When spring arrives, the season of tensan begins.
The tiny eggs laid in late summer pass through the winter, and when late April comes, they hatch, and another year quietly begins.
Tensan are not silkworms whose lives are completed only beside people, as domestic silkworms are.
They grow with the trees of the mountains, feeding on the leaves of kunugi oak, growing larger in wind and light, and spinning their cocoons on the underside of leaves.
Watching them, I am reminded that silk, too, is born carrying the presence of the mountain.
The Landscape of Tensan Still Found Here
In this region, I have heard that tensan were once raised in many places.
As a quiet remnant of that time, there are still places where groups of kunugi trees stand together.
When I see a kunugi grove, it does not feel as though there are simply trees there. It feels as though traces of a way of life that has continued for a long time still remain.
From Tiny Eggs, Growing Closer to the Color of Leaves
The newly hatched larvae are astonishingly small and seem fragile.
Yet each time they eat leaves and molt, they gradually grow closer to the color of the mountain.
By around the third instar, they begin to blend into the leaves so completely that they are difficult to spot.
By the fifth instar, their appetite grows even stronger, and I can feel that they are storing up the strength to spin their cocoons.
Watching this change, I feel that tensan do not simply grow. They seem to mature by slowly dissolving into the mountain itself.
What Is Left on the Underside of Leaves
Tensan quietly spin their cocoons on the underside of leaves.
Finding those cocoons in the mountains, they feel less like something made and more like something placed there gently by nature.
Then, from late summer into autumn, the moths emerge, mate, and leave their eggs behind.
Their time as moths is not long, yet after that brief span, another small life is left behind, connected to the next spring.
The end of one year becomes, just as it is, the beginning of the next.
Whenever I watch tensan, I am drawn back again and again to the stillness of that cycle.
From Cocoon to Thread, and Into Cloth
A tensan cocoon does not become thread as readily as that of the domestic silkworm.
Even so, at the filature, the silk is carefully reeled, and the long, drawable parts continue on as silk filament.
The parts at the beginning and end that cannot be reeled become spun thread in the studio.
It is not only the parts that can be reeled that hold value. The parts that cannot be reeled also have their own expression, and they too become part of the cloth.
In that, I always feel something deeply characteristic of tensan.
What has grown in the mountains becomes thread, and from weaving, becomes cloth.
When I think of that flow, I feel that within a single piece of cloth are woven the time of the seasons and even the air of the mountain.
We also hold small gatherings where we observe tensan and spend time close to their quiet life.
View the noasobi workshop | Attaching Tensan Eggs
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Home › Studio Journal › A Year of Silk Raised in the Mountains
山まゆの里染織工房 