Freedom Within Constraints – The Kogin World of Satonobou
Kogin-zashi is sashiko worked by guiding the needle horizontally across the cloth.
By following the strict numerical rhythm and moving the needle horizontally, you can produce beautiful patterns. This is what hooks people who fall in love with kogin. The technique itself is very simple. For some, the excitement fades after that first discovery. Others discover their own kind of fascination and sink ever deeper into it.
This summer, Toraya Satomi — better known as “Satonobou” — released a “goldfish neputa” diagram that combines traditional modoco. She elevates traditional forms into something modern and catchy. It is the sort of kogin that, you might say, has always seemed possible but never quite appeared. When we spoke with her, we found that this “always-possible-yet-unseen” quality went rather deep.
Discovering kogin after leaving Aomori
Satomi is from Namioka Town (now part of Aomori City) in Aomori Prefecture. She never did kogin-zashi at school. But her older brother once brought home a kogin school project that she found so adorable she kept it as her own coin purse for years. She only realised it was kogin-zashi after leaving Aomori for university.
In university she studied abroad in the Czech Republic for a year. South of Germany, the Czech Republic is a small country of about 10 million people, with the streetscapes of medieval Europe still intact. She was studying comparative culture and intercultural communication, so she immersed herself in Czech and other European cultures and, conversely, introduced Japanese culture. People asked her why she had come to the Czech Republic, what Japan was like, what made her Japanese — and through those conversations she began to be conscious of her own foundations: Japan, and Aomori.
She was deeply taken with the beautiful embroideries of Central Europe. It was after she returned from the Czech Republic that she realised that the coin purse she had been using all along — even during her time abroad — was kogin-zashi. At that moment, Satomi decided she wanted to go deeper into kogin-zashi.
For Satomi, the Czech Republic did not feel like a foreign country in the usual tense way. Czechs, she says, are “like Aomori people.” Reserved at first, but extremely warm and intimate once you become friends — those pure, open relationships still continue today.
New challenges in kogin
Satomi did not actually start kogin-zashi until after she joined the workforce. She began as a way to fill her lunch break. The first book she picked up was Hisako Kamata’s “First Kogin-zashi.” She had no one knowledgeable about kogin nearby, but thanks to this book she learned that everything she needed could be found right where she lived in Yokohama.
Satomi is now raising two boys, aged five and two, while continuing her kogin-zashi practice. After the birth of her first son she returned to work, but found herself trapped in busy days of work and child-rearing, irritable even when she wanted to cherish time with her child. To spend better time with her family, she resigned. Rather than devote herself solely to parenting, however, she decided to start something new — and chose kogin-zashi making. She then took a step beyond making for herself, opening sales on the handmade marketplace minne and launching her career as a kogin artist.
The tradition of kogin
In 2019, Satomi had two precious experiences through kogin-zashi.
The first was assisting a year-long “general learning” project at an elementary school in Yokohama. Third graders explored “kogin-zashi” in depth over a full year, branching into many activities. This integrated learning involved not only the children but also their parents, teachers, members of the local community, and even people across the country who shared kogin materials over Instagram — yielding rich, multifaceted results. Spending a year with these children, Satomi felt she wanted to dig deeper into what drew them so completely to kogin.
The other was exhibiting at Japan Expo, held annually in Paris. Japan Expo is a celebration of Japanese culture — manga, games, traditional culture, and more, all under one roof. There were many obstacles, but with her husband’s encouragement she decided to participate. She felt her own creative work was not yet strong enough, but she ran a workshop and introduced kogin-zashi alongside a Hirosaki city brochure, and many visitors paid attention to the charms of rural Japan. Their words and reactions — feeling a closeness to their own folk cultures and offering their own interpretations — made her realise that kogin-zashi might be even more impressive than she had thought.
After these two experiences, Satomi began to feel that “tradition” was absolutely central to kogin-zashi.
The fun of pleasant surprises
There was a time when kogin-zashi became boring to Satomi and she stopped. Working from a book felt like checking her answers against a key, and having “an answer” took the fun out of it. But when she was pregnant, a relative happened to ask her about kogin, and she picked up her supplies for the first time in a while — and felt the urge to try again.
So she decided to just stitch whatever she felt like stitching. With no design prepared, she would face the cloth directly and decide where the pattern would go as the needle moved. “What happens if I send the needle this way?” — sure enough, the pattern would seem unlikely to work. “Then how do I make it fit?” Once she started stitching this way, it became suddenly fascinating. The patterns build themselves, in unforeseen ways. They are unbalanced — yet somehow alive.
If she is not happy with a pattern she will simply unpick it. But the time spent does not feel wasted. There are also many cloths she has set aside half-finished. Those, too, will find their moment to be picked up again. Until then, they “mature.” Satonobou’s kogin shows you the joy of the stitcher at work.
She is currently making book covers as reward items for koginbank’s crowdfunding campaign. For these she has produced many prototypes, considering not only how the cloth feels in your hand and how the cover functions, but also how to express patterns that are not perfectly symmetrical — patterns that carry a sense of continuation or surprise.
The breath you can feel in kogin
Kogin-zashi on old kimonos is called kosaku (“old work”). The cloth used in those kimonos has a weave more than twice as fine as the cloth used for modern kogin. And since the hemp threads in those kimonos are not uniform in thickness, miscounting fabric squares was inevitable. When you translate antique patterns into modern diagrams, the “rules” of the pattern almost always break somewhere. But you can feel the breath of the stitcher in those breaks — and that is part of the pleasure of looking at antique kogin.
Modern kogin-zashi, with its larger weave, allows for far more accurate patterns. But the direction Satomi is pursuing in her work feels like it might come close to the old kogin: the breath of the maker, present again. She is inheriting the beauty of traditional patterns while trying to see how freely she can swim within their framework, using modern cloth.
Above are two pieces, both by Satomi. On the left is a piece in which she enjoyed letting the pattern develop as she stitched. On the right is a faithful reproduction of an East Tsugaru pattern, made to introduce traditional kogin at Japan Expo. Perhaps because of the pressure, she says creating this piece was the opposite — a real struggle. But the sense of accomplishment was tremendous. The experience has become a strength for her, freeing her to develop patterns flexibly within the weave.
For now, with her young children, Satomi cannot devote long uninterrupted time to large works. But she someday wants to take on a major tapestry. We look forward to the day we see that piece.
