Twilight for the Kimono

A Wilting Industry

Few garments are as tied to a nation as the kimono is to Japan. In a society that values the unspoken, its colors and patterns have for centuries served as an alternative form of speech. Without uttering a word, a well-chosen kimono can speak volumes about a wearer's sorrow or joy, animosity or amorousness. Restricting the legs to doll-like steps, the kimono changes the way both sexes walk, making even the clumsiest appear elegant. It is essential to the classical arts of Kabuki and Noh theater, the tea ceremony and ikebana, or flower arranging. In Murasaki Shikibu's 11th-century literary masterpiece, "The Tale of Genji," gifts of kimonos in scented silk are extensions of a romancing prince's spirit. The kimono is less a garment than a window into the Japanese soul.

Although a growing taste for Western clothing washed ashore more than a century ago, the kimono long remained the vanity garment of choice for major events in Japanese life. But now, the country's own demographics are working against it.

Fewer Japanese are marrying today than ever, and those who do largely shun traditional white wedding kimonos in favor of Western-style dresses. A declining birthrate, meanwhile, has meant fewer babies, which in turn has meant fewer sales of kimonos for children's coming-of-age rites. Nationwide, kimono sales have more than halved in the past decade.

Nowhere has the decline been felt more keenly than in Nishijin, home of Japan's finest -- and priciest -- kimonos and obi. Sales of Nishijin products fell from $2.7 billion in 1990 to a record low of $477 million last year, according to industry figures; during the same period, the district's production of kimonos dropped from 291,000 to just 87,382 garments.

At the same time, the ancient textile houses of Nishijin have fallen like cherry blossoms in late April. In 1980, there were about 1,200 kimono and obi factories and related businesses lining these ancient stone streets. Today, there are 606.

Once a lofty, ceremonious enterprise, even kimono-selling has been tainted by scandal in recent years, with desperate dealers pressuring retirees into taking out high-interest loans to buy exorbitantly priced kimonos. Faced with such accusations, the president of Azekura, a once-venerable dealer of Nishijin kimonos, committed suicide last March by jumping from the eighth floor of a Kyoto hotel. Other establishments have faded less dramatically, through bankruptcy filings and shuttered doors.

Some see a light for the industry in the unlikeliest of places -- Tokyo's hyper-hip Harajuku district, where Goth geisha in punk makeup and secondhand black kimonos strut the streets flaunting attitude and skull-faced leather purses.

"Right now, they are wearing cheap, used kimonos they bought for a few dollars in a bargain bin," said Toshimitsu Ikariyama, president of the Nishijin Textile Industrial Association. "But when these teenagers grow up and become prosperous, we hope they will be the start of a new generation who will wear more expensive and new kimonos for grace and beauty, the way their mothers and grandmothers did."

Others, however, are not counting on an organic recovery. Rather, they say, the industry must reinvent itself to survive.

Back to China

On a cloudy Kyoto afternoon, a graceful female attendant demurely opened the sliding wooden doors of the ancient kimono house of Kawamura. Across a floor of traditional straw tatami, beyond a wall-size window overlooking a Zen rock garden, past the portraits of Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, she led a guest into the office of Yasuto Kawamura, a maverick of the Nishijin textile district.

The 57-year-old president of a company that goes back five generations, Kawamura seems more middle-age pop star than kimono maker. In a black leather blazer and designer shades, he punctuates his decidedly un-Japanese demeanor like an Italian, with emphatic hand gestures and breathless conversation.

Japan's kimono makers, he argues, must drop all this preciousness. Kawamura's sales, like those of so many other kimono houses in Nishijin, are down 80 percent compared with two decades ago, but he is making plans for survival, manufacturing kimonos at cheaper prices in China and selling them in Japan.