[ Craft x Tech Lecture Series Vol.3 ]“Oitama Tsumugi x Yoichi Ochiai” @ The University of Tokyo

Craft x Tech is an initiative to bridge the gap between traditional Japanese craft and contemporary technology. Our goal is to create a novel and unique body of artworks that express both the history and future potential of these beautiful materials and techniques. With this in mind, we have selected a group of designers and artists whose work we respect and admire and who we believe will bring new and meaningful insights to these centuries-old master crafts traditions. For its inaugural edition, 6 traditional crafts from 6 prefectures of the Tohoku region and 6 designers/creators collaborated. Furthermore, as part of this project, the participating creators and craftsmen are invited to hold a special lecture series.

This special lecture series at the University of Tokyo began in 2023. The third session, held in February 2024, featured Oitama Tsumugi (a traditional woven textile from Yamagata Prefecture) craftsman Gentaro Nitta, President of Nitta Textile Arts Inc., and media artist/researcher/entrepreneur Yoichi Ochiai.
Nitta shared insights into the history and challenges of Oitama Tsumugi, while Ochiai introduced his recent art projects. Their discussion highlighted a deep passion for craftsmanship and innovation. Following the lectures, a panel discussion was held with guest speaker Yuichi Taka, Director and Head Sustainability & Innovation Div. at HighChem Co., Ltd., and moderated by Craft x Tech Creative Director Hideki Yoshimoto.

*Oitama Tsumugi is a woven fabric made in the Oitama region in Yamagata prefecture. Oitama region had been shipping blue ramie in the beginning of Edo Era, and was developed as a production area of textiles later. Oitama Tsumugi has different techniques inherited in each of the three main areas, Yonezawa, Shirataka and Nagai, but all have the common feature for example dyeing the yarn first and weaving it with plain weave.

Lecture by Gentaro Nitta, Oitama Tsumugi

Gentaro Nitta 
Born in 1980 in Yonezawa City, Yamagata Prefecture. In 2003, studied kimono and weaving at a long-established traditional "obi" manufacturer in Kyoto. Joined Nitta Textile Arts Inc. in 2005. Received awards such as the "Newcomer Award" at the Japan Traditional Crafts Exhibition, the "Association Award" from the Yonezawa City Arts and Culture Association, the "Newcomer Award" from the MOA Okada Shokichi Prize, and the "Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education Award" at the Japan Craft Dyeing Exhibition, among many others. Represented Yamagata in the LEXUS NEW TAKUMI PROJECT 2017. In 2017, appointed President (5th generation) of Nitta Textile Arts Inc. A regular member of the Japan Craft Association.

Natural environment of Yonezawa and the history fo Oitama Tsumugi

The Oitama region of Yamagata prefecture is located in the central part of the northeastern Japan. It is known for its heavy snowfall in winter, but it is rich in agricultural products and livestock farming.
Oitama Tsumugi is produced in three of these districts: Yonezawa City, Nagai City and Shirataka Town. Tsumugi is a silk textile made from spun silk thread hand-pulled from floss silk. The existence of Uesugi Yozan (1751-1822) is indispensable to the development of Oitama Tsumugi. In the 17th century, Yonezawa had already seen a development in producing ramie (called aoso or karamushi, a fibre extracted from hemp), safflower and lacquer. Of these, ramie was of particularly high quality and was sold as a raw material for mosquito nets and kimonos as far as Nara and Niigata. However, Yozan thought that commercialisation of products would bring more profit than the supply of raw materials, and he encouraged the production of kamishimo (formal dress) and summer kimonos for warriors by combining silk and ramie. Fabrics made using silk for the warp and linen for the weft, became a practical and luxurious fabric with the smoothness of linen combined with the suppleness and lustre of silk.

Safflower dyeing revived by the Nitta family

Nitta Textile Arts Inc. was founded in 1885. Originally from a family of warriors, they started their business as a weaver in the Meiji era (1868-1912), partly because they also made textiles thanks to the policy of the aforementioned Lord Yozan. Their main product was those for warriors, especially hakama trousers. It was even said, “Nitta means hakama, and hakama means Nitta.”

However, as Japanese people started wearing Western-style clothing in the modern era, the demand for hakama trousers naturally decreased. In the Showa period (1926-1989), the main products were replaced by underwear. Against this backdrop, the third generation, Shuji Nitta and Tomiko, my grandparents, tried to redevelop safflower dyeing around 1963, and succeeded. In the middle of the Edo period, Yamagata was the largest producer of safflower in Japan. The safflower was used not only for dyeing and weaving, but also for Chinese medicine and women’s lipstick, and was so rare and expensive that it was said to be as valuable as gold. However, safflower dyeing declined after the Meiji period due to the introduction of chemical dyes. My grandparents wanted to revive kimono using this beautiful red, which could only be produced by safflower dyeing, and as a result they established an integrated production system from dyeing to weaving. Today, we produce our own products in a variety of shades using techniques such as layered dyeing and layered painting.

Nitta’s strengths

Few companies do everything from dyeing to weaving in-house: most production areas have a division of labour system. Nitta Textile Arts Inc. handles everything from hand-dyeing to machine-dyeing, and from yarn-dyeing to fabric-dyeing, and handles not only vegetable dyes but also chemical dyes. We take Both hand-weaving and machine-weaving. I am planning to utilise our hand weaving technique in this Craft x Tech collaboration project.
We maintain these machines ourselves. For example, it is very important when dealing with kimonos to keep the ears of the fabric clean, and the looms we use for this work are about 100 years old. We use it carefully, checking adjusting and it by ourselves.

Past challenges and towards future collaboration

I grew up in an environment where my house and workshop were together from birth, so I have been familiar with crafts from an early age. Naturally, I started on the path of craftsmanship, and today I belong to the Japan Kōgei Association as a traditional craftsman and exhibit at the Japan Traditional Crafts Exhibition once a year. I recently exhibited a hakama trouser. The number of hakama trousers produced in Yonezawa as well as in the rest of Japan is decreasing, but I wanted to revisit the quality of it. I dyed and weaved the threads myself in 60 different colours. I intend to continue this practice of making one piece of work from the very beginning.
Just as my grandparents were introduced to safflower, I hope I will be able to present new creations and pass on this experience to the next generation through this wonderful project.

Lecture by Media Artist Yoichi Ochiai

Yoichi Ochiai 
Media artist. Born in 1987, he began his career as an artist around 2010. He explores themes of materialization, transformation, and an admiration for mass in the border areas. He holds the position of Associate Professor at the University of Tsukuba and Special Appointed Professor at Digital Hollywood University. In 2025, he serves as the Theme Project Producer for the Japan International Exposition (Osaka Kansai Expo). Recent exhibitions include "Childlike Heart to You" (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2020), "Kitakyushu Future Creation Art Festival ART for SDGs" (Kitakyushu, 2021), "Ars Electronica" (Austria, 2021), "Study: Osaka Kansai International Arts Festival" (Osaka, 2022), and "Ubiquitous Body, Intertwining Spacetime" (Kusakabe Mingei Museum, 2022), among many others. He is also involved in various collaborations across different fields, such as directing the "Yoichi Ochiai x Japan Phil Project."

Digital and Nature

In his essay “The Japanese View of Nature,” the physicist and essayist Torahiko Terada (1878-1935) stated that although scientists of the time considered nature and humans as opposing and separate entities, they were in fact one. He goes on to speculate that since humans have also adapted to their environment over a long period of time, the peculiarities of their environment must have left some kind of unique mark on humans. I suspect that this also applies to traditional crafts.

As a media artist, I am currently working on the theme of Digital Nature. By this I mean creating an organic world that does not separate nature and humans. To begin with, when I was a PhD student at the University of Tokyo in the late 2000s, my theme was how to create a structure without mass. I was trying to think of something that had a structure but was built on a balance that would disappear if the electricity went out, and that could also be created programmatically. For example, I was working on simulators of sound dilation to create shapes, to make things float and to project things in the air. We also did other things, such as using plasma to project an image in the air.

Later, when I set up my laboratory, I thought that the theme of my research would be the one beyond the sublation of the original nature with mass and the digital nature without mass, and that there would probably be a new nature that emerges between mass/physicality and data. We thought that the question then would be how to define the meta-structure of genetic and neural cycles, and this became the theme of our laboratory.

World+, World-, World+- and null

I call the nature with mass World+, the nature without mass World-, and the digital nature that combines the two World+-. I believe that the null between these three worlds is the problem. Null is a state of computer memory; nothing in it. The null state that is created at the intersection of the three worlds is likened to the Japanese and East Asian philosophy of being born out of nothing and returning to nothing, and is constructed physically, informatically and technologically. You will be able to see this in action in the pavilion at the Osaka-Kansai Expo, which will open in 2025.

Why traditional crafts?

Thus, I have become comfortable with the digital world, but I am also interested in crafts and folk art. To begin with, what is the difference between technology and traditional crafts and folk art? Technology has always been a tool to create a new nature, so the idea that there is no conflict between being close to nature and to develop technology seems to have been generally accepted before the war. However, this is not the case today. This is a big problem. And if a digital nature is established, can folk art be established in that nature?
I do photography, so I carefully scrutinise the materials and techniques I use for it. What I am showing you now is a photograph printed on handmade paper made by artisans, using digital technology and a 19th century technology called platinum printing. In this way, as I move back and forth between the world of mass and the world of masslessness, I am interested in old techniques and ideas and ponder whether I can make use of them in my work.

Towards the collaboration with Oitama Tsumugi

In his essay “To Have a Home”, Kunio Yanagida (1875-1962) says that nature grows and changes. This idea may have been commonplace in Yanagida’s time, but it is not so today. When I thought about what would happen if I were to give form to this premise of changing nature, coupled with our lives and the issue of sustainability in contemporary society, and what kind of cross between tradition and technology I would present, I thought that a tea house would be a good idea. Together with Mr Nitta, I have been thinking about how to pack the textile and land of Oitama Tsumugi into a tea house. The basic structure of a tea house is to create a cubic or rectangular shape and then assemble it with a lattice structure, but I would like to create something different.

Panel Discussion with Yuichi Taka from HighChem Co., Ltd.

In the second half of the lecture, a special panel discussion was held with Yuichi Taka from HighChem Co., Ltd., one of the sponsors of Craft x Tech. Joined by Gentaro Nitta and Yoichi Ochiai, the discussion explored themes of craftsmanship, technology, and innovation.

Yoshimoto:
I’d like to ask Mr Nitta first. You are both a traditionalist and responsible for preserving tradition, but you are also very active in new initiatives in collaboration with Mr Ochiai. What are your thoughts on these activities?

Nitta:
I have always believed that I just happened to be born into an environment where I could do crafts, but my motivation is that I just love it and want to continue. I am proud of the fact that it is really wonderful to be able to create something from nothing by myself. I don’t make things thinking that I have to preserve tradition or how I should act towards the future. In this collaboration, I think, after talking with Mr Ochiai, that the importance of being really interested in something and thinking about how to respond to that is what will result in making the future yourself.

Ochiai:
What is interesting about the Nitta is that when a machine breaks down, they fix it themselves. In other words, their uniqueness resides in the fact that they form a group of people who can fix everything related to the process of making their products by themselves.

Nitta:
Since I have the belief in doing it myself, I keep making it to see it finished. The joy of completion is very special. Failure is in a sense a success, and I can see failure as my own fault.

Yoshimoto:
Mr Ochiai, too, makes his own equipments.

Ochiai:
Yes, though it may seem surprising. There are, of course, some things I cannot make myself. For example, I can’t make weavings. But the fun part is that it goes beyond our imagination for the first time when a few of us get together and make something,

Yoshimoto:
Why did Mr Ochiai become interested in crafts and mingei? I think there are many people who find it surprising.

Ochiai:
I was interested in them when I came across the idea that nature changes. I wondered if mingei would change as nature changes. In other words, what is naturally created constitutes minge, but as nature expands, what is created also changes, so I started to research how I should think about mingei now. Surprisingly, I found that in the field of painting, there were things like the introduction of photographic techniques, and then there were things like the introduction of Western science and the response to it. In other cases, I think about what nature is. There are a lot of overlaps with the research I have done so far.

Yoshimoto:
I thought that tradition and technology were nature+, but Mr Ochiai sees them as nature-, don’t you?

Ochiai:
Tradition itself is software, i.e. nature -, so traditional crafts are nature + -.

Yoshimoto:
The same may be true of what Mr Nitta is doing. I feel that if traditional crafts are nature + -, then people like Mr Nitta are facilitating them. Before this project, Mr Nitta also tried many new things. What were your thoughts on doing such things before this project?

Nitta:
From the point of view of a craftsman who makes things, even though I think I know a lot about the world, I often feel that I actually know nothing about it. In my case, if I focus on kimono making, the more I concentrate on that, the more I lose sight of the wider world.　I am very happy when I am offered to do something I have never done before. New worlds come into view through the connections between different people.　So I think that I was and still am able to create things through encounters with people in order to build a different world.

About the nature mentioned earlier, this is a really deep story.
What is nature? In fact, the farming village in the picture Mr Ochiai showed you seems completely natural, but there are also babbling rivers and other things that have been created by humans. In a way, however, knowing that and daring to think it’s beautiful is also being natural.

Ochiai:
There is very little untouched nature left. But just because it’s not untouched nature doesn’t mean it should be destroyed. If the post-war view of nature was built on the idea that there were rural villages and then non-rural cities and then back to nature, I think this is a good opportunity for people to see how our view of nature changes when the digital comes into it.

Yoshimoto:
But does the question then arise as to what is natural? Especially in relation to physicality. I worry that the speed of evolution in this world is so fast that human physicality may not be able to keep up.

Ochiai:
I don’t think that we need to look at the world without mass in a very special way. The moment we have a symbol, we can see a transformation of the world without mass. For example, when a cat meows ‘meow’ we think it is doing something or communicating something. If the information is compressed, it has a mass -.
Shizen in Japanese is different from nature in English. Nature includes the quality of a thing or essence of a thing. In contrast, shizen in Japanese has the meaning of the universe. In other words, the Japanese word nature is a combination of the words universe and nature. In this way, it is also important to think about the ecosystems that humans can join.

Yoshimoto:
The reason why you want to create a tea house is because it encompasses universe, nature and the human body, right?

Ochiai:
I think of the tea house as a mass+ made of mass-. But what is done in it is drinking tea with the body. The process itself is also analogue. The significance of this is huge, for the digital and physical worlds, for AI and nature, and for technology and craft.

Yoshimoto:
What do you think of this project, Mr Nitta?

Nitta:
It’s very exciting. It’s not just about making things, but it’s even more exciting when you know the background, especially when I understand what it means and feel the process of connecting the points, it makes me look forward to it even more.
This time, too, I was able to create a new piece of work by asking for collaboration in this way. I want to improve myself so that I can say I want to do it again next time. It is important for craftspeople to be able to say, ‘I can do this,’ by challenging themselves to do something they haven’t done before.

Yoshimoto:
Incidentally, it was Mr Ochiai’s suggestion that he wanted to do textiles. Could you tell us the reason?

Ochiai:
I happened to be in Fukushima prefecture before I was approached about this. There I was looking at ramie and thinking about whether this could be used for something. Later, when Mr Yoshimoto approached me about collaborating with traditional crafts, he introduced me to Oitama Tsumugi.
Originally, the similarities between textiles and computers have been pointed out for a long time, so I thought it would be a good match for me. Besides, textiles are transformable. When woven, it becomes a structure; when wrapped, it turns into a deposit; when transparent, it becomes a wall and lighting.

Yoshimoto:
Is it your first time making a tea house with textiles?

Ochiai:
Yes, it is. I want to challenge myself to see if I can make it without building pillars. I want to make something that people won’t think it’s a cube.

Yoshimoto:
Here we would like to introduce you to another guest. Mr Ko from HighChem Co., Ltd.

Taka:
Nice to meet you, my name is Taka of HighChem Co., Ltd. I am a sponsor of Craft x Tech.
I was surprised to hear about Lord Yozan earlier because I respect him as a businessman. As some of you may know, he paid off all his debts by himself. I thought that this was also a fate.

My company was created by my father and mother. Now they both have Japanese citizenship, but they are Chinese. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, they entered the reopened university as a freshman and then started business. They turned their savings into a ticket to Japan and went to study at the University of Tokyo.
They both studied chemistry, so after graduating from the University of Tokyo with a master’s degree in chemistry, they started working as a researcher at Mitsubishi Chemical. Later, they set up their own company, HighChem Trading Company.
My father’s strongest and most important field was C1 chemistry. He developed technology to convert carbon into substances. The most distinctive technology that HighChem possesses is the technology to produce polyester raw materials from carbon monoxide (CO). As the world is looking for carbon neutrality and greening, the HighChem company is also promoting the conversion of carbon monoxide (CO) into carbon dioxide (CO2). The aim is to make polyester from CO2.

Yoshimoto:
I was surprised when I heard that you had made CO2 fibres. I wondered if such a thing was possible.

Taka:
We are ready to do it right away, but there is a problem of price: converting CO to CO2 alone would increase the current price of polyester by a factor of ten. That is too expensive for customers to buy it. The chemical industry is a huge industry, but the margins are thin. Cloth shops will still want to sell the same house-quality products as before. So it might be a good idea to start by working with high brands. That way, the day will soon come when CO2-derived polyester will be part of everyone’s life.

Yoshimoto:
It sounds a bright future is waiting for the field of textiles. Have you ever heard such a story, Mr Ochiai?

Ochiai:
About carbon recycling, right? That’s what happens in the textile sector. As Mr Taka mentioned, cost is also a big issue. So it’s good to make sure that the costs are properly matched.
By the way, I’m a photographer, so when I print photos, I make them with hot springs or with Dead Sea salt or something. What I think during the process is that it is important to know what CO2 is used to make the product.

Yoshimoto:
What do you mean?

Ochiai:
If you did it in a crematorium, you could get any amount of interesting CO2 (laughs). You could make it from the CO2 burned when someone dies.

Yoshimoto:
Is that as a meaning?

Ochiai:
Yes, because carbon neutrality is only a semantic space. So what carbon dioxide the product is made of is important.

Taka:
This space contains about 400 ppm of CO2, which is enough to produce a skein of yarn. If we could collect CO2 from places with high CO2 concentrations, such as factory exhaust gases, we could manufacture products more efficiently.

Ochiai:
But you have to burn something for that.

Taka:
We all know that carbon neutrality is most efficient if it is done where things have just been burned and it is easy to collect CO2 in high concentrations. But at the same time, people who want to sell things in a sustainable context want a clean image of CO2.
Despite these many challenges, I think apparel has a lot of potential for coexistence with the chemical industry in Japan. Most of the chemicals around us are made from petroleum, and the cost of the raw materials is decided by the petroleum companies, and the price of the final goods is decided by, for example, the apparel people or the people who make household goods. Therefore, chemists such as we cannot add any value to the products and sell them to customers. However, if the technology to make fibres from CO2 becomes commercially viable, we, as an upstream company, will be able to sell straight to the apparel industry. I believe that the day will come when the chemical industry will be able to brand its products.

Ochiai:
It would be surprising to other animals that they all have the same CO2 but different meanings.

Taka:
I would like to introduce one more thing: what I am wearing today is 100% made from plant starch. The corn starch is fermented once to make lactic acid, and then the lactic acid is turned into something called polylactic acid.
Compared to bio-based sustainable materials, such as vegan leather, which you may have heard of, corn has a big advantage because it is produced in large quantities every year. I think that things that are made to be sustainable must always be affordable. If you make something that is too outlandish and it costs several hundred thousand dollars, you end up just making it.
But there is a challenge: it is made from corn starch, so it is very sensitive to heat.
If you try to dye something made from polylactic acid at the same temperature as polyester, it won’t dye, it won’t take colour and it will soon fall apart, which has been a problem for many years.
When I was having trouble deciding what to do, I went round to traditional craft weavers and dyers all over Japan and asked them to try it. Then, I don’t know why, but they succeeded.
I think that traditional Japanese crafts have a power that cannot be put into words. It may be a matter of ethnicity, but I think it has a mindset of “let’s do as much as we can”. In retrospect, I was listening to the discussion thinking that our company and Craft x Tech’s initiatives are connected.

Yoshimoto:
I see. Has Mr Nitta worked with people in the industrial textile industry so far?

Nitta:
There hasn’t been much until now. But Yonezawa has been active in textile research since the Edo period, so I want to try new materials. At the moment, my company mainly deals with silk, but I think we need to try with rayon, polyester and many other things to create something new.

Yoshimoto:
It would be interesting for HighChem and the Nitta to collaborate.
Now that we have some time, we would like to take questions. Is there anyone here?

Questioner 1
I would like to ask whether silk is sustainable because it uses a single life form, the silkworm. As an actual handler, what are your thoughts on this?

Nitta:
It depends on how you look at sustainability, but in terms of supply and demand, it can no longer be made if there is no one to use the product . Basically, sericulture used to be an industry in Japan. From the Meiji period until the early Showa period, the silk export industry was an important industry. However, it is not as active in Japan today as it used to be, though it is used by many foreign brands. This means that there are fewer opportunities for people in Japan to see and use silk. The same applies to safflower. I want to keep the position of making silk because there is a demand for it.

Ochiai:
We believe that silkworms and people have a symbiotic relationship. The silkworm is a creature that man has improved and created, and it is not a creature that can live as it is in nature. However, the question arises as to the rest of nature, what about rivers, and whether horses are livestock or not.

Taka:
There may also be an issue of education. I think it would be good if we could actually show them and let them experience that this kind of symbiotic relationship exists.

Nitta:
Agreed. The current relationship between silkworms and humans has been built up over thousands of years. So we need to look at the issue in the context of history and the environment, without tying it down to a single point, such as ethics. I think the nature + and – mentioned earlier is exactly that. I don’t think it is as simple as what is good and what is bad.

Yoshimoto:
Next question, please.

Questioner 2:
I have two questions. Firstly, the first question is for Mr Yoshimoto: how did Mr Nitta and Mr Ochiai become a pair for this project? The second question is for Mr Nitta and Mr Ochiai, what kind of outlook do you have for them after this project is over?

Yoshimoto:
The pairing of these two people was basically proposed by us, the designers. This time it worked out very well, and the designers said they wanted to work with a particular traditional craft. Moreover, there was no overlap. When we first proposed the idea to Mr Ochiai, he said he liked the ramie fibre, and we decided on this pair.

Ochiai:
Regarding the second question, people who get together on projects like this tend to stay together for a long time. When you are passionate about making things, a common understanding develops between the two of us. It is a success when something starts to develop between the two of us, such as “we’ve done this much before” or “if we’ve tried this far, let’s try this next time”. I hope it will become something like that.

Nitta:
I feel I am tested when we are working together and face challenges to see if we can do it this way. It makes us more willing to try things we haven’t done before. The most important thing is that we can continue to use textiles to create new things in the future.

Yoshimoto:
For the last question, please.

Questioner 3
You will also be exhibiting abroad, and what do you think the impact and effect of the Craft x Tech collaboration will have both abroad and in Japan?

Yoshimoto:
Of the six groups of designers, four are from abroad. We took them to Tohoku and visited the craftsmen’s workshops with them. I saw their reactions there and felt their enthusiasm for this project. Of course, they know about Japanese design and Japanese crafts. But when you actually go and see them, there are a lot of eye-opening stories.
I think that even the Japanese people here, as well as myself, will have their concepts overturned when they go to Mr Nitta’s workshop. In short, when you see how lacquer products sold in department stores are made, your understanding of them will probably change considerably. This is especially true for people from overseas.
So what is very important in this project is to get the viewers interested in the behind-the-scenes production of the finished art pieces. Collectors and the international media are interested in Mr Nitta’s activities. Therefore, I don’t want to create something that is finished in the so-called product design or industrial design style.

Ochiai:
I am trying to get customers to have a cup of tea. This is a problem in contemporary art these days, where customers don’t get a chance to look at the work carefully. It takes at least 10 minutes to have a cup of tea.

Yoshimoto:
Mr Nitta visited Mr Ochiai’s exhibition. How was your experience of the tea house?

Nitta:
I enjoyed it very much. I went there after searching and researching first, but it was totally different from what I had imagined. I was drawn in by the way the whole concept and building process was built as one. You have to experience it to understand.

Ochiai:
I would like to surprise everyone with “what is this all about?”. Please visit the tea house.

Yoshimoto:
Thank you very much. With this, I would like to conclude today’s lecture and discussion. Thank you very much for coming today.

[Event Details]
Date: February 9, 2024
Venue: ENEOS Hall, The Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology
　　　 1st Floor, South Wing, Building 3, 4-6-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo
Speakers: Gentaro Nitta, Yoichi Ochiai, Yuichi Taka