers factory tours by reservation as well as hands-on weaving and dyeing workshops, and sells finished Kurume Kasuri cloth and made-up goods drawn directly from its own looms and dye vats. Its self-description as a keeper of the complete traditional process — rather than a single stage of it — is the workshop's own characterization, consistent with the process detail it publishes, and distinguishes it from the many Kurume Kasuri sellers who weave or dye but not both.