Friday Photo: Purple Furisode

This is one of the first kimono I ever bought, and is one of the few new ones in my collection. On my first trip to Japan I managed to find the Mimuro shop in Kyoto. It's down little back streets off of Shijo-Dori and can be tough to find, but if you can get there during a sale it's worth it. We're talking multiple floors of everything from yukata (at least in the summer) to tomesode and furisode, for all ages. The time I went they were having a huge sale, and I managed to get this furisode, a fukuro obi, a juban, an obi age, and two obi jime for $700 -- about half the cost of the furisode alone when it was being sold at full price. Not only that, but I got a tour of the other floors and their other goods, completely with getting to see an unfinished all-shibori furisode worth around $20,000 at the time, while waiting for my things to be packed and my payment to be processed. The whole trip was a lot of fun, and was one of my first experiences with the fun experience of surprising people by being a white chick who knew things about kimono (seriously, walk into a kimono shop or the wafuku floor of a department store and start asking for kimono-related items by name. It's awesome).

Friday Photo: Furisode from Sendai

This is actually the first furisode I ever bought. I found it in a little second-hand kimono shop in Sendai on my first trip to Japan in 2007. The design is a combination of dyed sections, embroidered patterns, sections died in the shibori technique, and designs stamped in gold and silver. I have been told by the folks at Ikuokaya that the the dyed section is done in a style that was used for paper in the Heian era.

Friday Photo: Furisode

Just a couple of pictures and a story to get this blog rolling. This is a lovely green furisode I bought in Kyoto during my trip there in April 2009. And yes, it has a story!

I have been to Japan a grand total of three times so far. The first trip in the summer of 2007 also saw the beginning of my kimono collection, when I bought my first several pieces (seriously, they covered my bed at home when I laid them out after returning home). I often went to Nagoya on the weekends, and discovered a street near the Uso Kannon shrine filled to bursting with all kinds of second-hand shops, including at least two kimono shops. Before leaving Aichi prefecture for my grand tour through the rest of the country, I made one final trip to Nagoya to visit the kimono shops and see if an item I had previously wanted to buy -- a lovely iro-uchikake (colored wedding kimono) -- but had been short on cash for was still there. The uchikake was still there, but I decided it was too heavy to carry around or ship home and it didn't really interest me all that much anyway*. I wandered into the rest of the shop to see if there was anything else I wanted, and there it was. A gorgeous, deep-green furisode with red, white, and yellow camellias on it. It was perfect, too, not a snag or stain anywhere. But it was $200 or so, the shop didn't take credit cards, and I didn't have the cash for it, so I had to let it go.

Fast-forward to April 2009. My collection had grown substantially in the nearly two years since that visit to Nagoya. I had several other furisode, my iro-uchikake, my awesome houmongi (which you will see later!), more yukata than you can shake a sensu at...but I had never really forgotten about the green camellia furisode, and was still on the hunt for one in that lovely shade of green. I wandered in to the Chicago Harajuku shop on Teramachi-dori and went upstairs to the second level, where they keep the kimono, and began looking around. I found this one with the other furisode near the stairs. It was pretty shocking, really, since it's tough to find kimono that look so much alike. Granted that there are some small differences, but they're similar enough that I felt like it was fate for me to find that green furisode in Kyoto, and bought it immediately.

So now I have my lovely green camellia furisode, and I hope the green camellia furisode from Nagoya went to a loving home.



* This turned out to be a good thing because several months later, I found the iro-uchikake I currently own, and have never once regretted it. In fact, in the four years between buying that uchikake and now, I have only seen one other iro- uchikake I would even remotely consider buying.