I’m going insane trying to research this on my own so I’m hoping the community can help. A long while back I clearly remember watching this documentary about Japan (and it wasn’t Begin Japanology, though it was of a similar 90’s video quality) and it was showcasing different ways that Japan made and used silk. One of the methods shown was this unique form of spinning silk from plant fiber, and I swear the plant in question was seaweed but it may have been some other kind of river or lake grass. Either way, I remember it was a water-borne plant fiber and I remember the documentary was showcasing this traditional method of silk weaving in what looked like a mountainous village, maybe? I remember that because part of the process involved soaking the fibers in the running river water nearby.
I’ve had no luck so far through Google, but the things I distinctly remember about this procedure was that it was a traditional method done in remote villages since antiquity, it was spun from a plant fiber (which I remember as seaweed but I may be mistaken), part of the process involves soaking the plant fiber in running water, and it was specifically described as ‘silk’ and not something else like cotton.
Does anyone know about this process? Or if not the exact process does anyone know where I could research this on my own time?
Thank you in advance for any help or insight you can provide.
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/vuchy9/cultural_question_silk_from_seaweed/
3 comments
https://daily.jstor.org/wearing-seaweed/
>In invisible ways, people have been wearing seaweed for a long time. Funori is a red seaweed cultivated on rocky Japanese coasts. Washed and soaked, it becomes a gummy solution. In the late 1500s Indian calico painters spread a thin layer of funori onto painted colors to keep them from flaking off of the fabric. The lighter colors—pastels and white—needed thicker coats. A second coat of funori was applied one month later, before the fabric was considered finished. By the seventeenth century, the Japanese were applying it to their own textiles to make them stronger, a process called sizing.
So it isn’t like silk or cotton but used in the process to create a certain type of cloth.
i think you are mistaking it being a water grown weed. you probably saw part of the process where it is being soaked in the river. if i have to guess you are looking for flax (亜麻). the first part of this vid shows the flax plant being soaked in water for 1week to 10days.
https://youtu.be/p6EJNuYweV0
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170906-the-last-surviving-sea-silk-seamstress
It’s not Japan, but this felt related