In 1686, the Tokugawa government banned a piece of clothing.

Not a color, not a fabric but a specific dyeing technique that had become so extraordinarily luxurious, so unmistakably expensive to produce, that the shogunate decided that it posed an actual threat to the social order and thus made it illegal.

The technique was called sō shibori, meaning “all-over dapple,” and it was, at the time, possibly the single most labor-intensive textile being produced anywhere in Japan. This article will explore what sō shibori was, why it got banned, and why the ban is part of the reason shibori still exists in the sophisticated form it does today.

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A Country That Legislated What You Were Allowed to Wear

During the Edo period, running from 1603 to 1868, there was a strange and specific kind of prosperity as Japan had unified under the Tokugawa shogunate and sealed itself off from most foreign contact, and in that enclosed stability, commerce exploded. Merchants, technically the lowest of the four social classes, beneath samurai, farmers, and artisans. Despite accumulating extreme wealth, they still officially remained at the bottom of the hierarchy.

This created a problem where the government had to take it seriously enough to write new laws about. As wealthy merchants that could afford to dress better than the samurai who technically outranked them, and visible wealth in the wrong hands was, in Tokugawa political thinking, a threat to the entire societal structure. So the government issued sumptuary laws, edicts that dictated what fabrics, colors, and techniques different classes were permitted to wear. Merchants were barred from silk along with restricting the use of bright reds and purples and certain embroidery techniques were outright prohibited.

The stated goal was frugality and social order. What actually happened was that dyers and merchants spent the next two centuries finding every possible loophole they could exploit, and the loopholes they invented under that pressure became more sophisticated than anything the restrictions were initially trying to prevent.

What So Shibori Actually Required

Shibori is a manual-resist dyeing technique where the fabric is bound, stitched, folded, or twisted before dyeing so that the bound sections resist the dye and only the surrounding cloth absorbs it, creating a pattern through physical manipulation of the cloth itself rather than anything painted or printed on top of it. This tradition in Japan stretches back over a thousand years, but it developed its most extraordinary refinements specifically during the Edo period, precisely because commoners were legally barred from silk and had to dye cotton, almost exclusively in indigo, into something worth wanting.

Sō shibori was the most extreme version of this: kanoko shibori, meaning “fawn spots,” in which the entire surface of a kimono is covered edge to edge with thousands of tiny individually bound dapples, each one pinched up by hand and wrapped tightly with threads before dyeing, then released afterward to reveal the resist pattern underneath. A single kanoko kimono covering the whole garment could require years of a skilled craftsperson’s labor. Not weeks. Years.

The pattern itself, incidentally, echoes the spotted coat of a young deer, which is where the name “fawn” comes from. Something about that has always struck me was that even the most extravagant and most labor-punishing textile Japan ever produced took its inspiration from something as innocent/unassuming as a fawn.

In 1686, the government looked at sō shibori and decided that anything requiring that much invisible, unmeasurable labour had become a display of opulence/symbol of extravagance too dangerous to allow among commoners. They banned it by name.

The Ban That Made the Craft Better

Here is the part I find genuinely remarkable: the restrictions didn’t kill shibori, it redirected it.

With the most extravagant version of the technique now illegal, dyers pushed technical sophistication into forms that stayed within the letter of the law while pushing everything else as far as it could go. Miura shibori, a looser looped-and-bound technique producing softer, more irregular patterns, required less labor than kanoko but still demanded real skill to execute well. Nui shibori introduced stitching before binding, allowing for more deliberate, controllable pattern placement. Craftspeople in small production towns amongst them, the chief of these production towns, Arimatsu, which is near Nagoya, refined these techniques into genuine regional specialties, and Arimatsu has been producing shibori continuously since the early 1600s. It still is, today, one of the most recognized centers of the tradition of sō shibori anywhere in the world.

On the other hand, there’s a broader pattern that shows up across Edo period textile history, not just in shibori. When the government banned lavish silk, dyers invented yuzen, a freeform resist-painting technique using rice paste that could produce complex, painterly pictorial designs on the plainer fabrics commoners were still allowed to wear. When restrictions tightened further, merchants started lining plain outer cotton robes with the richest silk they could find, hiding their wealth entirely on the inside of the garment where no inspector would see it, where it was visible only to the wearer and to whoever they chose to show. Kabuki actors and courtesans in licensed pleasure districts existed partially outside the normal social hierarchy and became de facto fashion laboratories/models, wearing things everyone else technically couldn’t, and their looks filtered back into the wider culture through woodblock prints that functioned as something close to Edo period fashion media.

Every restriction produced a workaround more interesting than the thing it was trying to prevent. Shibori, which was forced into working within cotton and within legal technique boundaries, became one of the most technically demanding textile traditions Japan has ever produced, not despite the law but because of it.

What I’m Bringing to Brunei

I’ve decided to start carrying shibori in the shop, and I wanted you to know its history before you see it on the shelf, because I think it changes what you’re looking at when you understand it.

What you’ll be looking at is cloth that exists in its current form because a government once decided it was too dangerous for ordinary people to own, and the people who made it responded not by giving up the ambition but by getting more ingenious. Every dimple and pucker in a piece of shibori cloth was placed there by a human hand, bound, dyed, and released, one small section of fabric at a time. It is not printed. It is not machine-repeated. It is the accumulated record of somebody’s patience and expertise.

The workforce doing this today has shrunk considerably from its nineteenth century peak, and the techniques that were sophisticated enough to be banned in the seventeenth century are, in a very real sense, still rare enough now that most people encountering them for the first time have no idea what they’re looking at.

I’d love to change that a little, starting from here.

House of Crux is a weekly journal written by a Japanese entrepreneur in Brunei documenting the intersection of traditional textiles, cultural heritage, business, and everyday life. Each week, a story from Japan.

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Customers touch my fabric before they ask about it. Almost every time. A hand goes out, fingers brush across the surface, and there’s a small pause before anyone says anything.

What they’re usually reacting to isn’t a printed pattern or a particular color. It’s the surface itself: a fine, all-over texture, slightly bumpy, slightly alive under the fingers, completely different from the smooth flat weave of the printed cotton and polyester sold everywhere else here.

That texture has a name. It’s called shibo, and it’s not decoration. It’s the result of a fight between physics and a very stubborn Japanese craftsman, where the craftsman wins on purpose.

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The Fabric That’s Made By Trying to Untwist Itself

The technique is called chirimen, and it originated in Japan in the 16th century after weavers encountered imported crepe fabric from China and spent the next several centuries perfecting something distinctly their own. Today it’s most strongly associated with the Tango region of Kyoto Prefecture, which has been producing silk textiles for over 1,300 years and currently accounts for roughly seventy percent of all kimono silk fabric made in Japan. About 600 workshops in the area are still involved in some part of the process.

Here is the part that I think is genuinely clever, in a way that has nothing to do with tradition for tradition’s sake and everything to do with a craftsman understanding physics better than most engineers.

To make chirimen, weavers use two different threads that are treated in completely different ways. The warp thread which are running lengthwise, are left untwisted, this is raw silk in its natural relaxed state. The weft threads which are running crosswise, are twisted violently between three thousand and four thousand times per meter, as the threads are alternating in between the clockwise and counterclockwise direction, woven in one after another.

At this stage, the fabric just looks like plain white cloth. Flat. Unremarkable. The twisted threads are holding an enormous amount of tension, coiled up like springs that have been wound and are waiting for permission to release.

Then the fabric goes through a process called scouring, where it’s boiled and refined to remove sericin, the natural protein coating on raw silk. This process does something the weaver has planned for from the very beginning: it loosens the fabric’s structure just enough that those thousands of tightly twisted weft threads finally get the chance they’ve been waiting for and they try to untwist. They can’t fully unravel because they’re locked into the weave, however they still continue to strain against it, and that strain physically pulls the surface of the fabric into thousands of tiny, irregular bumps.

That’s shibo. It isn’t printed, brushed, or embossed onto the fabric afterward. It’s the visible record of the threads trying to relax and are being stopped halfway. The texture you feel under your fingers is frozen tension.

Why the Wrinkle Makes the Color Better

Here’s the part that explains why this fabric doesn’t just feel different, it looks different too, in a way that’s hard to describe until you’re standing in front of it.

A flat, smooth fabric reflects light uniformly across its whole surface. Every point on the cloth is facing the same direction relative to the light source, so the color you see is essentially one flat tone, everywhere, all the time.

A fabric covered in shibo has thousands of microscopic peaks and valleys. Light hits each of those tiny irregular bumps from a slightly different angle which then scatters, and reflects back at you in dozens of directions simultaneously rather than one. The practical result is that dyed chirimen has a depth and richness to its color that flat silk simply cannot produce, because the surface itself is doing something closer to how a rough gemstone catches light compared to a polished flat sheet of glass. This is also why, coincidentally, chirimen resists visible creasing far better than smooth silk: a surface that’s already irregular has nowhere obvious for a new crease to stand out against.

The craftsmen in Tango adjust the exact number of twists, the balance between the warp and the weft, and the specific alternating pattern of the twisted threads to control precisely how large or fine the shibo turns out. A tighter, more numerous twist produces a finer, denser shibo. A different combination produces something coarser. This is not something you can eyeball. Weavers develop the feel for it over years, adjusting tension by hand, trusting a process they can’t fully see the results of until the fabric comes out of the scouring bath and the surface finally reveals what all that hidden twisting was actually going to look like.

The Part That Should Worry You a Little

I want to be honest about something, because this newsletter tries to be honest about things.

Real Mikawa cotton, the traditional Japanese cotton once used for garments across the country, is now produced in such small quantities that it’s barely sufficient for a limited run of high-end towels. It is not a fabric I can bring to you in any meaningful volume, because there is almost none of it left to bring. Ninety-nine percent of the cotton used in Japan today is imported. This isn’t a secret and it isn’t something craftsmen are quiet about. It’s simply what happened to an industry that scaled down for a hundred different economic reasons over the past century. But we’ve been particular about 100% made in Japan cotton all the time.

Chirimen has managed to fare better, but the weavers who do this work by feel, adjusting twist tension with decades of accumulated judgment and experience, are not a growing population. Several of the workshops still producing traditional Tango chirimen are small, generational operations. The problem with that is I don’t know how many more years some of these particular weavers have left in them.

This is, honestly, part of why I do what I do. The fabric in my shop isn’t simply beautiful. It’s evidence that someone spent years learning to twist raw silk approximately three thousand times per meter, by feel, so that a fight between a fiber and its own physics would produce something no printing machine could ever replicate.

I still encourage you to touch it before you take my word for any of this to get a feel of what a Japanese craftsmen can achieve and also before it is gone forever.

House of Crux is a weekly journal written by a Japanese entrepreneur in Brunei documenting the intersection of traditional textiles, cultural heritage, business, and everyday life. Each week, a story from Japan.

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I didn't come to Brunei with a business plan. I came with an idea and a boss willing to bet on it, and somewhere between that first batch of fabric and now, I've been trying to build something that actually reaches people, not just a product on a shelf but a brand people trust enough to bring into their closets, their weddings, their most important days. That work happens almost entirely face to face, at the fitting table, taking measurements, discussing fabric, hearing about their lives. That last part turned out to matter more than I expected.

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The Ceremony of comfort

Japan is famous for its customer service, and the reputation is deserved. The precision of it, the consistency, the way every interaction follows a script refined over decades to remove any possible source of friction: it is genuinely impressive. I grew up inside it and simply assumed this was what good service looked like everywhere.

Working at the tailor shop rearranged that assumption almost immediately.

Here, the interaction between customer and staff is less polished. Someone might tell me my suggestion doesn't suit them. Someone else will spend forty minutes talking about her daughter's upcoming wedding before we've even discussed fabric. A customer will message me at ten at night with a question and expect an actual answer, not a scripted one. There is no ritual greeting, no choreography. Two people are simply talking, more or less as equals, about something that matters to one of them.

What I noticed, slowly, was that I preferred it.

Japanese service is designed to make a customer feel comfortable. Working here taught me the distinction between that and actually attending to someone as a specific person. Tailoring requires the second thing whether you want it to or not. I know my regular customers' measurements, their preferences, small details about their families, the occasions they're dressing for. That knowledge lives in a relationship, not in a service protocol.

The elaborate, beautiful, slightly ceremonial politeness I grew up with, the "irasshaimase" that greets you the moment you walk through a shop door in Japan, is comforting in its own way, where come to think of it, a kind of perfected surface. A closeness this specific, the kind you get from putting your hands on someone's shoulders to check a hem, doesn't really fit inside a script. Brunei never gave me a script to begin with, so the closeness had nowhere else to go.

Being Told What You Actually Think

Something else I had to unlearn: in Japan, dissatisfaction is rarely spoken aloud. A customer who is unhappy typically doesn't complain. She simply doesn't come back, and you may not find out anything was wrong until much later, if you find out at all. The feedback arrives as absence.

My customers here tend to just tell me. Sometimes with a fair amount of directness. In the beginning, this stung a little, in the specific way I'd been trained to feel stung by direct criticism. I come from a culture that values kuuki wo yomu, reading the air, understanding what someone wants or feels without them having to say it. It is considered a mark of sophistication. Making someone spell things out can feel almost rude.

What I've noticed after enough of these conversations is that being told directly is simply faster. A problem named out loud gets solved. The relationship survives it, grows stronger than before, because we've actually talked about something real instead of both quietly managing an unspoken tension.

I've started thinking that the "air practice" I was raised on depends entirely on everyone agreeing to play the same game. It only works if the person across from you is also transmitting on a frequency built for careful, indirect interpretation. When they're not, when they're simply saying what they mean, all that trained sensitivity has nothing to read. It just gets in the way.

I think about the customers I probably lost, quietly, over the years I might eventually work in Japan, without ever knowing why. Compared to that, someone telling me straight to my face that the collar sits wrong feels like a genuine kindness.

What This Taught Me About the Word "Normal"

None of this makes Japanese service culture wrong, or Bruneian directness superior in some universal sense. What working here taught me is narrower and, I think, more useful: the specific shape of politeness I grew up inside, the distance it maintains, the things it makes unnecessary to say, was never the only way to be good at taking care of people. It was one culture's answer to a question every culture has to answer somehow.

I didn't need to leave Japan to learn that intellectually. I needed to spend a year with my hands on strangers' shoulders, adjusting hems, hearing about their weddings and their unhappy in-laws and their honest opinions of my fabric choices, to actually feel it.

That's the part I don't think I could have learned any other way.

House of Crux is a weekly journal written by a Japanese entrepreneur in Brunei documenting the intersection of traditional textiles, cultural heritage, business, and everyday life. Each week, a story from Japan.

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When I moved to Brunei, I expected to be the person who knew things about Japan.

I brought Japanese fabric. I had opinions about regional textile production. I felt reasonably prepared to be a Japanese person representing Japanese things in a foreign country.

What I did not expect was to meet people who knew more about certain parts of Japanese culture than I did.

Specifically: anime. And Pokémon cards.

House of Crux

What Is A Kimono, Really?

Every time a customer in my shop holds up a bolt of Japanese fabric and asks, “This is for kimono, right…

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2 months ago · 3 likes · CruxTokyo

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“You Are Already Dead”

Let me tell you about the most confusing introduction I have ever experienced.

When I was studying abroad in Canada, a local student maybe ten to fifteen years old was assigned to show me around the dormitory on my first day. We had never met. I didn’t know her name yet. She looked at me, a Japanese person who had just arrived in her country, and said, very seriously:

“お前はもう死んでいる。” ( “Omae wa mou shindeiru” = “You are already dead”)

For anyone who doesn’t know the reference: this is a line from Fist of the North Star, a manga and anime from the 1980s. The protagonist says it to enemies before delivering a fatal strike. It has become one of the most iconic lines in the history of Japanese pop culture. In Japan it’s the kind of reference that appears on merchandise and gets quoted in comedy shows.

I did not immediately know this. My knowledge of Fist of the North Star was not particularly deep. So my first reaction to her I had just met telling me, in Japanese, that I was already dead, was something close to genuine alarm.

When I figured out it was an anime reference, I felt two things simultaneously: relief, and a kind of delighted confusion about what exactly had just happened.

This is what anime does. It teaches people sentences in a language they don’t speak, and then they deploy those sentences at maximum impact on unsuspecting Japanese people who don’t watch enough classic manga adaptations.

Brunei Watches Everything

The young generation here is deeply into anime. This is not a casual observation. I mean they have watched things, they remember things, they reference things in conversation with the easy confidence of people who grew up with this material as a completely normal part of life.

What surprised me even more than the anime was the presence Pokémon cards.

In Japan, I had essentially never met anyone who collected Pokémon cards as an adult. I knew the game existed. I knew there were collectors. I had simply never encountered them in my daily life.

In Brunei, I meet them constantly. Almost everyone I know here has cards. People show them to me. People talk about which sets they’re tracking down. People have opinions about card conditions and storage methods and which prints are worth holding onto.

At some point I had to genuinely ask myself: did I miss something about what was happening in Japan? Or did something travel outward and become bigger somewhere else than it ever was at home?

How Anime Got Everywhere

(And Who Takes Credit For It)

The short answer to how anime became a global phenomenon involves a combination of factors that the Japanese government would very much like to take credit for.

The longer answer is more complicated.

In 2002, an article in Foreign Policy magazine called “Japan’s Gross National Cool” pointed out that Japan had accumulated enormous cultural influence through anime, manga, video games, and food, and suggested the government might want to think strategically about this. The government read the article and took the suggestion seriously. In 2010, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry officially launched the Cool Japan strategy. In 2013, they established the Cool Japan Fund with an initial investment of 50 billion yen to promote Japanese cultural exports abroad.

Some of this funding went to projects that made sense in retrospect. Some of it went to a satellite television channel broadcasting Japanese content across Asia that failed to find an audience. Some of it went to a five-floor Japanese department store in Kuala Lumpur that also failed to find an audience, accumulated losses, and closed.

By 2022, the Cool Japan Fund had lost 23.1 billion yen.

Meanwhile anime was reaching tens of millions of paying subscribers on streaming platforms globally, through a process that had been running since the 1990s largely through fan communities sharing things they loved without any government involvement at all.

My reading of this: anime got everywhere because it was good enough that people wanted to share it. The government showed up afterward and tried to attach itself to something that was already working. This is not unique to Japan. This is how governments relate to culture in general.

The Current Situation Is Complicated

The cultural landscape has shifted considerably since the early Cool Japan years.

Chinese and Korean pop culture now have serious global momentum. Labubu, the collectible toy phenomenon from Hong Kong-based Pop Mart, is everywhere you look. K-pop has built a distribution infrastructure and fandom management system that operates with a precision that is genuinely impressive as a strategic operation. Japan is no longer the only game in town when it comes to Asian pop culture exports, and anyone pretending otherwise is not paying attention.

Japan’s current government has been trying to respond to this. In 2025, five major Japanese music industry associations jointly launched Music Awards Japan, known as MAJ, billed as an Asian Grammy equivalent. The inaugural ceremony was held in May 2025 at Rohm Theatre in Kyoto, broadcast live on NHK and streamed globally on YouTube. YOASOBI, Creepy Nuts, Fujii Kaze, Mrs. GREEN APPLE all performed. The production was genuinely impressive.

Then Prime Minister Takaichi showed up.

Not at the ceremony itself, but at the Gala Party the night before, in Tokyo, where she was introduced to the crowd with a full formal announcement and proceeded to give a speech about how Japan’s music would conquer global markets and that the government would be pushing content industry overseas revenue to twenty trillion yen. The reaction on social media was swift and not particularly kind. The comparisons being made were to what would happen if Trump walked out at the Grammys, which is, I think, a precise and useful analogy for understanding why people were upset.

The Grammys work, to the extent they work, because they feel like the music industry talking to itself and to its audience about what mattered that year. The moment a head of government takes the microphone to explain that this is actually a national economic strategy, something deflates. The art and the policy statement cannot exist in the same room without the policy statement winning.

What is interesting is that MAJ itself seems to be continuing regardless. A second ceremony is already scheduled for 2026 in Tokyo. Whether it can establish genuine credibility as an international music prize, rather than being read as a government soft power project in a tuxedo, is something I’ll be watching with some interest.

J-pop is genuinely good. It doesn’t need a prime minister explaining why it should be successful. It needs people to hear it.

Back to the Pokémon Cards

I want to end on something that bothers me a little, because this newsletter is honest about things that bother me.

Pokémon cards are, at their origin, a game for children. The entire design philosophy was built around kids collecting, trading, and battling with each other. The joy of the thing was supposed to be accessible.

What has happened globally, and is very visible in Brunei, is that rare cards have become financial assets. Adults with significant disposable income have entered the market in ways that make the original experience essentially unavailable to the children the cards were made for. Scalping, high-price resale, cards treated as investment vehicles rather than games: all of it documented, all of it continuing.

In Brunei, there is no regulatory framework around any of this. No resale laws, no particular consumer protection structure, no reason for anyone to intervene in what the market does with a piece of illustrated cardboard. This is consistent with the general character of life here, which I find mostly freeing and occasionally uncomfortable in roughly equal measure.

What I notice in the Pokémon card situation, and in a lot of economic life in Brunei generally, is something that exists everywhere but becomes more visible when regulation is minimal: the people with money get everything first, and the people without it keep waiting for an opportunity that arrives slightly too late or slightly too expensively.

I don’t think this is unique to Brunei. I think it’s a pretty accurate description of how most markets work when left entirely to themselves.

The thing I find myself thinking is not that the wealthy shouldn’t be able to buy things. It’s that a world where economic participation is genuinely open to everyone, where the kid who loves Pokémon can actually play the game, where social security exists not to extend the lives of those already comfortable but to give the not-yet-comfortable a real chance at something, is a more interesting world than the alternative. And probably a more stable one.

I left Japan partly because I wanted to use my own money, as I wrote in my first issue. But I don’t think the answer is everyone for themselves. I think the answer is systems that actually work for the people who need them most, which is a different thing entirely.

House of Crux

Why I left Japan

I am a completely normal Japanese girl…

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3 months ago · 28 likes · 2 comments · CruxTokyo

What that looks like in practice, in Japan or Brunei or anywhere else, is the question I keep not quite answering. But I think asking it is the right place to start.

House of Crux is a weekly journal written by a Japanese entrepreneur in Brunei documenting the intersection of traditional textiles, cultural heritage, business, and everyday life. Each week, a story from Japan.

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Every time a customer in my shop holds up a bolt of Japanese fabric and asks, “This is for kimono, right?”

I smile. I nod. I say something vague like,

“It can be.”

And inside my head I’m thinking: not exactly. And also, you’re asking the wrong question.

Because the word “kimono” doesn’t mean what most people think it means. And the garment we picture when we hear it didn’t even exist under that name for most of Japanese history.

So let’s actually do this properly.

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Kimono Just Means “Thing You Wear”

Literally. Ki means to wear. Mono means thing.

For a thousand years, if you were Japanese and got dressed in the morning, you were wearing a kimono. Farmers wore kimono. Samurai wore kimono. Children, priests, merchants, everyone. The word covered all of it.

It didn’t start specifically meaning “silk robe with an obi” until the Meiji period, 1868 to 1912. That’s when Japan opened to the West, and the West needed a tidy, exportable word for the thing they were buying in Yokohama port.

Japan provided the packaging. Nobody included the instruction manual.

The Garment That Started as Underwear

The first version of what would eventually become the kimono appeared during the Heian period, 794 to 1185.

The idea was genuinely radical for its time: take straight cuts of fabric, sew them together, and make a garment that fits any body without tailoring. No darts, no shaping. Just rectangles. You could take it apart, wash it flat, resew it, and pass it down to the next person. For a society that treated fabric as serious wealth, this was extremely practical engineering.

Court noblewomen turned this practical rectangle into an art form. They wore juni-hitoe, layered robes that could reach twelve or more kimonos deep, and invented kasane no irome, the system of color combinations I wrote about in a previous issue, where the sequence of colors visible at sleeve openings and hems communicated the season, your taste, and your social literacy all at once.

https://open.substack.com/pub/cruxtokyo/p/calendar-you-could-wear?r=8jxdy8&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=webUnderneath all those layers was the kosode, which translates as “small sleeves.” At first it was technically underwear. But because it was comfortable and practical, it kept migrating outward. This is a recurring theme in fashion history that I find quietly satisfying: the sensible undergarment that eventually takes over.

The Isolation That Made Kimono Japanese

Skip ahead to the Edo period, 1603 to 1868. Japan unified under the Tokugawa shogunate and then essentially closed itself off from the rest of the world for 264 years. No significant foreign influence, very limited trade, a society that was weirdly stable for longer than most countries have existed.

The kosode became the universal garment. Everyone wore it regardless of age, gender, or class. And because there was no outside influence reshuffling the aesthetic conversation, Japanese textile culture had two and a half centuries to develop entirely on its own terms.

This is also when things got interesting in a specifically Japanese way.

Sumptuary laws dictated what fabrics and colors different social classes were allowed to wear.

Merchants, who were technically at the bottom of the official social hierarchy despite being quite wealthy, were told that golden threads and elaborate brocades were not for them. So they invented shibori, a tie-dyeing technique that produced patterns you couldn’t legislate against.

They developed yuzen, a resist-dyeing method that could produce painterly designs on plain fabric. They refined komon, tiny repeating patterns that looked simple from a distance and extraordinary up close.

By the end of the Edo period, a single particularly fine kosode could cost more than a house. People started treating textile as genuine art, keeping pieces, repairing them, handing them down. The straight-line cut that had been a practical feature of the original Heian design now meant you could alter a garment across three generations without destroying it.

The kimono became a family heirloom almost by accident.

Meiji Named It, Then Made It Obsolete

Then the Meiji government arrived in 1868 and told people to wear Western clothes. Factories introduced chemical dyes. Silhouettes shifted. The country modernized at a pace that made everyone slightly dizzy.

And somewhere in that period of transformation, the garment finally got the name we use now.

The irony is that “kimono” as a specific term arrived precisely when the kimono started becoming optional. By the 1920s it was already shifting from everyday wear to special occasion only. The word got attached right as the thing it named began its gradual retreat from daily life.

What I’m Actually Selling You

This is the part where I stop being a historian and answer the actual question.

I don’t sell kimono. I sell the fabrics that made kimono possible, and that have been making things possible for several hundred years before I got involved.

Tsumugi, a fabric originally made from the silk floss of irregular cocoons considered too imperfect for finer weaving, is now UNESCO-listed Intangible Cultural Heritage. It was common fabric once, the practical choice of people who couldn’t afford anything better, and it is extraordinarily durable and comfortable and gets softer with age. The indigo-dyed cloth from Tokushima uses techniques that have survived industrial dye manufacturing because the results are genuinely better than the alternative.

These fabrics are still being made, by some of the same regional producers who have been making them for generations. Some of those producers are very elderly and will eventually stop. I think about this more than is probably healthy when I’m selecting what to bring to Brunei.

Why It Feels appropriate Here

Clothes carry meaning in Brunei in a way that maps directly onto this history.

Baju kurung is not just a dress. It’s what you wear on Friday, to a wedding, to meet someone important. The specific fabric you choose communicates things that don’t need to be said aloud. The logic is recognizably the same as Heian kasane no irome, even though the rules and the geography are completely different.

When you put Japanese fabric into that system, something new happens. Not kimono. Not baju kurung. Something that doesn’t have a name yet, which I think is exactly the right place to start.

Back to the Customer Question

So, is this fabric for kimono?

Here’s what I actually want to say.

The fabrics in my shop have survived centuries of Japanese history by being genuinely good at being cloth. Warm when it’s cold. Breathable in humidity. Durable enough to alter and pass down. They weren’t preserved because someone decided to protect them as cultural artifacts. They survived because people kept choosing to use them.

I bring them to Brunei because I think they deserve to keep being used. Not displayed, not preserved behind glass, not reserved for special occasions only. Used. Made into something that gets worn to work and to weddings and eventually handed down to someone who will wear it differently than you did.

If you want to see what’s currently available, the shop is at BTC May in Tanjong Bunut. If you’re reading this from somewhere other than Brunei, I’m working on ways to make that easier for you, and I’ll announce it in a future issue.

The kimono was never really about looking Japanese. It was about making something that adapts and lasts.

That part still applies.

House of Crux is a weekly journal written by a Japanese entrepreneur in Brunei documenting the intersection of traditional textiles, cultural heritage, business, and everyday life. Each week, a story from Japan.

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If you’ve been following my Instagram or TikTok, you already know I’ve been living in Brunei for over a year now. Something happens when you stay somewhere long enough: you stop noticing the things that once stopped you in your tracks. The country’s rhythms become your rhythms, and the first-week version of yourself, the one whose jaw kept dropping, starts to fade.

I’m writing this before she disappears entirely.

This is my record of the things that genuinely surprised me when I first arrived, which I’m also keeping for the inevitable moment when someone asks me “so, what’s Brunei actually like?” and I need an answer more honest than “it’s nice.”

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Brunei Is Freezing

I need to start here because nobody warned me about this and it should be on the government’s tourism website in large letters.

Brunei sits on the island of Borneo, in the middle of Southeast Asia, roughly four degrees north of the equator. It is, by any reasonable definition, a tropical country. The air outside is warm and thick and smells faintly of rain at all hours.

None of this matters because the entire country runs on air conditioning.

Every shop, every office, every restaurant, every car is cooled to a temperature that would be considered aggressive even in a Japanese winter. This makes sense once you understand it: the Islamic dress code means that women typically wear hijab, long sleeves, and long skirts year-round. The solution to wearing full-coverage clothing in tropical heat is apparently to make all indoor spaces cold enough to make the clothing comfortable. The logic is impeccable and also I was wearing a cardigan in thirty-degree weather within my first week.

Since most people get everywhere by private car rather than walking, you spend your life moving between cold interior spaces with brief warm transitions. I have been genuinely chilly in Borneo. My Japanese friends did not believe me.

Brunei Is an Animal Kingdom

In Japan, urban wildlife means pigeons and crows. That’s it. The occasional raccoon dog if you’re somewhere more rural, but essentially, pigeons and crows.

Brunei is a completely different situation.

Every single day I see stray dogs, cats, lizards the size of my forearm, and frogs appearing suddenly from places where frogs have no business being. Occasionally: monkeys. Sometimes: reports of crocodiles near the river, which I have chosen to treat as urban legend for my own peace of mind.

The dogs are everywhere. Every street has its own dog families, semi-feral but clearly looked after by the surrounding community, fed by residents, known by name by the shopkeepers. There are cats in every parking lot and on most walls. The lizards do not care that you are there. The frogs will be on your doorstep in the morning and there is nothing you can do about it.

Coming from a country where the presence of a single crow is considered a minor event, this took several weeks to adjust to. I still find it delightful, which I think says something about me.

“Bruneians Are So Kind and Friendly”

If you search for Brunei travel content, you will find this statement in virtually every post. It is true. I can confirm it from personal experience. Bruneians are genuinely warm, welcoming to outsiders, and consistently helpful to someone who is clearly confused.

Here is the part of the sentence that travel posts leave out: Brunei is also a small community where everybody knows everybody, reputations travel faster than news, and the primary entertainment available is knowing what everyone else is doing.

I say this with complete affection and zero judgment, because my hometown in Japan operates exactly the same way, possibly worse. During COVID in 2021, my hometown quietly reinstated something very close to traditional village ostracism against households that weren’t complying with local unspoken rules. In the 21st century. I grew up there.

Small communities are small communities. People are kind to visitors because you’re interesting and you haven’t done anything yet to generate a story. Once you’ve been there long enough to have opinions and make decisions and occasionally make mistakes, you become content. This is fine. This is human. Brunei’s version of it is, in my experience, generally warmer and less vindictive than the Japanese countryside edition.

The friendliness is real. The watchfulness is also real. Both things are true at the same time, and once you accept that, life here becomes significantly easier to navigate.

A Place That Makes Life Interesting

Living somewhere foreign is not always comfortable, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. There are days when the gap between where you are and where everything you know is located feels very large.

But I wrote down these observations because I wanted to keep the version of myself that still found everything remarkable. The cold buildings in the tropical heat. The dogs on every corner. The warmth of strangers who genuinely wanted to make sure I was alright.

Brunei surprised me in ways I hadn’t expected, which is the best thing a place can do.

If you have questions about life here, or if you’ve visited and want to compare notes, I’d genuinely like to hear from you. Drop something in the comments.

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House of Crux is a weekly journal written by a Japanese entrepreneur in Brunei documenting the intersection of traditional textiles, cultural heritage, business, and everyday life. Each week, a story from Japan.

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At some point in the Heian period (794 to 1185 CE), a noblewoman at the Imperial Court in Kyoto made a very bad decision. She wore the wrong color combination for the season.

I don’t know who she was. History didn’t bother recording the names of women who committed minor social infractions. But I know that everyone in the room would have noticed, because in the Heian court, your outfit wasn’t a personal choice. It was a calendar. It was proof of your education, your sensitivity, your worthiness to exist in the same space as the Emperor.

Getting it wrong wasn’t just embarrassing. It was a statement about your character.

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It Was Complicated on Purpose

Let me explain what was actually happening here, because it’s genuinely one of the more extraordinary things I know about the history of Japanese clothing.

Heian noblewomen wore a layered garment called juni-hitoe, which translates roughly as “twelve layers.” The name is slightly misleading since the actual number of layers wasn’t always twelve, but the idea was that multiple robes were stacked on top of each other in a precise sequence. The sleeves and hems of each layer would be visible at the edges, creating a graduated effect of overlapping colors.

The art form was called kasane no irome, literally “the colors of layering,” and it worked like this: for every season, for every occasion, there was a correct configuration of colors. Spring called for combinations evoking young grass and early cherry blossoms, pale greens layered under whites or soft pinks. Autumn demanded deep crimsons and russets that mirrored the changing leaves. Winter favored white over green, snow over pine, stillness over movement.

The combinations had names. Yamabuki, named for the yellow kerria flower, was appropriate for late spring. Fuji, for wisteria, signaled the same season in purple. Momiji, maple, meant autumn was fully underway.

A woman who understood these combinations was demonstrating that she understood the natural world with enough precision to translate it into fabric. A woman who got it wrong was telling everyone in the room that she didn’t. In a society where most formal communication happened through poetry and clothing rather than direct speech, that was a meaningful failure.

Why Japan Developed a Calendar You Could Wear

This requires a small detour into Japanese aesthetics, because the color calendar wasn’t some arbitrary fashion system dreamed up by bored aristocrats.

The Heian period was when Japan deliberately stepped back from the influence of Tang Dynasty China, which had shaped Japanese culture quite heavily in the preceding centuries. The court began to develop something distinctly its own, an aesthetic sensibility that centered on the natural world as experienced in Kyoto, which has some of the more dramatic seasonal changes you’ll find anywhere in Japan.

Cherry blossoms arrive and are gone within two weeks. Autumn maples turn a color that doesn’t really exist at other times of the year. The first green of spring looks nothing like the green of summer. Heian court culture built an entire intellectual and artistic tradition around noticing these distinctions and responding to them with appropriate feeling, a concept that eventually became incorporated in the idea of mono no aware, which is usually translated as “the pathos of things” or “the poignant beauty of impermanence.”

The color calendar wasn’t decorating clothes with nature. It was saying that a person of genuine culture should feel the difference between late March and early April, and that feeling should be visible in what she was wearing. The fabric was evidence of her inner life.

The Garment Itself Was Extraordinary

I want to spend a moment on what juni-hitoe actually looked like, because descriptions rarely do it justice.

The full ensemble consisted of several distinct layers, each with a specific name and purpose. Starting from the outside, there was the kara-koromo, a short outer robe in woven silk that was considered the most prestigious garment in the ensemble. Below that came the uwagi, the uppermost of the stacked robes. The core of the layering system was the itsutsu-ginu, literally “five robes,” which provided the cascading color effect at the sleeves and hems. Beneath everything was the hitoe, a single unlined robe, and the whole thing was anchored by the naga-bakama, long trailing trousers in deep scarlet.

The weight of the complete ensemble could reach twelve kilograms. Movement was limited by design. A woman in full juni-hitoe didn’t walk through a room; she arranged herself within it. The ideal was stillness, the robes spread around her, the colors cascading at every opening, a human figure that had become almost indistinguishable from the landscape she was dressed to evoke.

The fabrics themselves were woven with patterns that had their own meanings: tachibana for citrus trees, karakusa for scrolling vines, hishi for diamond shapes that had been part of Japanese textile vocabulary since before the Heian period. The finest were double-woven in silk, with additional patterns in contrasting thread color on top of the base weave.

A Thousand Years of Taste in My Hands

I find myself thinking about kasane no irome at odd moments, and I thought about it a lot when I was doing my first proper buying trip for the shop BTC may.

Standing in front of bolts of Japanese textile, deciding what to bring back to Brunei, I was not thinking about 12th-century court conventions. I was thinking about what my customers would find beautiful, what would make a baju kurung look elevated rather than merely different.

The Heian court is gone. The juni-hitoe is now worn only at Imperial accession ceremonies and certain Shinto rituals. The names of most of those noblewomen have been lost.

However the fabric remembers.

Where You Can Actually See This

If you want to encounter kasane no irome somewhere beyond an article written by a Japanese woman sitting in Brunei, you have a few options.

The Fushimi Inari shrine and several others in Kyoto hold ceremonies throughout the year where traditional court dress is worn by participants. The Jidai Matsuri festival in October is probably the most accessible of these, with a procession that moves through 1,200 years of Japanese history in costume.

For the fabrics themselves, the woven silks, the structured patterns, the textures that carry a thousand years of aesthetic preference in their construction… I’d suggest starting with what I bring from Japan. I try to source fabrics that have this quality of depth to them, textiles where the making is visible if you know where to look.

The season they belong to, I’ll leave it to your imagination.

House of Crux is a weekly journal written by a Japanese entrepreneur in Brunei documenting the intersection of traditional textiles, cultural heritage, business, and everyday life. Each week, a story from Japan.

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The moment I started working at the tailor shop named BTC May, my boss did something I wasn’t expecting. She suggested I bring in Japanese fabric to sell alongside the business.

If you haven’t read my first issue, the full story of how I got here is worth reading.

but for now, what matters is this: my boss believed in the idea before I had any proof it would work. She didn’t just encourage me. She sponsored my first batch.

I keep asking myself whether all Bruneians are like this. The warmth here, the willingness to say yes to something uncertain, the genuine enthusiasm for an idea that hasn’t proven itself yet. It genuinely surprised me. Where I grew up in Japan, in a region where the winters are long and the people are careful, decisions like that take time. Trust is built slowly. Here, it arrived almost immediately.

I’ll tell you more about where I grew up another time.

Three Days

I felt like my first batch sold out in three days. It was that quick.

I had brought over more than ten different designs, patterns and textiles sourced from Japanese makers, the kind of fabrics that carry centuries of craft tradition in their weave. Customers picked them up, held them, and said things like “I love this” before they’d had time to think about it. That particular combination of color and texture and weight that Japanese fabric does so well, it translated immediately, even here, in a tropical country on the other side of the world from the workshops where those fabrics were made.

I kept restocking. New designs, new materials, larger quantities of whatever was selling fastest. The business started to find its shape.

The Customer I Didn’t Know I Had

Here is something I want to be honest about, even if it makes me sound a little unusual as a business owner, I genuinely do not think about who my customers are in terms of status or background. What I see is the person in front of me. The fabric they’re running their fingers over. The occasion they’re dressing for. Whether thev’re wealthy, influential, or someone I have never met before has no bearing on the attention I offer or the care I put into the work. Everyone gets the same me. No performance. No tiering.

The downside is I’m often clueless about details other people would consider important.

Which is how I only found out this week that one of my customers wore my fabric to the Istana Nurul Iman this year.

The Istana

A quick note for anyone outside Brunei: the Istana Nurul Iman is the official palace of the Sultan of Brunei, and it is, by most measures, the largest residential palace in the world. During Hari Raya Aidilfitri, the celebration marking the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting, the Sultan holds an open house at the Istana. It is one of the most significant social occasions in the Bruneian calendar. The clothes people choose to wear there are not chosen lightly.

I went to a separate open house that season, hosted by a friend of my acquaintance who lives in Brunei. It was a casual afternoon. At some point during the visit, I noticed that his wife is one of our customer who made a baju kurung from one of my fabrics.

I asked her about it.

She mentioned, that she had worn it to the Istana on the first day of Hari Raya this year.

I think I just stood there for a moment completely stunned.

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Did the Sultan See My Fabric?

I want to be careful here, because I genuinely don’t know the answer to that question.

What I do know is that at the Istana during Hari Raya, female guests meet with the Queen and the princesses rather than the Sultan directly. The formal reception follows this arrangement. So whether my fabric made it into the Sultan’s actual line of sight is, as I told my customer with what I hope was a dignified expression, essentially a matter of probability.

What is not a matter of probability: my fabric was inside the Sultan’s palace. There were cameras. There were staff. There were hundreds of guests dressed for one of the most important occasions of the Bruneian year.

Something I chose, sourced, and brought to Brunei was there for all of it.

What It Means to Make Something That Matters

I started this business without any particular expectation that it would reach anywhere extraordinary. I wanted to bring Japanese textile craft to a part of the world that hadn’t seen much of it, and I wanted to do that with enough care and honesty that the people who bought from me would feel good about what they’d chosen.

Finding out that one of my fabrics had been worn to a royal reception, not because I’d targeted that outcome, not because I’d positioned my product that way, but simply because a customer loved it enough to choose it for the most significant occasion of her year, made me feel something I’m still not sure I have words for in English.

Proud is close. Grateful is closer. Quietly determined to keep going is probably the most accurate.

The products I bring from Japan are made by craftspeople who have been refining their techniques for generations. They deserve to be worn somewhere that matters and I intend to keep finding them those moments.

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House of Crux is a weekly journal written by a Japanese entrepreneur in Brunei documenting the intersection of traditional textiles, cultural heritage, business, and everyday life. Each week, a story from Japan.

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I am a completely normal Japanese girl.

Or at least, I used to be.

Since 2025, I have been living in Brunei Darussalam, a tiny, oil-rich sultanate tucked into the northern coast of Borneo that most people can’t locate on a map without Googling it first. If you’re one of those people, don’t worry. I couldn’t either, when I first applied to go there.

So. What exactly happened?

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The Accidental Exchange Student

At university in Tokyo, I was studying Southeast Asia specifically Laos, which is, as far as academic specializations go, impressively obscure. There are only about ten students per year in all of Japan who study the Lao language at university level. I was one of them, which tells you something about my relationship with the road less traveled.

My university had an exchange program: two weeks to a month abroad during summer or winter break, with academic credits. The plan was obviously Laos. Except the Laos program only ran in winter, and this was the summer right after COVID, and I was desperate desperate to go somewhere. Anywhere with a functioning airport and no quarantine hotel.

Then a friend said, “Hey, want to come to Brunei with me?”

I said yes. I didn’t know where Brunei was. I said yes anyway and applied it.

She ended up going to New Zealand that summer.

I went to Brunei alone.

The Country That Shouldn’t Work (But Does)

Brunei was, to put it simply, a shock to the system but the pleasant kind.

Japan in 2022 was still one of the most ethnically homogeneous developed nations on earth. Brunei, meanwhile, is a place where Malay, Chinese, Indian, and expat communities coexist in a genuinely functional way, held together by oil money, a monarchy, and the kind of tropical heat that makes everyone slow down and be slightly nicer to each other. No income tax. Free healthcare. Free university education. A Sultan who has been on the throne since 1967 and shows no signs of abdicating.

Does it sound too good to be true? It is complicated, and I will talk about that another time. But for a 20-something Japanese woman who had just spent two years watching her government explain why young people needed to pay more taxes to fund the retirements of people who would outlive the pension system itself, Brunei felt, honestly, like a provocation. A very well-funded, air-conditioned provocation.

My Small Act of Financial Resistance

I want to be honest with you about something, because this newsletter is going to be honest about things.

Japan has a beautiful, intricate, world-class social security system. It also has one of the lowest birth rates on the planet, an aging population that is the envy of life insurance actuaries everywhere, and a tax burden on young workers that is and I say this with love for my country, completely unhinged.

By the time I was job-hunting, I had done the math. Roughly half of what I would earn in a standard Tokyo salaryman job would disappear before I could spend it, pension contributions for a system that will likely not exist in its current form by the time I’m old enough to collect, health insurance, residency taxes, the whole architecture of a welfare state designed for a demographic that is no longer being born in sufficient numbers.

The young people who will pay taxes when I’m elderly? There won’t be enough of them. The money will be gone. I have no illusions about this.

This is not a political manifesto. I am not an economist. I am a girl who went to fashion school while getting a university degree, learned to sew, fell in love with a country she couldn’t find on a map, and decided that her money was more interesting to her than it was to the Japanese government.

This is my small act of resistance. I want to use my own money.

The Phone Call That Changed Everything

While I was navigating the deeply ritualized torture of Japanese job-hunting season, a friend from Brunei called. That family runs a tailor company, a real one, the kind that has been dressing government officials and their families for decades, the kind whose customers sometimes wear their work to meet the Sultan.

She asked if I wanted to join.

I said yes. Again without fully thinking it through.

I moved to Brunei. I brought my fashion design certification, my obsessive knowledge of Japanese textiles, and an idea that had been forming in the back of my mind since that first exchange semester: what would happen if you combined the ancient craft traditions of Japanese fabric-making with the equally ancient, equally sophisticated world of Muslim fashion?

It turns out, something way more beautiful that I would have imagined was created. But that story deserves its own chapter.

What This Newsletter Is

This is House of Crux, the only weekly journal I know of written by a Japanese fashion designer living in Brunei, I made this for people anywhere in the world who are curious about:

Japanese textile history and the extraordinary craft traditions behind fabrics that have been woven the same way for five hundred years. The strange, fascinating, occasionally maddening experience of being a foreigner building a small business in a Muslim monarchy in the middle of Borneo. The slow, deliberate project of bringing Japanese fabric culture into conversation with Islamic fashion and what happens when two deeply aesthetic traditions finally meet. And occasionally, some affectionate criticism of Japan, delivered by someone who loves it very much and left anyway.

New issues every week. Free to start. Honest throughout.

If you’re curious about Japan, about Brunei, about fashion, about what it looks like when someone leaves a perfectly good country to do something slightly impractical in a place most people can’t find on a map, you’re in exactly the right place.

Welcome to House of Crux.

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