Objects of Life
¨Farmhouses usually contained one or more working looms; weaving alone involved long hours of labour and textiles were seen as mottai - objects from and of life, received from and credited to whatever forces were thought to be responsible for life and living. It was only natural, then, that a textile's life extended far beyond the life of the object into which it was first made.
(...)
In japan and everywhere else in the world, from the dawn of history until the early years of the twentieth century, cloth - any cloth - was precious, an essence of human labour and effort, a metaphor of life's interaction and vicissitudes.¨
