Yukihito Kanai

The Dyer of Amami

Yukihito Kanai, Colour, Mud, and the Living Traditions of Amami Ōshima

 

By Evangelia Papoutsaki and Chuck Clenney

{Listen to Yukihito Kanai speaking to Horizon magazine Chuck Clenney here}

Yukihito Kanai is a second-generation mud-dyer based in Tatsugo Town on Amami Ōshima. His craft, dorozome, is one of the island’s most distinctive cultural traditions: a dyeing process that uses tannins extracted from the native sharinbai plant and iron-rich sediment from local mud fields to produce the deep browns and blacks characteristic of Ōshima Tsumugi silk.

The technique is found virtually nowhere else in the world. Yukihito has spent more than two decades not only practising and refining it, but also expanding its reach through international collaborations and exhibitions while consistently arguing that what sustains a living tradition is not the preservation of fixed forms, but the continuity of the ideas and values that generated them.

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Playground and Provenance

Kanai grew up in northern Amami Ōshima at a time when the island’s roads were poor and its communities turned inward. The mountains, the shore, and the mud fields where artisans worked were simply where children went. Heritage sites and cultural assets were not yet the vocabulary of that world; these were just the places life happened.

“At the time, transportation was not nearly as convenient as it is now,” he recalls, “so the mountains, the sea, and even the mud fields where artisans worked became our everyday playgrounds.”

It was only after leaving — after high school, to Tokyo — that he began to understand how thoroughly those spaces had shaped him. The community relationships forged within a small island, the daily presence of the natural world, the sensory archive of swimming beneath a cloudy sky: all of it, he says, was quietly installed inside him long before he understood it as inspiration.

When he returned to Amami in his mid-twenties, it was not to inherit the family business in any conventional sense. His father had established the dyeing workshop that would become Kanai Kougei, now in its second generation in Tatsugo Town, but Kanai came back on his own timing, drawn by curiosity rather than obligation. He had been studying sound engineering. He wanted, as he puts it, simply to understand the work that had sustained the island and the people who raised him.

In trying to understand it, he discovered something that changed his entire sense of what art could be.

“I realised: you can make colour. Until then I had thought colour was something you painted. But here, colour is taken from mountains and nature and becomes part of woven cloth.”

The Chemistry of Place

Dorozome is technically a form of plant dyeing, though its name — “mud dyeing” — reflects what makes it singular. In most plant-dye traditions, the craft takes its name from the plant: indigo dyeing, madder dyeing. Amami’s dyeing is named for the mud because, as Kanai explains, using mud as a mordant was so unusual that the name stuck. People asked, “What is that?” — and the question became the label.

The process begins with sharinbai, a native evergreen of the rose family known in local dialect as teichigi. The wood is cut green, while still wet with sap, split and chipped by hand, then boiled to produce a deep red tannic infusion. Silk thread is immersed in this bath — not once, but repeatedly, up to thirty times — before being taken to the mud fields and submerged in iron-rich soil formed over geological time, some 1.5 million years in the making. The tannins from the plant meet the iron in the mud, and a chemical reaction occurs that no synthetic process can quite replicate. The cloth is then rinsed, dried, and returned to the dye bath. The entire cycle is repeated four or five times, building layer upon layer until the distinctive deep browns and blacks of Ōshima Tsumugi — the island’s famed silk pongee — emerge from beneath the accumulated depth of the process.

Dorozome involves an extraordinarily exhaustive series of processes: the sharinbai is gathered, ground into wood chips, boiled to prepare a dye bath; silk yarn is dyed in this bath twenty to thirty times before being immersed in the paddy field mud. The tannin in the sharinbai reacts with the iron in the mud, turning the yarn a deep dark colour. The procedure is then repeated four or five times to produce the characteristic deep black of Ōshima Tsumugi.

Kanai describes the experience of the practice as one of being permitted rather than in control: “Natural dyeing is only possible because of the natural environment. That’s why I always feel like I am being allowed to dye, rather than simply doing it myself.”

What is produced is not merely cloth. It is, in Kanai’s framing, a record of relation — between plant and soil, between geological time and human hand, between the specific climate of this island and the specific season of this year. Because the environment is always changing, no two dyeing sessions produce exactly the same colour. The same process, done side by side by two different people, yields subtly different results. This is not a flaw to be engineered out. It is the very nature of the thing.

“The environment itself is always changing,” he says, “so there is never truly the exact same colour as before. That is why each generation must continue adjusting and refining the process.”

Sound and Colour, Island and Self

Kanai trained in sound engineering before he returned to Amami, and the connection between those two disciplines — sound and colour, vibration and pigment — is not merely metaphorical for him. Both, he argues, are of a place: the sounds of the land and the colours of the land are expressions of the same underlying conditions. When he began to understand dyeing, he was, in a sense, translating something he already knew.

“There are colours of the land and sounds of the land,” he says. “I simply had never thought of them as colour before. When I began translating sound into colour, I started to see what I wanted to do.”

This sensory attentiveness pervades his approach to design. He does not think of the materials he works with as a palette to be assembled — as though colour were a neutral medium waiting to be arranged. Each colour carries provenance: this one from coral, this one from a plant, this one from soil formed in a specific geological layer. In Amami, those relationships are deeply entangled, he says, and when you try to work with them, the entanglement itself becomes a kind of pressure toward simplicity. He finds himself drawn to minimal forms — raw-edge cloth, pared-back surfaces — not out of aesthetic preference alone, but because stripping back is the only honest response to materials so richly layered with meaning.

“I cannot fully explain why that feels right,” he says. “It is important to me to value sensations that thought alone cannot reach.”

 

Tradition as Disposition, Not Form

Kanai is described by those who know his work as a rarity — someone who is simultaneously a seasoned artisan and a spirited artist. While upholding time-honoured techniques, he ventures beyond the concept of traditional craft, exploring new values of dorozome through original projects in collaboration with creators and fashion labels.

He is deeply resistant to any reading of “tradition” as the static preservation of form. Tradition, in his view, is something more like a disposition — a way of engaging with materials and environment that can take many shapes across time, because it is rooted in responsiveness rather than repetition.

“If tradition means not simply preserving form but making use of what exists in each era,” he says, “then I think that is entirely natural. More important than the concept is how one engages with the materials.”

He draws an analogy to music — an instinct that keeps returning, given his background. When someone arranges traditional shima uta (island songs) into pop, they face criticism at first; eventually the arrangement becomes part of the tradition. The same dynamic governs dyeing. New applications, new collaborations, new interpretations of the material: all will meet resistance, and all, if honest, will eventually find their place. What matters is not whether the form is new, but whether the spirit that generated the original form is still present and alive.

“Tradition often becomes fixated on form,” he says, “but I think the essence lies in the spirit that created that form. If that spirit remains reflected, then allowing new forms to emerge is actually an interesting moment.”

The Mud Fields and the World

Kanai’s practice has never been confined to Amami alone. He has led mud-dyeing workshops abroad, sharing the technique as a form of cultural exchange. He has worked in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. Kanai was aware of traditional Māori dyeing practices and felt a connection to their ethos, curious to visit New Zealand and learn more about indigenous craft traditions.

In 2025, Kanai presented !Nature in Amami Ōshima! at Toi MAHARA in Waikanae, Kāpiti — an exhibition featuring two heirloom kimono, paper wall hangings and contemporary garments made using dorozome. The exhibition was opened by Japan’s Ambassador to New Zealand, Makoto Osawa, and was accompanied by workshops at Ngā Manu Nature Reserve where Kanai shared shibori dyeing processes using local plants. Six Kāpiti artists were invited to collaborate with Kanai in a cultural exchange, producing naturally dyed streamers for a Tanabata, or Star Festival, installation.

The New Zealand visit deepened what Kanai already sensed: that Amami’s relationship to material — working from what the land provides rather than imposing upon it — is not local or parochial, but part of a wider, older intelligence shared across island cultures.

“Before Ōshima Tsumugi,” he observes, “Amami also wove cloth from banana fibres — similar to bashōfu. That way of making things from what exists in the land is very close to Māori weaving with native plant fibres. It may be the oldest method, but in some ways it is also the most advanced.”

He was also struck by the political framework he encountered in Aotearoa New Zealand — the comparative degree to which indigenous culture is acknowledged within civic structures. “When being a minority can so easily become a disadvantage,” he reflects, “it showed me that the extent to which a society is willing to accommodate culture can shape those relationships.” It is a gentle observation, but its implications for Amami — a place with its own distinct language, history, and identity within Japan — are not hard to read.

After the UNESCO Designation

Amami Ōshima became part of the Amami- Ōshima Island and Tokunoshima Island, Northern Part of Okinawa Island and Iriomote Island UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site in 2021. The designation brought new visibility to the island’s exceptional biodiversity and, with it, increased attention to its cultural traditions including dorozome and Ōshima Tsumugi. Kanai acknowledges the shift — more inquiries, more visitors, more occasions on which the craft is cited as an emblem of island culture — while remaining measured about what the designation actually changes.

“For islanders,” he notes, “this environment was simply normal. That is why I think understanding it at a deeper level — not merely through tourism or craft industries — could change how we preserve it going forward.”

The word “preserve” itself gives him pause. Nature, he suggests, has become what it is without human beings trying to preserve it. Culture, historically, has survived its most difficult periods not through intervention but through necessity — because it was genuinely needed. Whether tourism and designation can create that kind of necessity, or whether they tend instead to substitute spectacle for meaning, is a question he leaves open.

“Sometimes I am not even sure what ‘preserving’ means,” he says quietly. “Sometimes it may be better not to interfere at all.”

 

The Finite and the Infinite

There is one concern Kanai raises with some directness: the mud itself. The iron-rich sediment on which dorozome depends is a finite resource, formed over geological time and not replenishable on any human timescale. Workshops across Amami have historically been built precisely where suitable mud exists, rather than transporting it — the logic of the island being that it is faster for people to move to where the materials are than to move the materials. But during the post-war industrialisation of Japan, Kanai suggests, this finite resource was not always treated with sufficient care.

“There were times,” he says, “when finite resources were not treated with enough care. So now we need to consider what should be preserved for the island, including its natural heritage.”

The solution, as he frames it, is not technological or regulatory alone but philosophical. Because colour comes from nature and changes over time, the most Amami-like way of preserving something is not to preserve only the form but to allow the form to change while preserving the spirit and philosophy behind it. The colour of this year’s dyeing will differ slightly from last year’s. The colour available in fifty years may differ more substantially. That is not failure; it is the craft being honest about what it actually is — a relationship between makers and an environment that neither fully controls.

“Since colour itself comes from nature and changes over time,” he says, “I think the most Amami-like way of preserving things is not to preserve only the form, but to allow the form to change while preserving the spirit and philosophy behind it.”

Passing the Baton

Kanai thinks carefully about what it means to hand something on to a younger generation — and what it means to hand it on well. He has worked on projects outside the island, and he has observed that it is often easier to generate interest among people who come from elsewhere than among those who grew up surrounded by the craft. The familiar becomes invisible; the heritage of the everyday is hardest to see.

His answer is not to preach or to prescribe. It is, characteristically, to leave space.

“I think it is better to leave some space — to not overfill things — so that when the baton is passed, they have room to create their own role.”

Tradition survives, in his telling, not by replication but by reactivation: each generation finding its own reason to engage with the materials, its own questions to bring to the mud and the plant and the iron-rich earth. The form changes. The spirit, if the transmission is honest, does not.

Following People, Not Places

When visitors come to Amami — and more and more do, in the wake of the UNESCO designation — Kanai’s advice is consistent. Don’t plan an itinerary. Follow people.

“If you follow the people of Amami, you will naturally arrive at many places. That process itself becomes an interesting journey, and communicating with island people becomes part of the experience.”

It is advice that applies equally to his own practice. The collaborations he values most were not planned; they emerged from encounter. The connections between Amami and Māori weaving were not researched in advance; they surfaced in conversation and observation. The ideas that become work often come, he says, while drinking together — not in the studio, not over email, but in the informal chemistry of human proximity.

“Just as there is a chemical reaction between natural materials and people in making something,” he says, “I think there is also a kind of chemical reaction between people.”

In a practice built on chemical transformation — tannin meeting iron, plant meeting soil — it makes complete sense that the human dimension of the work would follow the same logic. Something unexpected becomes possible only in the actual encounter. You cannot predict it in advance. You can only put the elements together and see what colour emerges.

Kanai’s practice sits at the intersection of craft, ecology, and cultural continuity. Dorozome depends on a specific environment — its plants, its mud, its changing seasonal conditions — and he is clear-eyed about what that dependence means: the environment is finite, the process must adapt, and each generation has to find its own reason to engage with the materials. His answer to the question of how a tradition survives is neither preservation in the strict sense nor unanchored reinvention. It is something more like sustained responsiveness — to the land, to collaborators, to what each era makes possible. That, in his view, is what keeps the work honest.

Yukihito Kanai’s studio, Kanai Kougei, is located in Tatsugo Town, Amami Ōshima.

Follow Yukihito Kanai’s work at @yukihitokanai on Instagram.

Sources cited:

• Toi MAHARA gallery, !Nature in Amami Ōshima! exhibition page, toimahara.nz
• Toi MAHARA, Esteemed Japanese textile artist jumps at Kāpiti opportunity, toimahara.nz/news
• Objects of Use, Kanai Mudding Works: Mud and indigo dyers, Amami Oshima, objectsofuse.com
• PAPERSKY, Yukihito Kanai, textile dyer, papersky.jp
• Mediamatic, Yukihito Kanai: Workshop Tutor, Mud Dye, mediamatic.net
• The Colors of Amami: An Interview with Yukihito Kanai – Horizon Magazine podcast transcript