A Life Devoted to Kogin – The Story of Ms. Takagi and the Thursday Group
In Tokyo’s Nihonbashi-Ningyocho district, there is a company called the Kogin-zashi Thursday Group. It is a company devoted to kogin-zashi production, book publishing, and running classes. Its representative is Yuko Takagi, who is 90 this year and is still producing new works.
Encountering kogin
Ms. Takagi was born in Kyoto and spent her childhood in Hokkaido. In Hokkaido’s long winters, she grew up watching her mother and grandmother sewing and knitting beside the fireplace. As a child, she liked to draw kimono patterns of her own and experiment with them.
She first met kogin-zashi as an adult, when she visited Aomori on a trip. She brought back a piece of kogin-zashi as a souvenir, took it apart to figure out how it was made, and tried stitching it herself. That encounter marked the beginning of everything.
A flood of designs
Ms. Takagi has published five books of kogin-zashi designs. Inside them are more original designs than she herself has bothered to count. Every one of them is fresh and delicate — a freedom you cannot reach by simply following tradition.
Ms. Takagi’s eyes shine brightest when she talks about the design stage, which she says she enjoys the most. While walking through town, whenever she spots an interesting pattern, she sketches it in her notebook; back at home, she works it into a kogin design. For her, the two are inseparable.
In her youth, she worked at a major automobile manufacturer making technical drawings. The lines in her kogin patterns are remarkably precise. For larger works, she draws by hand on graph paper so large that it spills over the edges of the desk, and combines several sheets to create a single piece. Even before stitching begins, the preparation requires an astonishing amount of time.
But the diagrams broaden the world of the work. Customers who place orders based on a design can ask her to add motifs that match their taste. The students who work from these designs are also free to adapt them. Through this ongoing exchange, the designs continue to evolve, and the works are always changing. “It’s fun how new things come in,” Ms. Takagi says.
A practice that extends beyond the individual
A distinctive feature of Ms. Takagi’s activity is that it did not remain merely a personal hobby or small teaching practice — she set up a company. She says this did not come from any grand ambition, she says: requests simply kept growing and incorporating the activity was the natural next step. But while many traditional crafts are sustained by individual passion, running a continuous business is anything but easy.
Thursday Group has actively held exhibitions and sales both in Japan and abroad, continuing to take on new challenges while preserving the tradition. Their approach offers an important clue to how traditional crafts can survive in the modern age.
From a past report: 42nd Yubikai International Art Exhibition Report.
Every May, Thursday Group exhibits at the Yubikai International Art Exhibition held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, where each student’s year-long major works are gathered.
“Outsider”
At Ms. Takagi’s exhibitions, people with ties to Aomori gather around the works nostalgically and begin talking with one another. Sometimes, however, she hears: “Your work is wonderful — but you’re an outsider, aren’t you?” When she tells this story, she always gives a brief wry smile. At first glance, the remark sounds exclusionary, but I think Ms. Takagi takes it differently: perhaps it is precisely because she was an outsider that she was able to create so freely.
Tradition cannot survive through faithful preservation alone; it remains alive only through renewal. But to put forward such renewal takes real courage. Perhaps because she was not bound to the land, Ms. Takagi could meet the expectations of others and at the same time open up entirely new possibilities.
Kogin-zashi has been rooted in its region while changing form and being passed down through time. In that journey, Ms. Takagi’s role has been far from small. Her career, spanning more than sixty years, shows how the life of a single artist can become intertwined with culture itself.
Even now, Ms. Takagi goes to her company every day and continues to work with her hands. From here on, however, the scale of her activity will inevitably grow smaller. There is something wistful about that, but it also makes it all the more important to know — and to preserve — what has come before.
Closing
The name “Kogin-zashi Thursday Group” — why Thursday? — naturally makes one wonder, while at the same time yet once heard, it is impossible to forget. The name was given by the Showa-era politician Kakuei Tanaka, whose handwriting still adorns the Thursday Group’s signboard today.
When Ms. Takagi first went to consult her uncle about beginning this work, Mr. Tanaka happened to be there. “Today is Thursday — so call it the Thursday Group,” he said, and named the group on the spot.
Official website: Kogin-zashi Thursday Group.
