Selling the Kimono: An Ethnography of Crisis, Creativity and Hope

Abstract

Julie Valk’s monograph, Selling the Kimono: An Ethnography of Crisis, Creativity and Hope, aims to address an apparent paradox – that the kimono industry is both in crisis and thriving. Valk tackles this by contextualising the garment and its attendant practices and meanings through ethnographic fieldwork with creators, sellers and consumers of kimono. This paradox is certainly not a new discovery (see Assman, 2008; Cliffe, 2017; Okazaki, 2015), but the focus and subject matter of Valk’s book is original. By taking an economic anthropological approach, and by focussing on the idea that crisis often instigates change and highlights resilience, Valk gives a new insight into how the industry is evolving. Her research focussed on lesser-known regions and retailers in particular to demonstrate that the culture of kimonowearing is undergoing a shift away from kimono as ‘luxury item’ to a more casual ‘kimono laifu’ (‘kimono life’) (128). Valk’s fieldwork was based in Toyoto, Aichi Prefecture, but she also visited other main production sites in Tokyo, Kyoto, Kanazawa, Nishio, and Nagoya. This multi-site fieldwork approach of participatory observations and qualitative interviews with wholesalers, retailers and customers in Japan enables her to give a broad view of the industry. Based on this rich empirical data, Valk develops her argument in eight chapters. Chapter 1 outlines her paradoxical argument that the kimono industry is both in crisis and thriving. It details how the industry has positioned itself not only as kimono producers and retailers, but also as knowledge experts capable of advising customers whose knowledge of the kimono ‘rules’ that arose in the post-war period had become lost as a result of the kimono being less frequently worn in Japanese society. Chapter 2 provides background on the particularities of the kimono as an item of clothing. Valk notes that wearing a kimono requires a different skill set, one that ‘forces a continued engagement’ (27) throughout the day, which often proves to be a barrier for consumers. This chapter also provides an overview of the development of the kimono industry and outlines the way in which the kimono retail industry is structured. Chapter 3 establishes the groundwork for the rest of Valk’s argument by documenting the gradual formalisation of the kimono in the twentieth century. In post-war Japan when the population was adopting Western clothing, the kimono industry rebranded kimono culture as being primarily for ceremonial events, elevating it to the status of luxury item. This formalisation and parallel decline in everyday wearing of kimono is supported by Valk’s qualitative data from interviews conducted with women in their 50s, 60s and 70s from Aichi prefecture. Chapter 4 focuses on wholesalers and the concept of resilience within the kimono industry. Valk introduces the idea that those who are able to survive do so because they practice active resilience (pro-active efforts to change the circumstances) rather than passive resilience