I first encountered dorozome, a traditional mud-dyeing technique from the island of Amami Oshima in southern Kyushu, in 2022. The process involves dyeing cloth or fibers in red tannins extracted from techigi, a native flowering shrub, before working them with the island’s iron-rich mud to fix the color.
It was the first time I had ever heard of using mud as a mordant, and I was deeply impressed. What could be more natural or sustainable, I thought, than using bountiful local trees and the dirt under your feet to color textiles?
Turns out the reality is a bit more complicated, as I learned reading Charlotte Linton’s “Dyeing with the Earth: Textiles, Tradition, and Sustainability in Contemporary Japan,” which will be released Oct. 28 by Duke University Press. Linton, a postdoctoral research fellow in social anthropology at the University of Oxford, spent a year in Amami in 2017 working at natural dyeing workshop Kanai Kougei and researching how local craft processes intersect with the global economy and ideas of sustainability.
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