It was not too long ago.
It was once a norm for women in Japan to make their own clothing. Since cotton growth was not possible in a prefecture of Aomori, people planted hemp instead, making threads out of its fibers in order to make fabrics. Since the winter in Aomori is unbearably severe, clothing was more vital than food. Not even one thread was left to waste.
People kept wearing the same clothes through many generations, patching with fabric scraps to make it thicker and adding stitches to make it tougher. When the clothing came to no more use, people tore it into pieces to use them as threads to make new clothing from it.

“BORO” is now gaining an international recognition in today’s art scene.
It literally means “shabby” in Japanese.
Indeed they look all shabby; yet at the same time, you would not be able to find such beautiful clothing as BORO found in Aomori.

People spent unimaginable length of time to make clothing. They learned techniques and polished their sense of beauty for better looking.
This eventually yielded incomparably complicated patching patterns and designs.
Now, over the ages, BORO has become to represent the opposite to today’s prevailing consumer culture: It contains no waste, but only “love” for the family that lasted forever.

Chuzaburo Tanaka, the ethnologist, has been collecting these “shabby” BORO in the mountainous villages in Aomori for more than half a century.
Though BORO speaks no word, we can hear them.
We can feel the warmth of the stiches.
We can feel the girls’ wishes, strength, wisdom, and their potential sense of beauty.
No matter how severe the life got, they lived a life with love.
No matter how miserable the life got, they knew how to survive with laughter.
They simply enjoyed creating necessities for themselves with the limited resources, never wasting even one short thread.


Now BORO, indeed so shabby but so beautiful, seems to throw at us the fundamental questions of life in a modern world.