The Southern Islands

The oldest chronicles put the descent of the gods in southern Kyushu: Ninigi, grandson of the sun, came down onto a peak in the Kirishima range carrying the sword, the mirror and the jewel, and his line went east and became the imperial house. Two mountains still argue about which of them it was.

The other god here was made by a mistake. Sugawara no Michizane was a brilliant scholar exiled from Kyoto to Dazaifu in 901 by rivals, and he died there two years later. Then lightning struck the palace hall and killed courtiers, and plague and drought followed. The court concluded that it had angered him, restored his rank posthumously, and enshrined him as Tenjin. He is now the god of study, and Japanese students buy his amulets by the hundred thousand every winter.

Okinawa believed something else entirely. In the Ryūkyū religion the sacred place is an utaki — a grove, a rock, a clearing — with nothing in it. No statue, no hall. The priestesses were women, the noro, and the senior one outranked the king’s own priests. You can see the difference in the dyeing: bingata is hotter and more southern than anything on the main islands, because it was looking at China and Southeast Asia and not at Kyoto.

Kyushu faces the continent, so it received everything before anyone else: wet rice, bronze, iron, Buddhism, and in 1543 three Portuguese with matchlock guns, blown onto Tanegashima. Within ten years Japan was making its own.

Twice the traffic went the other way. The Mongols came in 1274 and again in 1281, and both times it was Hakata Bay. After the first invasion the defenders built a stone wall along twenty kilometres of shoreline; parts of it are still buried under the streets of Fukuoka.

And once Japan went out. Hideyoshi invaded Korea in 1592 and again in 1597, achieved nothing, and came back with potters, taken by force and settled in the hills. Around 1616 one of them, Yi Sam-pyeong, found porcelain stone at Izumiyama near Arita, and Japan made its first porcelain. Thirty years later the Chinese kilns collapsed in civil war, the Dutch needed a supplier, and Arita porcelain left Nagasaki for Europe by the shipload. The whole trade rests on a deportation.

Fukuoka was two towns with a river between them: Hakata on the east, the merchants’ port, and Fukuoka on the west, the samurai castle town. The workshops, the festival and the weaving all stayed on the Hakata side. This house is on the Fukuoka side, which is a joke that only works locally.

Hakata weaving dates itself to 1235, when a Hakata merchant called Mitsuda Yasozaemon sailed to Song China with the monk Enni and came back six years later with a way of weaving a thick, ribbed silk. The standard pattern still carries two Buddhist implements from that trip, a vajra and an offering dish, worked into the stripes.

Kurume’s kasuri was worked out around 1800 by a girl of twelve named Inoue Den, who looked at the white flecks in a faded indigo cloth, understood that the thread had been protected in places before it was dyed, and reproduced the effect deliberately by binding the yarn. She taught it to other women. It became the cloth half of Kyushu wore.